Pedro de Matos Filipe

(Almada, 19-06-1905 – Tarrafal, Santiago Island, Cape Verde, 20-09-1937)

Pedro de Matos Filipe, son of José de Matos Filipe and Margarida Rosa, was born in 1905 in Almada, city where he lived. He was a docker and trade unionist and presided over the General Assembly of the Association “Terra e Mar”.

Linked to the libertarian and anarcho-syndicalist movement, he participated in the movement of 18 January 1934, in Almada, promoting the paralysis of road transport and the strike at the Parry & Sons factory with Joaquim Montes, also killed in Tarrafal. He was also a member of the support group that protected the individuals who cut the submarine cables in Almada during the revolutionary movement.

He was arrested on 30 January 1934, charged with possession of bombs and explosives. Sentenced by the Special Military Court to twelve years of exile in the colonies with imprisonment and a fine of 20.000$00, he embarked on 8 September 1934 to the Fortress of São João Baptista in Angra do Heroísmo, in the Azores. About two years later, on 23 October 1936, he went to the Concentration Camp of Tarrafal, in Cape Verde, where he died at the age of 32, on 20 September 1937, without any medical assistance or medicine, victim of blackwater fever.

According to Acácio Tomás de Aquino, when Pedro de Matos Filipe – “one of the strongest boys in the Camp [Tarrafal Concentration Camp]” – died, “he was reduced to skin and bone”. Pedro Matos Filipe told him, in a final conversation between the two of them, that he had been suffering from “a diarrhoea of blood for a long time, and the doctor has done nothing about it yet!”.