The Forgotten Victims of Franco

Eighty years ago this month the Spanish Civil War was nearing its end. On 27th February 1939 Britain and France recognised the government of Gen. Francisco Franco and his Nationalists as the legitimate government of Spain. The war went on for several more months until Franco declared the war had ended on 1st April.

Until Franco came to power Spain’s lgbt community had “enjoyed” a higher degree of freedom than most of Europe. Sodomy had been decriminalised in 1882 and the Second Republic (1931-1939) had been more liberal than the preceding monarchy. The power of the aristocracy and the Catholic Church had been reduced.

All that changed when Franco took over. The Catholic Church regained its political powers and things like abortion and divorce were made illegal. Although there was no new law re-criminalising homosexuality or sodomy the lgbt community saw an increase in opposition and victimisation.

In 1954 Franco reformed Spain’s 1933 Vagrancy Law to include homosexuality, thereby making it illegal once more. To the Nationalist government this was a step made to “correct and reform” homosexuals rather than punish them. But punish them they did with harassment, arrest and torture. In 1971 homosexuality was declared a mental illness rather than a crime with the introduction of the Law of Dangerousness and Social Rehabilitation. Gay men were sent to “correction camps” for “corrective treatment”, or physical and psychological abuse, as we would recognise it today.

Even after months of this forced “therapy” convicted homosexuals had little chance of finding employment afterwards as the police would inform employers of their employee’s record as a homosexual.

When homosexuality was legalised once more in Spain in 1979 (40 years ago this year) several years after Franco’s death, democracy, the monarchy and more liberalism were introduced. However, men and women who had been still convicted for their homosexuality were still being discriminated against. In 1976 the Spanish government issued pardons to all political prisoners under Franco, but not to homosexuals as it was still classed as a “mental Illness” that required “correction”.

It wasn’t until this century that the Spanish government decided to finally wipe out the convictions of all those who were convicted of homosexuality or underwent treatment. Homosexuality had been legalised two years earlier. Those who had been affected felt that there should be more than a pardon. More than anything, many of them called for financial reparation to cover the hardships they had endured because of their convictions.

In 2004 the Association of Ex-Social Prisoners of Spain was formed. Antoni Ruiz, its president and one of Franco’s victims, had been arrested and convicted of homosexuality in 1975. He was jailed, raped by other prisoners and subjected to psychological torture by the prison authorities. After years of campaigning the government agreed to give financial payments to Ruiz and all surviving victims of Franco’s homophobic laws. In 2009 Antoni Ruiz was the first to receive any of this compensation, receiving 4,000 euros.

Each case for compensation that goes before the Commission for Compensation of Former Social Prisoners is treated individually. As of January 2018 only 116 people had been successful in their case. I have no data for the thirteen months since then.

While the persecution of gay men and women by the Nazis has become deeply engraved into lgbt heritage the persecution in Franco’s Spain, which went on long after the Nazis were defeated, has gone largely unnoticed outside Spain. Unlike the Holocaust there are no memorials to Franco’s lgbt victims and many people today are surprised that Spain, a nation that has been in the forefront of lgbt rights in the 21st century, has had such a recent homophobic past.