Rua da Creche (where José Dias Coelho was murdered)

The sculptor and painter José Dias Coelho went underground in 1955, as a full-time worker for the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP). The clandestine house he shared with his wife, Margarida Tengarrinha, herself a figure of the resistance, housed the party’s document-forging office — identity cards, bicycle licences, driving licences, passports. From 1960 the two of them drew illustrations and mastheads for clandestine publications such as A Voz das Camaradas (The Voice of the Women Comrades) and Avante!. Dias Coelho was part of the leadership of the Lisbon organisation and was in charge of the party’s intellectual sector.²

On 19 December 1961, the PIDE agents António Domingues, Manuel Lavado and Pedro Ferreira, of José Gonçalves’s squad, ambushed him on Rua dos Lusíadas, near Largo do Calvário. Dias Coelho ran off and turned into this street, then Rua da Creche; the agents surrounded him and fired two shots in front of no. 30 — one point-blank, in the chest, and the other when he was already on the ground.¹ According to the newspaper of A Voz do Operário, it was only two hours later that the agents took him, dying, to the CUF Hospital.⁵ He was 38.²

Margarida Tengarrinha, who was still living underground, only found out a week later: “When, early in the evening of 26 December 1961, at a meeting in the street, a comrade told me that Zé had been shot dead by the PIDE, I couldn’t believe it.” The funeral had taken place that day, at the Benfica cemetery. She then decided, she wrote, “not to let his memory die”.³ José Afonso recalled the crime in the song “A Morte Saiu à Rua” (Death Went Out into the Street).²

After 25 April, at the request of the Alcântara Parish Council, an edict of 17 February 1975 gave Rua da Creche the name of José Dias Coelho. The Parish Council wanted the caption to read “Communist Party activist murdered by the PIDE in 1961”, but the Street Names Committee would not allow references to political organisations, and the caption became “Sculptor and anti-fascist activist/1923 – 1961” (Escultor e militante antifascista/1923 – 1961).⁴ At the scene of the crime there is now an inscription with the words of Dias Coelho’s last engraving, dedicated to the worker Cândido Martins Capilé, killed at a demonstration: “Of all the seeds cast upon the earth, it is the blood shed by the martyrs that raises the most abundant harvests” (De todas as sementes deitadas à terra, é o sangue derramado pelos mártires que faz levantar as mais copiosas searas). Every year, on 19 December, the PCP holds a tribute there.⁵