Carnation Revolution: the concentration camp used by the Salazar dictatorship against opponents of the regime

Edmundo Pedro (1918-2018), entered the Tarrafal concentration camp, on the island of Santiago, in Cape Verde, at the age of 17.

He was part of the first group of prisoners who went to build the camp, which at that time had little more than tents. It was October 1936.

Edmundo Pedro had been arrested eight months earlier for leading the Communist Party Youth and embarked for Tarrafal without really knowing where he was going.

His father, Gabriel Pedro, also an opponent of the government, was traveling alongside. Neither of them knew, at that moment, how long they would spend in exile. They only returned 10 years later.

The Cape Verde Penal Colony, the official name of the Tarrafal camp, was created in April 1936, in the context of several social protests that had begun in 1934, with the general strike of January 18, which led to several arrests in Portugal. .

The regime created a concentration camp in one of its colonies and deported the prisoners it considered most ideologically dangerous there.

“The first phase of the camp welcomed mostly political prisoners who opposed the regime: anarcho-syndicalists, communists and socialists”, explains historian Isabel Flunser Pimentel.

“It looked like the camps, not extermination camps, but concentration camps that existed in Nazi Germany or Franco’s Spain. The objective was not to kill the prisoners, but to neutralize them, put them as far away as possible and leave them them to die”, she adds.

Initially it was just a field with canvas tents. “It was the prisoners themselves, under forced labor, who then built the different barracks”, says Nélida Brito, professor of Contemporary History at the University of Cape Verde.

340 prisoners passed through there, all Portuguese, in what became known as the “first phase” of the camp.

The conditions were terrible: in addition to mistreatment and beatings, there was scarce food, the lack of hygiene conditions — the “bathrooms” were five holes in the floor with cans inside —, combined with Cape Verde’s hostile climate, the dangers of transmission of malaria through mosquito bites and lack of medical care.

So much so that Tarrafal is beginning to be known as “the field of slow death”.

Anyone who today visits the Tarrafal camp, transformed into a Resistance Museum, can read, inscribed on the walls, the declaration of intentions by the doctor Esmeraldo Pais da Prata, who was supposed to ensure the health of the prisoners: “I’m not here to cure, but rather to issue death certificates.”

“33 prisoners died between 1936 and 1954. Most of them from diseases such as malaria or diarrhea, as a result of the water they drank which was not drinkable. But others due to the mistreatment they suffered”, says Nélida Brito.

The worst of the punishments was the so-called “frying pan”. Created by the first director of the Tarrafal camp, Manual dos Reis, in 1937, it was a concrete “box” six meters long, three meters wide and with a small crack in the ceiling.

“Exposed to the intense Cape Verde sun, the heat inside could reach 60 degrees”, says the history teacher.

“When you were in the frying pan — and there happened to be twelve men there — the moisture from your breath condensed on the walls where it ran. It doesn’t take much imagination to get an idea of ​​what could happen when twelve men tried to breathe inside a box like that, with the tropical sun warming the outside, and where the evaporation of breathed air ran down the walls”, wrote Gilberto Oliveira, a prisoner in the camp, in the book Living Memory of Tarrafal.

“The drenched bodies, the air without suffocating oxygen, making the blood throb in the fountains, the chests oppressed in a maddening semi-asphyxiation, with all that viscous humidity, incited by the putrid acids in the brass of the waste that everyone was forced to use ; a hole in short, where men were treated worse than animals”, he writes.

Gabriel Pedro, Edmundo Pedro’s father, was the prisoner who spent the longest time there: 135 days. His desperation was such that one day he tried to take his own life, cutting his wrists with a can he had inside.

They found him in time to save his life. The son, Edmundo, was locked in the frying pan for 70 days, after an attempt to escape.

“You can’t imagine what that was. The temperature inside reached almost 50 degrees. At night there was condensation and the humidity ran down the walls and we licked it. They took the water out of us. We have no idea what it was that suffering”, he said in an interview with the Portuguese newspaper i, in 2017.

