Category Archives: Disfavored Minorities

1597: Anneke van den Hove, buried alive

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(Thanks to 17th century Dutch Anabaptist Thieleman Janszoon van Braght for the guest post. It was originally an entry in his Anabaptist martyrology Martyrs Mirror, but although this doctrine did not emerge until the 1520s, van Braght was keen to deploy his hagiographies to connect his movement to a longer tradition of pre-Lutheran dissidents, and thus claims post facto for proto-anabaptism such figures as Waldensians, Albigensians, and Gerard Segarelli. -ed.)

At Brussels, under the reign of the archduke Albert, there was apprehended for her faith and following Christ, a young maiden named Anneken van den Hove (being the servant maid of Nicolaes Rampaert’s sister), having been betrayed, as it was said, by the pastor of the Savel church at Brussels.

This Anneken was imprisoned two years and seven months, in which time she suffered much temptation, from priests, monks, Jesuits and others, who thereby sought to make her apostatize from the faith she had accepted; but however great pains they took with her, in the way of examining, tormenting, fair promises, threats, long imprisonment, and otherwise, she nevertheless constantly remained steadfast in the faith in her Lord and Bridegroom, so that finally, on the nin[eteen]th of July, 1597,* certain Jesuits came and asked her whether she would suffer herself to be converted, for in that case she should be released and set at liberty. Thereupon she replied, “No.” They then offered to give her six months more time for consideration; but she desired neither day nor time, but said that they might do what seemed good to them, for she longed to get to the place where she might offer up unto the Lord a sacrifice acceptable unto Him. This answer having been conveyed to the judges, information was brought her about two hours afterwards, that if she wanted to die, prepare herself, unless she wished to turn.

Hence the justice of the court, and also a few Jesuits, went out with her about eight o’clock, half a mile without the city of Brussels, where a pit or grave was made, while in the meantime she fearlessly undressed herself, and was thus put alive into the pit, and the lower limbs having first been covered with earth, the Jesuits who were present asked her whether she would not yet turn and recant? She said, “No;” but that she was glad that the time of her departure was so near fulfilled. When the Jesuits then laid before her, that she had to expect not only this burying alive of the body into the earth, but also the eternal pain of the fire in her soul, in hell. She answered that she had peace in her conscience, being well assured that she died saved, and had to expect the eternal, imperishable life, full of joy and gladness in heaven, with God and all His saints.

In the meantime they continued to throw earth and (as has been stated to us) thick sods of heath ground upon her body, up to her throat; but notwithstanding all their asking, threatening, or promising to release her and take her out of the pit, if she would recant, it was all in vain, and she would not hearken to it.

Hence they at last threw much additional earth and sods upon her face and whole body, and stamped with their feet upon it, in order that she should die the sooner.

This was the end of this pious heroine of Jesus Christ, who gave her body to the earth, that her soul might obtain heaven; thus she fought a good fight, finished her course, kept the faith, and valiantly confirmed the truth unto death.

Since she then so loved her dear leader, Christ Jesus, that she followed Him not only to the marriage at Cana, but also, so to speak, even to the gallows-hill, there cannot be withheld from her the honor and name of a faithful martyress, who suffered all this for His name’s sake.

Hence she will also afterwards, when going forth as a wise virgin, yea, as a dear friend of the Lord, to meet her heavenly Bridegroom, be joyfully welcomed and received in the heavenly halls of immortal glory, together with all steadfast servants of God.

O God, be merciful also unto us that are still living, that continuing faithful unto the end, we may with her, and all the saints receive Thy blessed inheritance.

* July 9th by the old Julian calendar preferred by Protestants; July 19th by the updated Gregorian calendar preferred by Catholics.

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1928: Seven electrocuted in Kentucky

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On this date in 1928 — Friday the 13th — the Bluegrass State tied a terrible record that still stands to this day by sending seven men to the electric chair on a single day. (New York, the electric chair pioneer, had carried out a sevenfold electrocution in 1912.)

The prolific history writer/blogger Mike Dash fielded a Reddit question with some detail about this event, here; Dash notes that Kentucky habitually carried out (smaller) multiple-execution batches during this period, likely for reasons of administrative convenience moreso than record-hunting.

For additional particulars, we excerpt a summary of their cases from the Owensboro (Kentucky) Messenger of the same date.

