Repressionfarm worker and domestic servantunderground full-time PCP workermember of the PCP Central Committeepolitical prisoner
Born
1 May 1922, Alhandra
Died
22 April 2010
The daughter of farm labourers from Alhandra, she was arrested with Álvaro Cunhal and Militão Ribeiro in 1949 and again in 1959, and spent more than thirteen years in the dictatorship’s prisons.
She was born in Alhandra on 1 May 1922, the daughter of farm labourers.2 At ten she was already working in the floodplain fields (lezírias) of the Ribatejo, and she went to Lisbon early on as a domestic servant. Her sisters, Georgette and Mercedes, were also communist activists.3 She joined the PCP in 1945 and went underground in 1946, in a clandestine printing works in Figueira da Foz.23
Under the name “Elvira”, she lived in a clandestine house in Luso with Álvaro Cunhal, who was “Manuel”, and Militão Ribeiro. In the early hours of 25 March 1949, six PIDE agents and members of the GNR arrested the three of them.14 Sofia was held for three years.1 In 1957 she was elected to the Central Committee, and in 1959 she was arrested and tortured again.2 She was held in Caxias Fort, where she led the PCP cell with Maria Alda Nogueira.7 In all, she spent more than thirteen years in the dictatorship’s prisons.2
After some time in the Soviet Union, she returned to the underground struggle in 1969.2 In a testimony published in 1975 in Mulheres Portuguesas na Resistência (Portuguese Women in the Resistance), she held the PIDE doctor José Godinho Gama Barata responsible for the death of Albina Fernandes, to whom he gave “no assistance at all”, despite having seen her attacks in prison.5 She died in 2010, aged 87.2
From the archives
In other archives
These can only be viewed on each archive’s own website.
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.
An underground communist activist, she was arrested in 1959 and sentenced to eight years of major imprisonment plus security measures, which she served in Caxias. A deputy from the Constituent Assembly onwards, she chaired the Parliamentary Committee on the Status of Women from 1983 to 1985.
A communist leader, he was in the group of prisoners who inaugurated the Tarrafal camp in 1936. Arrested again in 1949, with Álvaro Cunhal and Sofia Ferreira, he died in isolation in Lisbon Penitentiary, on hunger strike, on 2 January 1950.
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.
One of the first members of the Portuguese Women’s Association for Peace, she helped Jewish refugees during the war. Arrested and tortured by the PIDE in 1962, she went into exile in Algeria and was, in Algiers, the first female voice of Rádio Voz da Liberdade (Voice of Freedom Radio).
A journalist and documentary maker born in Angola. A medical student active in the committees supporting political prisoners, she was arrested in 1970 for contacts with the Angolan liberation movements and sentenced by the Lisbon Plenary Court.
Notes on the sources2
The total time in prison: “more than 13 years”, according to the PCP’s 2010 note, or “more than twelve years”, according to the PCP’s speech on the centenary of her birth (2022).
The day of death: 22 April 2010, according to Wikidata; the PCP’s note, published that day, does not say.
Do you know more, or do you have a document? Tell us.
