Women of the resistance
Aurora Rodrigues
Aurora Rosa Salvador Rodrigues
- Born
- 20 January 1952, Vale da Azinheira, Minas de São Domingos (Mértola)
A law student, she witnessed the murder of Ribeiro Santos in 1972. Arrested in 1973, she was one of the women students most savagely tortured by the political police in Caxias, and she never talked.
She was born on 20 January 1952 in Vale da Azinheira, in Minas de São Domingos, in the Alentejo; her father was an anarcho-syndicalist.1 In 1969, aged 17, she came to study at the Lisbon Faculty of Law and drew close to the MRPP.1 On 12 October 1972 she was in the lecture theatre of Económicas, the economics school, when a PIDE/DGS agent killed the student José António Ribeiro Santos.31 She then formally joined the MRPP and its student organisation, the Federation of Marxist-Leninist Students.1
She was arrested on 3 May 1973, after a students’ meeting, and taken to Caxias Fort, in strict isolation. The PIDE/DGS subjected her to threats and humiliation, to the “statue” torture, to sixteen consecutive days of sleep torture, to violent beatings and to simulated drowning, plunging her head into a basin of water. She did not talk.1 Three months later she was released without charge, without trial and without having been able to speak to a lawyer. She was one of the women students most savagely tortured by the political police.1
After 25 April, she was arrested again on 28 May 1975, in a COPCON operation that detained more than 400 MRPP activists. She left the party in 1977.1 She told of her experience of torture and prison in the book Gente Comum – Uma História da PIDE (Ordinary People: A History of the PIDE), edited by António Monteiro Cardoso and Paula Godinho, and in 2016 she gave her testimony to the Aljube Museum.1
From the archives
A documentary edited by Sofia Gomes for the exhibition “Women and Resistance – New Portuguese Letters and other struggles” (“Mulheres e Resistência – Novas Cartas Portuguesas e outras lutas”), with excerpts from the testimonies the Aljube Museum has been recording since 2015: sixteen women talk about resistance to the dictatorship and the struggle for women’s rights. This version has Portuguese Sign Language (LGP) interpretation; the version without LGP is on the same channel (XmUbNbnHgKg, 2022).
Original page Licença padrão do YouTube — embed permitido pelo canal oficial do Museu do Aljube
Museu do Aljube Resistência e Liberdade, on YouTube. The player only connects to that site when you press “Watch”.
Aurora Rodrigues, in a testimony recorded by the Aljube Museum on 12 October 2016. The museum’s keywords include the student movement, the murder of Ribeiro Santos, the Movement for the Reorganisation of the Party of the Proletariat (MRPP), imprisonment, interrogation and torture in Caxias.
Original page Licença padrão do YouTube — embed permitido pelo canal oficial do Museu do Aljube
Museu do Aljube Resistência e Liberdade, on YouTube. The player only connects to that site when you press “Watch”.
On the walks
Places
In the timeline
They crossed paths with her
Isabel do Carmo
b. 1940
A medical student, she was the first woman to speak at a general assembly in the 1962 academic crisis; she later founded the Revolutionary Brigades, which attacked the machinery of the colonial war. A doctor and professor, she is the author of the first study on obesity in Portugal.
José António Ribeiro Santos
1946–1972
A 26-year-old law student, shot dead by a PIDE/DGS agent at a “meeting against repression” at the ISCEF, on 12 October 1972. His funeral was one of the largest demonstrations against the dictatorship in its final phase.
Aida Magro
1918–2011
A chemical engineer and underground PCP activist, she was in charge of the Eastern Zone of the Lisbon Local Committee, “the most important working-class zone of the capital”. Arrested by the PIDE in 1957, she was, in Caxias, one of the authors of the letters of the Caxias Manifesto.
Albina Fernandes
1928–1970
A communist activist arrested in 1961 with her two small children, whom she kept with her in Caxias. She spent six years and seven months in prison and took her own life in 1970, her nervous system weakened by the years in jail.
Alda do Espírito Santo
1926–2010
A poet from São Tomé whose Lisbon home, on Rua Actor Vale, housed the Centre for African Studies from 1951. Arrested in 1965 and imprisoned in Caxias, she later wrote the words of the anthem of São Tomé and Príncipe.
António Tereso
A mechanic imprisoned in Caxias, he posed for months as a “rachado” (turncoat), at the PCP’s request, to prepare the escape of 4 December 1961, and it was with him at the wheel of Salazar’s armoured car that eight prisoners got out of the fort.
Notes on the sources2
- Whether she went on to become a magistrate, as the Wikidata description says: none of the text sources mentions it.
- The year of publication of “Gente Comum – Uma História da PIDE”.
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Sources
- 1Aurora Rodrigues (testemunho e biografia). Museu do Aljube Resistência e Liberdade — consulted on 2 October 2026
- 2Consulta SPARQL de identificadores e datas (P569/P570) de pessoas. Wikidata Query Service — consulted on 2 October 2026
- 3O assassinato de José Ribeiro Santos. Comissão Comemorativa 50 Anos 25 de Abril — consulted on 2 October 2026
- 4Aurora Rodrigues. Museu do Aljube – Resistência e Liberdade — consulted on 2 October 2026