Milford Lawson

Milford Lawson was convicted in the Whitley circuit court at Corbin, in 1926, for the killing of John Stansberry. Stansberry, who lived with his wife and daughter on Main street in Corbin was awakened by an alarm at his door at midnight. He was shot to death by Lawson when he opened the door to answer the alarm. The sixteen year old daughter of Stansberry witnessed the shooting. Stansberry was killed instantly.

Orlando Seymour

Orlando Seymour was indicted jointly with William Huddleston for the killing of Will Schanzenbacher in Louisville. Huddleston was given a life sentence and Seymour, who actually did the killing, was given a death sentence. Mr. Schanzenbacher had charge of a coal yard in Louisville. It was known to the two defendants that he was in the habit of carrying the receipts of each day home with him in the afternoon in a tin box. Huddleston and Seymour planned to hold him up and rob him. It fell to the lot of Seymour to do the actual holding up, while Huddleston waited in the car. When demanded by Seymour to give up his money, Mr. Schanzenbacher, instead of acceding to his demands, started to run away and was shot down by Seymour.

Hasque Dockery

Hasque Dockery was tried in the Harlan circuit court in 1926 and given the death penalty for killing Mrs. Elizabeth Howard. Dockery was guilty of a triple murder, having killed Mrs. Howard, Joe Jenkins and Mrs. Jenkins at the same time. He appears to have been estranged from his wife, who was living with Bradley Howard and his wife and the Jenkins family. It appears that Dockery went to that house on the night of the killing search for his wife and without provacation [sic] shot and killed Mrs. Howard, Joe Jenkins and his wife. Charles Howard, a young boy, escaped only by running. Dockery also fired one shot at him.

Charles P. Miltra

Charles P. Miltra was indicted jointly with Carl Hord in the Jefferson circuit court for the murder of Marion A. George in 1926. George opera[t]ed a grocery store at First and Magazine streets in Louisville. This murder was committed in pursuit of a plan which the two defendants had entered into to rob Mr. George. It was agreed that Hord should go into the store and call for cigarettes and that Miltra was to follow, and while Mr. George was getting the cigarettes he was to cover him with the pistol and demand the money. That part of the program was carried out, but Mr. George grabbed a meat cleaver and struck Miltra with it. Miltra then fired two shots, the first missing George but the second piercing his abdomen. Miltra escaped and went to St. Louis where he was arrested a few days after the tragedy and upon his return to Louisville made a voluntary confession. The peculiar defense was interposed for Miltra, that he should not be held responsible for the shooting of George because he was rendered unconscious by the lick which George inflicted upon him with the meat cleaver and did not know that [sic] he was doing when he shot Mr. George. This contention, however, was overruled by the court on the idea that malice is not necessarily confined to specific intention to take the life of the person killed, but it may include an intention to do an unlawful act whose result will probaably [sic] deprive another person’s life.

James Howard

James Howard, negro, was given the extreme penalty in the Jefferson circuit court for the murder of his common law wife, Lucy Buckner. He stabbed his victim to death with a knife. This killing took place April 17, 1926. It is disclosed by the evidence that Howard ran his victim down and stabbed her to death while she was trying to escape from him. Howard was jealous of another negro, which appears to have incited the killing.

Clarence McQueen

Clarence McQueen, negro, was indicted in the Harrison circuit court and given the death penalty for the murder of Louis Williams, another negro. McQueen is a negro about forty years of age. He and Williams were neighbors and had been friends for a long time. On April 25, 1927, while under the influence of liquor, McQueen, who had a shotgun, came upon Williams on the river bank where they became involved in a difficulty and McQueen shot Williams to death. He then escaped and was not apprehended until September, 1927, when he was returned to Cynthiana and placed on trial.

William Moore

William Moore, negro, was indicted and tried in the Jefferson [… omitted text …] Anna Eslick, who appears to have been his sweetheart, and who was the wife of another negro. This killing took place in the absence of any eye witness, but while the evidence against Moore was largely circumstantial, at the same time it was practically conclusive that Moore killed the woman, by beating her to death with a beer bottle.

The state of Georgia supplemented the day’s grim toll with a “mere” double electrocution of Sam Gower and Preddis Taylor, while two men more, Will Burdo and Greene Kirk, hanged in separate executions by two Mississippi counties.