The majority of prisoners ended up in the Tarrafal camp without any trial. “This is the case of Edmundo Pedro”, says historian Irene Flunser Pimentel. “He was there for 10 years and it was only when he returned to the metropolis that he was tried and sentenced to a sentence of half a year, which he no longer served, of course.”

In 1954, years after the Allied victory in World War II and some international pressure, the camp was closed.

However, in 1961, with the outbreak of the Overseas War and the independence movements of the Portuguese colonies, the regime decided to open the field again.

The name was changed — it became Campo de Trabalho de Chão Bom — and the “frying pan” was retired.

In its place comes the “holandinha”, a cement construction, also precarious, but which was inside another building, impossible to see from the outside.

In this second phase, the prisoners are no longer Portuguese anti-fascists, but members of the liberation movements of the African colonies.

“107 Angolans, 100 Guineans and 20 Cape Verdeans passed through there. In this second phase, there wasn’t as much forced labor, especially because the camp had already been built and they spent most of their time closed there”, says Nélida Brito.

“A library was created that had three functions: that of a library, thanks to the sending of books, that of a school and that of a church as well. Furthermore, thanks to the complicity of some guards, [os presos] got 3 radios. Conditions continued to be harsh — corporal punishment and unsanitary conditions continued to exist — but there was none of the brutality of the first phase.”

The prisoners were separated by nationality and the guards did not allow them to mix, so that some political movements did not “feed” others.

During the many years they were there, the prisoners developed forms of resistance.

“Many did what they called academic overcoming. Those who had more studies taught others, some only knew how to write their name. And this, this learning from each other, was a way of surviving and resisting that oppression”, says Diana Andringa , journalist and author of the documentary Memories of the Slow Death Camp.

Recorded in 2009, on the 35th anniversary of the camp’s closure, the documentary shows the reunion of the prisoners who entered there and survived.

“It was very moving to watch that. Many didn’t even know each other, most had never been back there and that sharing of common memories was healing. They entered there in a different way, as victors, because what these Africans, trapped in the 1960s, had in mind common with the Portuguese, imprisoned in the 1930s, was anti-fascism and anti-colonialism.”

In the images there are reports of extreme cruelty. Of violence, beatings, stories of isolation in the Netherlands that ended in madness. But what impressed the journalist most was what she calls “useless evil”.

“Some were arrested with their parents and, when they arrived here, they were forced to undress. Many Angolans and Guineans preferred to be beaten rather than undress in front of their parents. That, in their cultures, is something that is not done. And this is where colonialism shows total disrespect for the culture of others, and it is there, where it brutally attacks them”, says the journalist.

“The families of the Guineans were told that they had died. And many had a funeral. The weight that this leaves on a family, the trauma of knowing later that a child was buried alive… I also remember the wife of an anarchist Portuguese, Mário Castelhano, who received the return of a postal item with the word ‘died’ written in red. That’s how she found out that her husband died. These are those brutalities that shocked me the most, because it’s useless evil, no. It has no purpose, just to hurt more”, she reports.

When the revolution took place in Portugal, on April 25, 1974, some prisoners heard the news on the radio. Others have information from a few guards who had in the meantime created a certain relationship with some.

“I have good news for you, things broke out there”, a Cape Verdean guard told them surreptitiously. But nothing happens there. At least until May 1st.

That morning, a crowd gathered at the camp gate and demanded the release of the prisoners. Within minutes the director, Dadinho Fontes, and some military personnel entered the camp, announced the change of regime and released the prisoners.

When they left, the prisoners were cheered by the crowd who carried them on their shoulders to the city center, in a party that continued throughout the day.

“The most important thing is not that they tried to kill us slowly”, says Jaime Schofield, a Cape Verdean who was arrested in 1967, at a certain point in the documentary.

“The most important thing is the refusal of this slow death. In Tarrafal we reinvent life, always!”