‘She committed three sins: being a woman, coming from a very humble family, and being a lesbian’

She died on 19 September 1983, far from home, after falling from a window at a reformatory in San Fernando de Henares (Madrid). She was fourteen years old. The news of her death was reported in the newspapers.

Her story, and above all the final weeks of her life leading up to such a tragic end, helped to bring to a close one of the darkest chapters in the history of women in Spain.

The Patronato de Protección a la Mujer, (the Board for the Protection of Women), was a Francoist institution (whose history, however, stretched further back and which continued to exist well into the democratic era) designed to control the ‘moral risk’ attributed to some women - those who strayed from the norm, the most free-spirited and those whom the system used to make an example of to everyone else.

It also targeted those whose only ‘crime’ was being poor and begging, as they were suspected of prostitution; those blamed for the rape they had suffered; or those punished for dating a married man or for becoming pregnant without being married.

Furthermore, women committed to the anti-Franco cause were sent to the Patronato’s centres (such as the one in San Fernando de Henares, where Inmaculada died), sometimes with the collusion of their own families.

They were all regarded as immoral, dangerous, unworthy and deviant women. In many cases, as well as being confined to institutions run by religious orders, they were forced to work hard without receiving any pay.

How is it possible that a fourteen-year-old girl - no less than eight years after the dictator’s death - ended up in a reformatory in the region of Madrid, at Nuestra Señora del Pilar, an institution run by the Patronato and managed by evangelical crusaders, and that she ended up dying there in circumstances that remain unclear to this day?

The book Inmaculada: La Muerte que Precipitó el Final del Patronato (Inmaculada: The Death That Brought About the End of the Patronato) published in Spanish by Libros del K.O. reconstructs the young woman’s life and death.

It has been co-authored by three writers: Marta García Carbonell and María Palau Galdón, journalists and researchers specialising in democratic memory from a gender perspective; alongside Esther López Barceló, who holds a degree in History, a Master’s in Archaeology and has collaborated on the exhumation of mass graves of victims of the Franco regime.

“Researching Inmaculada has always been a shared obsession among most of the Patronato researchers. We wanted to know what had become of her, why she ended up in a home in San Fernando de Henares and why her life ended as it did,” explains Marta García, who offers a concise answer:

“We always say that Inmaculada committed three sins: the first, a cardinal one, was that of being a woman; another was coming from a very humble family, an Andalusian family with very elderly parents and twelve siblings; and the third, being a lesbian (and a defiant one at that: she had the name ‘Begoña’, her girlfriend, tattooed on her body).

All these ‘sins’ had a huge influence on how Inmaculada lived her life and her time at the Patronato, and they also explain very clearly how she died and the treatment she received after her death.”

In the course of their research, the authors have managed to make contact with Inmaculada’s family more than forty years after her death.

As the book recounts, Manuel, the girl’s brother, who lived in Marbella, got into his car as soon as he learned that his sister had died, drove to San Pedro Alcántara where he picked up his parents, and set off on the journey to San Fernando de Henares.

The family was left with the image described by their mother, Ana, when she saw her dead daughter: "Inmaculada’s face was 'bruised and scratched'."

The family’s regret at not having received or demanded information also lingered at home. And for not having been able to investigate the circumstances of the child’s death: unwittingly, due to the family’s socio-economic status and the vagueness of the judge’s explanations, the girl’s own father, Diego, contributed to the case being shelved as soon as the girl had died.

Judge María Victoria Rosell, quoted in the book, states: "The judge’s duty was to explain to the father that he was entitled to an investigation into the facts but, furthermore, he was entitled to substantial compensation as Inmaculada was a fatal victim whilst in the care of the State, all the more so in her case, as she was a child in care." When the possibility of reopening the investigation was later raised, the family were afraid and lacked the resources to pursue it.

So, as Marta García, one of the authors, points out, "Inmaculada’s story is full of silences: firstly, surrounding her death, as well as the silence that descended upon her family once she died; but there is also institutional silence, because there is a complete lack of documentation regarding Inmaculada and her death. So this difficulty in accessing the records means we do not really know what happened.”

Press reports on the incident spoke of Inmaculada’s death "after falling from the third floor while attempting to escape from a reformatory". Newspaper reports also covered the protests in the centre over what local residents considered to be the "suspicious circumstances" surrounding the girl’s death. They also noted that the post-mortem was carried out by Dr Alfonso Cabeza, whom the authors also contacted in order to piece together the story.

But before we reach the fatal outcome, we must analyse what led Inmaculada to one of the centres run by the Patronato de Protección de la Mujer. Because, moreover, she was confined there twice within the space of less than a year.

The first time, as Marta García recounts, was in 1982, after she ran away from home with her sister Antonia to go to Madrid: "Inmaculada is a teenager in the 1980s. The sisters lived with their parents, who were very elderly for the time. Their paternal grandfather also lived in the house; he was always on their heels, making sure they didn’t leave the house, didn’t go out partying, and didn’t go astray. It’s true that this was 1982 or 1983, but for many people, the National-Catholic ideology and the patriarchal system still persisted. So I think what they were looking for was that sense of ‘we’re off to Madrid to see what lies beyond this village’. And what that escape actually led to was them being locked up in a centre run by the Patronato.”