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1591: Ralph Milner, Roger Dickenson, and Laurence Humphrey

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(Thanks to the English Catholic Alban Butler for the guest post on three martyrs during Elizabethan England. This entry originally appeared in Butler’s hagiographical magnum opus Lives of the Saints which is in the public domain, although updated recent editions are also to be had from the usual booksellers. July 7 is the feast date for all three men described in this post; Dickenson and Milner were actually put to death on that date, while Humphrey’s execution date appears to be unrecorded. -ed.)

In this year [1591] there suffered at Winchester, on July 7, BB. Roger Dickenson and Ralph Milner, and on a date unknown Bd Laurence Humphrey.

Milner was a small farmer, or even a farm-labourer, and brought up a Protestant. Upon contrasting the lives led by his Protestant and Catholic neighbours, to the great disadvantage of the first, he put himself under instruction and was received into the Church; but on the very day of his first communion he was committed to prison for the change of religion. Here he was kept for a number of years, but his confinement was not strict and he was often released on parole, when he would obtain alms and spiritual ministrations for his fellow prisoners, and also use his knowledge of the country to facilitate the movements and work of missionary priests. In this way he made the acquaintance of Father [Thomas] Stanney, s.j., who afterwards wrote a memoir of him in Latin, and with the same priests assistance a secular priest, Mr Roger Dickenson, came to live in Winchester. He was a Lincoln man, who had made his studies at Rheims, and for several years he worked in the Winchester district, helped by Milner.

The first time Mr Dickenson was arrested his guards got so drunk that he was able to escape, but the second time, Milner being with him, they were both committed for trial: Dickenson for being a priest, Milner for “relieving” him. At the trial the judge, being somewhat pitiful for Blessed Ralph, who was old and had a wife and eight children looking to him, recommended him to make one visit as a matter of form to the Protestant parish church, and so secure his release. But, says [Richard] Challoner, Milner answered, “Would your lordship then advise me, for the perishable trifles of this world, or for a wife and children, to lose my God? No, my lord, I cannot approve or embrace a counsel so disagreeable to the maxims of the gospel.” As Father Stanney states that Milner was entirely illiterate, we must assume that this is a paraphrase of his reply. These two suffered together, one of the most moving couples in the whole gallery of English martyrs.

At the same assizes seven maiden gentlewomen were sentenced to death for allowing Bd Roger to celebrate Mass in their houses, but were immediately reprieved; whereupon they asked that they might die with their pastor, seeing that they undoubtedly shared his supposed guilt and should share also in his punishment: but they were returned to prison.

Laurence Humphrey was a young man of Protestant upbringing and good life who, having undertaken to dispute with Father Stanney (referred to above), was instead himself converted. Father Stanney in a brief memoir speaks very highly of the virtues of his neophyte and his energy in instructing the ignorant and relieving the needs of those in prison for their faith. But Humphrey being taken seriously ill, he was heard to say in delirium that “the queen was a whore and a heretic”; his words were reported to the authorities, and before he was well recovered he was committed to Winchester gaol. At his trial he confessed his religion, but denied memory of ever having spoken disrespectfully of the queen; he was nevertheless condemned, and hanged, drawn, and quartered in his twenty-first year.

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1350: Tidericus the organist

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On or very near this date in 1350,* the plague-ravaged city of Visby burned a man remembered as Tidericus (Diderik) the organist.

The Gotland capital at this point stood at the fore of the Hanseatic league; the medieval maritime Laws of Wisbuy reflect its influence. The arrival in this year of the Black Death would begin Visby’s passage from merchant power to its present-day station as the “City of Ruins”. (The beautiful remains of its medieval grandeur make Visby a UNESCO heritage site.)

Small wonder that the city took its abrupt fall from greatness as an infernal conspiracy, the dimensions of which posterity decodes from a few surviving bits of correspondence.

In the midst of the plague, Gotland arrested nine itinerants as well-poisoners. For people struggling to cope with the sudden, inexplicable ravages of Pesta the inference of a malevolent hand ruining the water supply was a natural one; it emerges frequently during pandemics.

Tidericus the organista — either an organ-builder or an organ-player or both — is the only one of the Visby nine whose name we know; it seems that “with no prior coercion, [he] clearly admitted how he would poison all the wells in the cities of Stockholm, Vasteras and Arboga, and every lake, fresh water source, and various wells as he travelled around Sweden, everywhere poisoning away with his concoctions.” See, all they had to do was ask him.

