At least 463 people who passed through Franco’s concentration camp on the island of San Simón, in the Vigo estuary, died. Eight, Asturians and Leonese from another camp at the mouth of the Miño, shot; an indeterminate number in bags and walks and more than 400 due to the extreme conditions of the place and the mistreatment of the guards. They all have names and surnames, he registered them the Names and Voices projectwhich the Xunta de Galicia activated in 2006 after an agreement with the University of Santiago, and were synthesized by the historian Dionísio Pereira. The Popular Party assured this Wednesday in parliamentary headquarters that “it was not aware that there were deaths” in San Simón.
“It is a minimum figure, only deaths that are verified through documentary, oral history or bibliographic sources,” warns Pereira in conversation with elDiario.es. Outraged upon hearing the intervention of the popular deputy José Luis Ferro Iglesias, he wrote a short entry on his social networks: “Without a doubt they are not all of them, because there is a lack of documentation (something that still hinders the investigation of Franco’s criminal prison system today) and also because “There were multiple sacks of prisoners who turned up dead in many different places in the province of Pontevedra.” The Nomes e Voces project was the most articulated and systematic effort to profile the character, intensity and victims of the repression of the first Franco regime in Galicia.
The Francoists imprisoned in San Simón, two islets with a total of 250 meters wide by 84 meters long, some 6,000 Democrats and Republicans between 1936 and 1943. They managed to overcrowd some 1,000 prisoners at the same time. Diseases such as typhus or dysentery were common. Pereira relates how the Voces e Nomes database allows us to know the age, profession or origin of the dead of San Simón. “Those who died on the island due to feeding conditions or illnesses were basically older people and came from outside, especially from Castilla La Mancha, Extremadura and Andalusia.” It was a common practice in the concentration camp universe of Franco’s regime to distance prisoners from their places of origin.
“There were several prisoners who drowned trying to escape, among them the CNT sailor Manuel Sayar Orellán,” explains this specialist in the history of anarchism, before recalling that mortality on the island rose “dramatically” starting in 1939 due to “ to the miserable ranch and the extreme humidity conditions.” In the summer of 1941, as researchers Gonzalo Amoedo and Roberto Gil Moure collected in their book Episodes of terror during the Civil War in the province of Pontevedra (Xerais, 2007), 250 people died there. “At the rate of 10 or 12 a day,” Pereira points out. The Vigo City Council, in whose municipal cemetery of Pereiró the bodies were buried, asked Redondela, the municipal area to which San Simón belongs, to enable a new cemetery because it was not capable of dealing with the overflow.
All this evidence and documentary evidence, published in academic research, historical essays or popular works, did not prevent PP deputy José Luis Ferro Iglesias from ensuring that they had no evidence “of any deaths on the island of San Simón.” Ferro Iglesias reduced what happened in the place, which will be declared Democratic Memory by the central government as demanded by the memory groups, to “the abuses of the director of the prison at that time.” His name was Fernando Lago Búa, the butcher of San Simón – “a reference person for the brutal repression of the rebels in Galicia”, in the words of the historian Emilio Grandío – and his first person responsible, he was shot by the rebels themselves against the Republic in January 1937. They accused him of promoting a dark extortion plot against inmates, but the details of the case and those involved are still the subject of discussion.
Digna Rivas, socialist mayor of Redondela, will propose at the next municipal plenary session to declare Ferro Iglesias persona non grata for “his attack on democratic values and coexistence” and lack of “the historical truth” of the Franco concentration camp. The parliamentarians from the Socialist Party and BNG who participated in the debate in which the popular man spoke also attacked what happened. The nationalist Luís Bará demanded a retraction for what he described as “an offense like never before said in this Parliament to the hundreds of people who died on the island of San Simón, who were taken from there to be murdered, who were shot.” Not only did he not obtain it, but the president of the parliamentary commission, Julio García Comesaña, of the PP, withdrew his voice. The next day, Bará announced a “battery of parliamentary initiatives” to demand a recertification of the conservatives. “In addition to refusing to develop historical memory policies,” he accused the PP, “they hide and deny a very painful reality for hundreds of families whose relatives suffered imprisonment in San Simón and were buried in anonymous graves.”
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