Augusto Costa

(Marrazes, 25-03-1901 – Tarrafal, Santiago Island, Cape Verde, 22-09-1937)

Augusto Costa, born in Marrazes, municipality of Leiria, was still a young man when he went to Marinha Grande with his parents. He excelled in the creation of the Glassworker’s Union and in the struggles against the Estado Novo, during the first years of the 1930s. He was a member of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) and was responsible for the party committee in the Santos Barosa company, where he worked as a glassworker.
He participated in the revolt of 18 January 1934 in Marinha Grande, keeping watch on the garrison of the National Republican Guard (GNR) that had been detained and their respective sergeant-in-command.

After the uprising failed, he was arrested, on February 2, and sentenced by the Special Military Court to five years of banishment, a fine and loss of political rights for eight years. On August 8, he embarked for the Azores, where he was imprisoned in the Fortress of Angra do Heroísmo. He requested an amnesty in June 1936; however, on October 23, he was sent to the Concentration Camp of Tarrafal, in Cape Verde, with the group of about 150 deportees who, on 29 October 1936, inaugurated the so-called “slow death camp”.

Augusto Costa died in 1937, eleven months after arriving at the camp of Tarrafal, as a result of the terrible conditions, torture, disease and chronic lack of medical care. He was 36 years old.