What’s more, at the same time he [Tidericus] admitted that there are many who belong to a certain society which consisted of rich merchants and all the kinds of people who hold office all over the world, as many people know they do, and each of them goes around with silver belts, and they are all half mad or crazed in some other way. Also, they are all marked with a letter written in Greek or Hebrew. In his last moment he said “Need I say more? All Christendom has been poisoned by us villains and the Jews.”

It seems the well-poisoning mission had been funded by merchant-Jews in Germany named Aaron and Moses. A few different letters between Hanseatic cities around this time attest to a similar fear of Semitic contagion, possibly hinting at a wider panic outside the scanty lines of primary documentation. One letter from Lübeck (cited here) mentions a person named Keyenort who burned at the stake after confessing to pocketing three solidi from Jewish agents who wanted him to poison wells across northern Germany and Prussia; another from Torun has a more ambiguous reference to an apparent mass arrest of “baptized Jews”.

A few years after this organist’s coda, the Danes defeated Visby on the battlefield; Danish control would persist until the 17th century and consigned the once-proud Hanseatic port to a distinctly lesser stature. By century’s end, Visby would be the haunt of the Victual Brothers pirates.

* Citations are split between July 1 and 2; the sources are few, indirect, and barely dated so even the outline of events in this post is somewhat inferential.

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1896: The Rufus Buck Gang, heaven-dream’t

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On this date in 1896, the Rufus Buck Gang was hanged at Fort Smith, Arkansas for a two-week spree of violence against white Oklahoma settlers.

More about this novelization is available on this companion website.

After doing a 90-day turn in Judge Isaac Parker‘s jail for selling liquor, the half-Creek, half-Black teenager Rufus Buck emerged violently politicized — “enraged by what he considered the theft of Indian lands. He decided it was his duty to rid the land of those who, in his eyes, did not belong”

If his theory of resistance was naive, the grievance was real enough. Earlier that century the Creeks of the American Southeast had been made to quaff humiliation by the emerging United States, and expelled with many other indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands to present-day Oklahoma; in Buck’s own lifetime, this remnant Indian Territory was itself being positioned for takeover by white settlement.

Buck gathered four other youngsters to his banner and from July 28, 1895 — when they slew a U.S. marshal — until their capture on August 10 they gave vent to rage and despair in a spree of robberies, murders, and rapes consciously directed at white settlers. This hopeless paroxysm of violence, almost precisely contemporary with suppression of the Ghost Dance movement and the official closing of the American frontier, marks the passage of an era; even the famous Judge Parker was in his dotage and would pass away a few months after the Buck gang’s own execution.

After the young men went to the gallows for rape on July 1, 1896, a poem was discovered in Buck’s cell, scribbled on the back of a photograph of his mother.

Mi dreAM —
i, dremP’T i, wAs, in, HeAven,
Among, THe Angels, FAir:
i, d, neAr, seen, none, so HAndsome,
THAT TWine, in goLden, HAir:
TheY, Looked, so, neAT,
And; sAng, so, sweeT
And, Play, d, THe, THe, golden, harp
i, was, ABouT, To, Pick, An Angel ouT,
And, TAke, Her, To, mY HeaRT:
BuT, THe, momenT, i, BegAn
To PLea,
i, THougHT, oF, You, mY, Love,
THere, Was, none, I, d seen
so, BeAuTiFul,
On, eArTH, or, HeAven, ABove.
gooD! By, My Dear, Wife..anD MoTHer
All. so. My SisTers.
Rufus, Buck
Youse Truley

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1779: Manuel, burned for witchcraft in the USA?

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(Thanks to the late University of Illinois history professor Clarence Walworth Alvord for the guest post, which originally appeared in an essay he wrote for the centennial of the Land of Lincoln‘s 1818 statehood. For context to this 1779 execution, the area comprising the future U.S. state of Illinois had been attached by the British crown to its own recently annexed province of Quebec, formerly French and Catholic. Illinois had then been seized during the Revolutionary War by Virginia, which at this moment (and only a few years thereafter) maintained it as Virginia’s own “Illinois County”. Notwithstanding Dr. Alvord’s rebuttal, the slave Manuel is still frequently described down to the present day as having been burned for witchcraft. -ed.)

