Spain Fails LGBTI Victims Of Fascist Dictator Franco Regime

Excerpts: As the debate surrounding former dictator Francisco Franco's remains divides the country, those his regime targeted for their sexual orientation are still waiting for justice. .

Maria de los Dolores Gamez, 81, stands next to the big door of a run-down building. She's looking at a plaque placed next to it. The inscription remembers the "historical injustice" suffered by homosexual and transgender people in this old prison of the western Andalusian city of Huelva. It was installed this year, almost four decades after same-sex relations were decriminalized in Spain, in 1979. "I think it's good that politicians have finally started doing something about these issues," Gamez said. "We have had too many years of silence."

Last month, the Spanish government passed a decree to dig up the remains of former dictator General Francisco Franco. The issue has sparked the so-called remembrance debate in a country estimated to have more than 2,000 mass burial sites. They date back to the Civil War (1936-1939), a conflict considered by many historians as a preface to World War II. The uprising marked the start of a decades-long period of authoritarian rule and political repression that only ended after free elections were held in 1977.

Aside from targeting political opponents, Franco's regime also went after those who dared to defy its nationalist-catholic model of society. Historians have concluded that the dictatorship had two "specialized" prisons for those people convicted under its homophobic legislation: one in Huelva and one in Badajoz, at the Portuguese border, in the western region of Extremadura.

Antoni Ruiz, born in 1958 in a small town in the eastern province of Valencia, was among them. At age 17, he outed himself as a homosexual in front of his family, but a nun denounced him to the police. "That was when my martyrdom started," he told DW. He was taken to different penitentiaries and ended up in Badajoz's prison. He spent three months there that felt like a lifetime. "No one would give you a job," he said. He was a criminal and a homosexual, and the police efficiently informed his potential employers about it. Like so many others, he said, he was prevented from developing professionally, struggled to make ends meet and felt socially excluded. -More.

https://www.dw.com/en/spain-fails-lgbti-victims-of-franco-regime/a-45486071






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