Overview
- Minister Ángel Víctor Torres delivered the certificate in Vigo to Silvia Fernández Quinteiro, widow of former O Porriño mayor Eva García de la Torre, marking Spain’s first such recognition of a woman punished under the Patronato de Protección a la Mujer.
- The document deems the 1978 Tribunal Tutelar judgment against García “illegal and illegitimate,” annuls the conviction, and states her internment was motivated in part by her sexual orientation; it was signed on September 20.
- García was reported by nuns as a teenager, judged in July 1978, and confined in religious institutions linked to the Patronato until 1985, where survivors recount forced labor and harsh treatment.
- The Patronato, a Francoist apparatus that persisted into Spain’s democratic transition, operated through Catholic orders such as Oblatas, El Buen Pastor, and Adoratrices and used tutelary courts lacking basic safeguards.
- Officials and advocates present the certificate as an administrative pathway for other survivors, even after a recent congressional bid to add Patronato victims to the Law of Democratic Memory was rejected.