Cape Verde. Tarrafal penal colony. Registered letter with...

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Cape Verde. Tarrafal penal colony. Registered letter with acknowledgement of receipt in Tarrafal on 16.10.1943, with censorship mark CP (Penal colony), censored in the city of Praia where it was opened by the censor, Censor No. 27, heading for Lisbon, arriving on 28.10. Enclosure recounting the letter in which the sender states, “far from this pestilent environment where I have been trapped for seventy-four months now, waiting for justice to be done.” Herculano Marques Gouveia, joined the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps in 1917 as a soldier in the 4th Company: he embarked on 21 April and returned to Portugal on 12 November on the auxiliary cruiser “Pedro Nunes”. A businessman, he was arrested by the PSP in Lisbon on 1 May 1933 and handed over the following day to the PVDE, “on suspicion of being involved in the throwing of some explosive bombs in Largo do Terreiro do Trigo”, where he lived. Released on 10 May, he was arrested again on 22 March 1937, “for investigation”. Taken incommunicado to a police station, he was transferred from the 27th police station (Pedrouços) to Aljube on 28 April and, on 5 June, embarked for Cape Verde without having been tried.

He returned from Tarrafal on 1 October 1944 and was detained in Caxias. Tried by the Special Military Court on November 1, he was sentenced to six years of exile and loss of political rights for five years. He was transferred to Peniche on December 4, 1944. Covered by Decree-Law No. 35,041 of October 18, 1945, he was released on November 1 of this year, after more than eight and a half years of effective imprisonment.

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