Although Jerónimo Saavedra wanted to be remembered above all as a teacher, as a professor with a long career in the university classrooms of the Islands, he will be, fundamentally, for being a determining person in the construction of democratic Canary Islands and its self-government.
Of his fruitful life journey, his great cultural sensitivity and his firm impulse to different musical projects stand out. His courage in expressing his sexual condition when few politicians dared to do so. His militancy in the Canarian PSOE, of which he was general secretary, and in the UGT. His commitment against the Franco dictatorship and to open paths that would enable the recovery of democracy.
Developing a broad career as a public servant in the transcendental and honorable political task. Saavedra was everything: president of the Canary Islands, minister of Territorial Administrations and Education and Science, mayor of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, deputy of the Common...
But I would like to highlight, especially, his work in the construction of autonomy. Starting from scratch, he was for the first time at the head of the Government of the Canary Islands between 1983 and 1987, the years in which the autonomous building was being built, in which the first powers emanating from our Statute are assumed.
A stage in which an enormous effort was carried out in education, enabling the construction of schools and institutes in all the places of the Canary Islands, overcoming a situation in which the network was absolutely insufficient, with schools doubled in morning and afternoon hours, without secondary schools in numerous municipalities, with insufficient teaching staff...
He was responsible for leading our first government and, therefore, the construction of an integrating Canary Islands, which began to overcome the existing abysses between the capital islands and the non-capital islands, as well as those present in the interior of Gran Canaria and Tenerife. Promote the infrastructures in which we suffered an evident delay. Also lead the first steps of the accession of the Canary Islands, with differential specificities to the rest of the State, to the European Union.
He did it from his deep democratic convictions and his capacity for respect and dialogue towards those who were members of other political formations. Ways and manners that are so necessary today when the most extremist and violent radical populism, racism and homophobia, machismo and hatred are spreading.
Jerónimo Saavedra is already part of the history of this land as one of its most relevant personalities. It is impossible to interpret Canarian politics from the transition to today without his figure and his contributions; his initial role (although he was president again between 1991 and 1993) in the construction of self-government that has meant a historic leap for this land and its people, for its unity and for its economic and social progress.
