1977: Marta Taboada and Gladys Porcel, Argentina revolutionaries
Add comment February 3rd, 2018 Headsman
Early in the morning on this date in 1977, Argentinian revolutionaries Marta Angélica Taboada de Dillon and Gladys Porcel were shot by the junta.
Essentially all the information available about these Dirty War murders is in Spanish, as are most of the links in this post. The preceding October, Argentina’s new military junta — having just a few months previous seized power by deposing Juan Peron’s widow — raided the Buenos Aires house shared by the pregnant Marta Taboada with Gladys Porcel and the latter’s boyfriend Juan Carlos Negro Arroyo, all of them adherents of the October 17 Revolutionary Movement.*
They vanished into the shadow ranks of the “disappeared” — the women shot on February 3 in Ciudadela, Negro Arroyo executed separately with some other male activists that same month, all to be dumped into the mass graves that became the usual repose of the junta’s enemies.
Taboada’s children, notably including journalist and activist Marta Dillon, who was 10 at the time, witnessed their mother’s abduction. In 2000, all four children marked the anniversary of that terrible night — a night, Marta Dillon described, after which there was “nothing left of the world that I had known” — by publishing a letter in a newspaper pledging militancy in their mother’s memory.
Mama, in your name and in that of all the compañeros, we uphold the joy of standing and fighting. We do not forget, we do not forgive, we do not reconcile, we judge and punish the genocides and their accomplices.
-Marta, Santiago, Andrés and Juan Dillon.
The remains of Taboada, Porcel, and Negro Arroyo were identified by forensics teams in 2011 and interred with honor.
* The name alludes to the date in 1945 when popular protests forced the army to release Juan Peron from custody.
On this day..
- 1860: James Stephens - 2020
- 1685: James Algie and John Park, Paisley Covenanters - 2019
- 1903: Amelia Sach and Annie Walters, the Finchley baby farmers - 2017
- 2016: Brandon Astor Jones - 2016
- 1891: Michel Eyraud, bailiff-strangler - 2015
- 1814: Mariano Matamoros, Mexican revolutionary - 2014
- 1578: Blessed John Nelson, martyr - 2013
- 1537: "Silken Thomas" FitzGerald, Earl of Kildare - 2012
- 1945: Not Fabian von Schlabrendorff, saved by a bomb - 2011
- 1967: Ronald Ryan, the last hanged in Australia - 2010
- 1915: Veljko Cubrilovic, Danilo Ilic and Misko Jovanovic, Archduke Ferdinand's assassins - 2009
- 1998: Karla Faye Tucker, for an axe murder and a Republican presidency - 2008
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Activists,Argentina,Borderline "Executions",Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Execution,History,Martyrs,No Formal Charge,Notably Survived By,Power,Revolutionaries,Ripped from the Headlines,Shot,Torture,Women
Tags: 1970s, 1977, buenos aires, dirty war, february 3, gladys porcel, marta dillon, marta taboada
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