The secret of writing true history depends upon the collection of all the contemporary evidence bearing on the case. The reason that people complain of the changing interpretations of history is that new material is found as society demands a broader and broader interpretation of the phenomena of the past. There was a time when history consisted in what we call to-day the drum and fife history; the doings of the great political leaders, events of military glory; and almost no other phenomena of changing society were noted. To-day the task of the historian, however, is far greater; and he is obliged to cast his net far afield in order to collect the material for the social development of the past …

“it must be remembered that the Creoles were very ignorant and superstitious, and that they one and all, including, apparently, even their priests, firmly believed in witchcraft and sorcery. Some of their negro slaves had been born in Africa, the others had come from the Lower Mississippi or the West Indies; they practised the strange rites of voudooism, and a few were adepts in the art of poisoning. Accordingly the French were always on the look-out lest their slaves should, by spell or poison, take their lives …

At this time the Creoles were smitten by a sudden epidemic of fear that their negro slaves were trying to bewitch and poison them. Several of the negroes were seized and tried, and in June two were condemned to death. One, named Moreau, was sentenced to be hung outside Cahokia. The other, a Kaskaskian slave named Manuel, suffered a worse fate. He was sentenced “to be chained to a post at the water-side, and there to be burnt alive and his ashes scattered.” These two sentences, and the directions for their immediate execution, reveal a dark chapter in the early history of Illinois. It seems a strange thing that, in the United States, three years after the declaration of independence, men should have been burnt and hung for witchcraft, in accordance with the laws and with the decision of the proper court. The fact that the victim, before being burned, was forced to make “honorable fine” at the door of the Catholic church, shows that the priest at least acquiesced in the decision. The blame justly resting on the Puritans of seventeenth-century New England must likewise fall on the Catholic French of eighteenth-century Illinois.

-Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West

An example of how easy it is to misinterpret a past event, provided all the material available is not collected, and how easy is that interpretation after the material has been found, has come under my observation … About forty years ago Edward G. Mason, at that time secretary of the Chicago Histori[c]al Society, found the record book kept by the county Lieutenant, John Todd,* in the year 1779, when Todd came to govern the territory that had been occupied by George Rogers Clark and his Virginians during the Revolutionary War. In this record book Mason found the copy of a warrant for the death of a negro, named Manuel, by burning at the stake, which burning was to take place after consolation to the criminal had been given by the parish priest. The copy of the warrant had been crossed out by drawing lines through it. Please bear this fact in mind, since it should have suggested a correct interpretation. Naturally this warrant aroused the imagination of Mr. Mason, and he vegan to search for an explanation and discovered that about this time there was an outbreak of voodooism among the Illinois slaves and that two slaves had been put to death. He drew the natural conclusion therefore that Manuel had been burned at the stake for the practice of witchcraft. Basing his interpretation upon Mr. Mason’s find, a well-known ex-president, Theodore Roosevelt, who among other occupations has dabbled in history, wrote at some length upon this episode and drew a comparison between eighteenth century Catholic Illinois, where for the practice of witchcraft men were burned at the stake with the sancttion [sic] of the parish priest and in accordance with French Catholic law, with a similar episode in the history of Puritan Massachusetts in the seventeenth century.

Fortunately there has come into my hands a full record of the court’s proceedings by which Manuel was condemned; and I find that the judges in the case, although they were obliged to listen to the superstitious accusations of negro slaves, were careful to determine the fact that Manuel and another negro had been guilty of murder by poisoning their master and mistress, Mr. and Mrs. Nicolle, and that it was for this act the two negroes were condemned to death. I then looked up the law of the land. Naturally it might be supposed as Roosevelt did that this was French law, but there was another possibility, namely that Virginia law in criminal cases would be used by a Virginian magistrate, such as John Todd. I found that the Virginia law in the case of murder of a master by a slave was death by burning at the stake so that in the case of Manuel you see that the condemnation was strictly in accordance with Virginia law and not with French law. Another document of even greater interest in the case also came to my hands. It certainly was a surprise. This was another warrant for the death of Manuel, issued at a later hour in the day, but by this later warrant the death penalty was changed from burning at the stake to hanging by the neck. To summarize then: Manuel was not condemned for witchcraft but for murder; he was not condemned to be burned at the stake in accordance with French law, but in accordance with Virginia law; and finally he was not burned at the stake at all, but was hung by the neck. This is an excellent example of the danger of drawing inferences in regard to historic events upon too narrow information. There was one fact which both Mr. Mason and Mr. Roosevelt ignored in their interpretation of the warrant. The copy of the warrant was found in a carefully kept record book, and was crossed out by lines being drawn through it. That fact should have made them suspicious of their own interpretation. Records such as this condemnation to death would not be lightly erased by the keeper of a record book. An historical Sherlock Holmes would not have been misled.

