About 6,000 Democratic and Republican prisoners passed through the concentration camp on the island of San Simón, in the Vigo estuary, between 1936 and 1943. Historians have not yet specified how many did not come out alive, but there were not a few: dysentery and typhus were common, more than a thousand inmates were crowded at the same time on two islets, 250 meters long by 84 meters wide. The crowding reached such a level that they anchored a ship nearby, the Upo Mendiand they filled it with inmates. Others were crossed to Cesantes, on the continent, where groups of Falangists collected them to walk them. It was one of the most feared nodes in the concentration camp universe of the first Franco regime. The PP relativized the events this Wednesday in the Parliament of Galicia: “As far as we are aware, we also do not know that there were deaths on the island of San Simón.”
Conservative deputy José Luis Ferro Iglesias reduced what happened to “the abuses of the prison director at that time” and recalled that he had been “put to the knife” for “badly treating the prisoners.” Nothing else. To 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. San Simón, in any case, continued to function as a concentration camp for six more years. Antonio Caeiro, director of the documentary Aillados In memory of two prisoners from 1936 in San Simón (first version in 1988, last montage in 2001), also found traces of executions: at least six, Asturians who had been tried in Camposancos (A Guarda), where there was another Franco camp. From there they were transferred to San Simón. The researchers Gonzalo Amoedo and Roberto Gil Moure explained, in their book Episodes of terror during the Civil War in the province of Pontevedra (Xerais, 2007) that in 1941 alone 250 people died there.
Ferro Iglesias responded to a question in a commission from the Socialist Party that demanded the development of the Democratic Memory Law in the community. By virtue of this, the central government has just announced that it will declare, next August, the Pazo de Meirás and San Simón itself as Places of Democratic Memory. The popular parliamentarian assured that the Xunta had not received any communication in this regard and it was then that he reduced the story of San Simón to the abuses of its first director and assured that with the “existing documentation” there were no deaths on the island.
His statements provoked indignation from the opposition. Paloma Castro Rey, the socialist deputy who had asked the question, regretted Ferro Iglesias’ lack of historical knowledge and his inaccuracies. More vehement, the nationalist Luís Bará, very active in the Galician groups that recover historical memory, described the hundreds of people who died on the island of San Simón, who were taken from there, as “an offense like never before said in this Parliament.” to be murdered, they were shot.” Bará was part, between 2005 and 2009, of the bipartite Government of PSdeG and BNG that turned San Simón into a reference center for Galician historical memory. When Núñez Feijóo came to power in the community in 2009, he removed the permanent exhibition about the prisoners there and blurred the story of the years in which the island was a concentration camp.
Since then, the Xunta allowed all types of activities in San Simón, gymkhanas, yoga stays or Halloween nights included. The memorial associations protested and demanded from the central government its declaration as a Place of Democratic Memory now granted and a stricter regulation of uses compatible with its ominous past, something that is included in the current state law.
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