19 December 1961, Lisbon (Rua da Creche, Alcântara)
A sculptor and painter who gave up his artistic career for underground life in the PCP. PIDE agents shot him dead in a street in Alcântara on 19 December 1961, aged 38.
He was born in Pinhel on 19 June 1923. In 1942 he entered the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, first in Architecture and then in Sculpture, and was active in the MUNAF, the MUD and the MUD Juvenil (Youth Movement of Democratic Unity).12 He organised the General Exhibitions of Visual Arts, which were held at the National Society of Fine Arts outside the control of the SNI, and where artists hostile to the regime showed their work.13 Arrested by the PIDE on 6 January 1949, during the campaign of Norton de Matos, he was held incommunicado for ten days in the Aljube.21
In 1952, for having led the protests of the Fine Arts students, he was dismissed from his post as a technical-school teacher and expelled from the school, and he was banned from entering any other faculty in the country. In 1955 he went underground as a full-time PCP worker and left his career as a sculptor behind. The clandestine house he shared with his partner, Margarida Tengarrinha, housed the party’s document-forging office, and from 1960 the two of them drew for the clandestine press.1
He was a member of the leadership of the Lisbon Regional Organisation and was in charge of the PCP’s intellectual sector when, on 19 December 1961, PIDE agents pursued him from Rua dos Lusíadas and shot him dead outside no. 30 Rua da Creche, in Alcântara.12 The street has borne his name since an edict of 17 February 1975.3José Afonso commemorated him in the song “A Morte Saiu à Rua” (Death Went Out into the Street).1
From the archives
Margarida Tengarrinha’s testimony, recorded by the Aljube Museum on 8 March 2017 and published in 2021. Going by the museum’s keywords, it covers the Youth Movement of Democratic Unity (MUD Juvenil), underground life in the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), the document-forgery apparatus, the clandestine press and José Dias Coelho.
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”.
In other archives
These can only be viewed on each archive’s own website.
A visual artist expelled from the School of Fine Arts in 1952, she lived underground with José Dias Coelho, in a house where the PCP forged documents. She only learnt that the PIDE had killed him on the day of his burial, which she could not attend.
A protest singer, persecuted by the censors and imprisoned by the PIDE/DGS in 1973. His “Grândola, Vila Morena” (Grândola, swarthy town), sung in chorus at the Coliseu in March 1974, was a month later the second signal of 25 April.
A medical student in Lisbon from 1948, he was active in the House of the Students of the Empire, the MUD Juvenil and the Centre for African Studies. Arrested several times by the PIDE in Lisbon, he was the first president of independent Angola.
A communist leader, he was arrested in 1949 and escaped from Peniche Fortress in 1960. General secretary of the PCP, he returned from exile on 30 April 1974 and addressed the crowd at the airport from the top of a Chaimite armoured car.
A communist leader, he was one of the eight prisoners who escaped from Caxias in Salazar’s armoured car, in 1961. Arrested in 1959 and again in 1965, he withstood PIDE torture without talking.
A metalworker and anarcho-syndicalist, he was one of the perpetrators of the bomb attack on Salazar on Avenida Barbosa du Bocage, in 1937. He fled to England, was handed over to the Portuguese police and was not released from prison until 1953.
Notes on the sources1
The time of the crime: “in broad daylight” (Toponímia de Lisboa) or “early in the evening” (Voz do Operário).
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