* Todd’s brother Levi was grandfather to eventual U.S. First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. -ed.

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1566: Bartholome Tecia, Geneva sodomite

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On this date in 1566, student Bartholome Tecia was drowned in Geneva as a sodomite.

Trial documents make him a youth from the valleys of northwest Italy’s Piedmont, where pockets maintained loyalty to the Evangelical Church of Vaud — Vaud being an adjacent Swiss canton that had been annexed by Calvinist Geneva. He was in the big city to study under Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor in theological preeminence.

He’s been rediscovered by a more queer-friendly posterity. An eponymous play by Jean-Claude Humbert received a Geneva municipal literary prize in 2005, and the present-day Geneva visitor will see a commemorative marker for Tecia unveiled in 2013.


Plaque in Geneva honoring Bartholome Tecia, which reads “BARTHOLOME TECIA. Piedmontese student aged 15, denounced, tortured and sentenced on June 10, 1566 to be drowned in this place, for crime of homosexuality. Today, sexual orientation and gender identity must be universally recognized as basic human rights. Around the world, people continue to be discriminated against, persecuted and sentenced simply because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.” (cc) image by MHM55.

There’s been a bit of pushback against this memorialization in view of the coercion alleged against him by two younger students. Executed Today would be the last to disclaim adolescents’ capacity for sexual predation, but it’s also the case that all three boys as participants in same-sex rendezvous would have feared themselves under the pall of the executioner: Geneva had drowned a similar trio for sodomy in 1554. While it’s obviously impossible at our remove to have anything better than a guess at the motivations and perspectives of the people involved, it does bear consideration that the accusers were powerfully incentivized to put the entire onus on someone other than themselves. For what it’s worth, Tecia militantly refused to confess, even when put to torture.

It happens that one of Tecia’s accusers was Theodore Agrippa d’Aubigne, the son of a participant in the Huguenot Amboise conspiracy to depose King Francis II. Agrippa d’Aubigne would go on to a scintillating military career during the French Wars of Religion, eventually settling in as Governor of Maillezais when his guy Henri IV won that war. That would have been a nice capstone to his career, except that France’s anti-Reformation turn following Henri’s assassination obliged him to flee a French death sentence for exile … to Geneva. He left an impressive literary legacy containing, to the best of my knowledge, no comment on l’affaire Tecia.

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1903: Victoriano Lorenzo, cholo

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Panamanian indigenous leader Victoriano Lorenzo was shot on this date in 1903.

He was a cholo (mixed-race; Lorenzo had both African and Amerindian ancestry) peasant who in the 1890s rose to become the most prominent indigenous leader in Cocle, a Pacific-facing province on the isthmus back when Panama was still a part of Colombia.

Lorenzo (English Wikipedia entry | Spanish) would lead indigenous forces in the Thousand Days’ War — a civil war between Colombia’s Conservative and Liberal Parties. Lorenzo fought in alliance with the Liberals; they lost the war, and with it the native land rights that Lorenzo fought for.

While the war was settled by the last days of 1902, the now-ascendant Conservative government accused Lorenzo and followers of continuing to fight and put him to a rial on grounds of murder and robbery that culminated in his public shooting in Panama City. The affair was so irregular that it’s commonly maligned as an “assassination”.