Marta García, illustrating how the institution works, explains that the mother, after reporting her daughters’ runaway to the police, received a call from the headteacher of the centre informing her of their whereabouts: “You have to put yourself in a mother’s shoes: suddenly your daughters have run away from home and she’s told they’re at a state-run school and that they’re being looked after. Obviously, the mother was relieved. What she didn’t realise was everything that lay behind it; she was unaware of how a system operated that had oppressed thousands of women for decades.”

It was a repressive scheme, García continues, which punished women who had "fallen" and those who were "in danger of falling": "It wasn’t necessary to have committed the sin. The mere suspicion that she might commit that sin could be grounds for confinement."

Inmaculada ran away from the centre after two months, in February 1983. Her sister, however, did not; she would probably remain there for longer. There is no information regarding what Inmaculada did in Madrid until September 1983, when she was readmitted to the same institution. The reason? She was found on Calle Valverde, an area known for prostitution, and, according to the arrest document, in the act of engaging in this activity.

The authors of the book claim that Inmaculada was locked up in a situation of total defencelessness, without knowing the reason and without a court order - something that was no longer legally possible under Articles 24 and 25 of the 1978 Spanish Constitution.

"The Socialist Party was in government, the Movida was in full swing in Madrid, Spain was hosting the World Cup, and the feminist movement was also fighting for its cause, and, furthermore, since 1978, under the Constitution, a person in our country could not be detained for more than 72 hours without a court order justifying or authorising their detention. In Inmaculada’s case, there is no court order explaining why she was detained,” says Marta García, who adds: “This is probably one of the reasons why the dissolution of the Patronato was fast-tracked: that indiscriminate and unconstitutional detentions were taking place which could have resulted in a death for which the State would be held responsible.”

Inmaculada died after falling from a third-floor window at the reformatory. The body was removed by a justice of the peace, whose report states that she was wearing a navy blue jumper and white knickers, without mentioning whether she was wearing trousers, a skirt, socks or trainers.

The body was lying on a white sheet. A green bedspread, tied to a yellow towel, was hanging from the window from which she is believed to have fallen. From this, the post-mortem report concludes that "it appears the inmate attempted to escape by lowering herself using the aforementioned items of clothing, and that the knot she made with the sheet she fell from and the other items of clothing gave way, causing her to fall".

On this point, the authors draw on the testimony of workers at the centre and the advice of the coroner, Javier Tapia, and Dr Alfonso Cabeza, who carried out the girl’s post-mortem. The former states: "The girl fell onto her hands. And that doesn’t add up if she was climbing down." The latter adds that it was a fall, but that he could not categorise it; in other words, he could not determine - even today - whether it had been an accident, a homicide or a suicide.

“Despite Dr Cabeza’s insistence that he does not know what caused Inmaculada’s death, the judge has ruled it a suicide. Why? Because it is the only way to bring this death to a close without the State being held responsible. Responsibility for a suicide lies with the person who decides to do it. In this way, it also ensures that the family has no right whatsoever to financial compensation," continues the writer, who then summarises the reasoning of Tapia and Cabeza:

"What has officially emerged - beyond the judge closing the case as a suicide - is that Inmaculada was trying to escape and climbed down that rope she’d made from sheets and towels. What they’re saying is that while she was trying to escape, she lost her grip and fell. But if you fall to the ground while trying to escape, you fall on your back, not face-first, and you don’t break your wrists.”

Nor do you try to escape without putting your trousers on. Other possibilities, suggests Marta García, are that someone pushed her or that she was fleeing from a danger greater than the fall itself.

“For me, what really matters - regardless of whether it was suicide, murder or an accident - is that there is a fourteen-year-old girl who is being held in custody without any court order. Furthermore, she is caught up in a system - the Patronato de Protección a la Mujer - which was completely out of step with the new direction the Spanish state was taking, and with the 1980s," reflects Marta García.

The girl’s death, the controversy surrounding it, and the protests in San Fernando de Henares… all hastened the demise of the Patronato. The authors point out that Inmaculada was most likely not the organisation’s only fatal victim. And they believe it is likely that she was not the last either: "How many deaths might have occurred between 1983 and 1985 without our knowing?" they ask. In any case, the closure of the organisation took place without much fuss: it happened as a matter of course, by depriving it of financial resources through the budget act.

The book is a collaborative effort. Not only because it was written by three authors, but also because, for it to have been possible, detectives had to get involved to track down the family, as well as friends who helped to obtain documentation, locate the centre’s staff, and find Dr Cabeza…

Historical figures also feature in the book, such as the theologian Enrique Miret Magdalena, who was Director-General for Child Protection at the Ministry of Justice, as well as Enrique Guerra, former mayor of San Fernando de Henares, who, as one of his first acts in office, visited the reformatory to find out what was happening inside: "What he tells us is that when he walked in, what he found was a sort of time machine that transported him back to the 1950s."

Finally, the text also features testimonies from women who passed through the Patronato. For the book, as well as seeking to rescue Inmaculada from oblivion, also aims to pay tribute to the survivors of an institution that should never have existed.