Scholars have interpreted the strange circumstances of his death as Conservative vengeance, the destruction of a hero and powerful symbol for impoverished people, the establishment of oligarchy, and as the forgetting of indigenous people as emblematic in the new Republic of Panama. Lorenzo has been interpreted as a martyr and the first victim of North American imperialism related to the Canal because he was held aboard the United States ship Bogota before his assassination. Seven days before his assassination, Esteban Huertas publicly announced that there was nothing more dangerous for the Canal construction than “guerrillas” and their activities in the mountains of Cocle …

The Conservative narrative of Lorenzo as “guerrilla” fighter permeated Panamanian national history, and schoolchildren learned to see Lorenzo negatively. National Panamanian history depicted Lorenzo shamefully as a “dirty cholo” …

In contrast, northern Cocle oral history memorializes, in cyclical time, Lorenzo as a cultural hero who continues to live, and understands his fight for land rights and political autonomy as the same fight of Urraca that is still ongoing today. People identify strongly with a liberation theology quote attributed to Lorenzo shortly before his death, “I forgive all. I die like Jesus Christ died,” wherein the cultural hero continued the cycle of death to defend land in this epoch. Rufino Peres J., born in 1941, recalls:

My people were illiterate, when he lived. They wore plant fiber loincloth (pampanillas) to go to Penonome … Why did they kill Victoriano Lorenzo? He died fighting for our land, and they formed a war, and that Victoriano Lorenzo, a cholo, won that war! It was not the president who won the war; it was Victoriano Lorenzo. They could never kill him: they used machetes, sticks, smoke, and they didn’t kill him. How was that? Then Victoriano Lorenzo went to the Presidency, and there they killed him. But Victoriano Lorenzo has stayed in History. So, now, whenever a campesino starts any kind of movement, they are scared because because we are the blood of Victoriano Lorenzo.

He uses the word blood (sangre) to mean how much someone is dedicated to the land and lineages in struggle, and adds, “Now youth don’t have blood like before, they have to be ready to die.” (from The Blood of Victoriano Lorenzo: An Ethnography of the Cholos of Northern Cocle Province, Panama)

Panama broke away from Colombia later that same year of 1903, and its new constitution abolished the death penalty outright. Independent Panama has never conducted an execution — so Lorenzo’s appears to be the isthmus’s last.

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Feast Day of Saint Mocius

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May 11 is the feast date in the Orthodox confession* of Saint Mocius or Mucius, Hieromartyr of Amphipolis, Macedonia.

Mosaic image of Mocius from the Greek monastery of Hosios Loukas. (cc) image from Hans A. Rosbach.

A hieromartyr is someone who was clergy when he died for the faith; Mocius, as a Christian presbyter, rallied his flock against a public festival for the wine-god Bacchus, allegedly destroying an icon of that hedonic deity.

Since this occurred during the anti-Christian crackdown under the Emperor Diocletian, Mocius got what what was coming to him from this behavior although not until they were able to take him to Byzantium for beheading: attempts to punish him by fire and by throwing him to wild animals were divinely interdicted.

He’s not to be confused with the quasi-mythical Gaius Mucius Scaevola, a hero of Rome’s Etruscan Wars whose legendary steel in the face of execution in the Etruscan camp — “Watch so that you know how cheap the body is to men who have their eye on great glory,” he declared as he thrust his right hand into a brazier without flinching in pain — led his astonished enemies to release him instead. “Scaevola”, meaning “lefty”, is the honorary cognomen his countrymen bestowed upon him thereafter; the feat has inspired later harm-seeking imitators ranging from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Friedrich Nietzsche to Paul Atreides.

* Catholics mark the feast on May 13.

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2010: Four Kurdish political prisoners

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On this date in 2010, Iran hanged five political prisoners — four of them Kurdish — in Evin Prison.

The non-Kurd was Mehdi Eslamian, condemned a terrorist for complicity in a notorious 2008 terrorist bombing in Shiraz, an incident for which his younger brother had already been hanged a year previous.

With him died Farzad Kamangar, Ali Heydarian, Farhad Vakili, and Shirin Alam Holi, all of them Kurdish dissidents of various descriptions.

Farzad Kamangar was a popular 32-year-old teacher, who might have been the most publicly visible member of this quintet to judge by media hits and tributary pop music.

Shirin Alam Holi, a woman from the area of “Kurdistan” reaching into western Iran’s Azerbaijan province, was condemned for affiliation with the PKK front Kurdistan Free Life Party. A letter allegedly written by her a few months before execution detailed the abuse she endured in custody:

I was arrested in April 2008 in Tehran. The arrest was made by uniformed and plain clothed members of Sepah who started beating me as soon as we arrived at their headquarters without even asking one question. In total I spent twenty five days at Sepah. I was on hunger strike for twenty two of those days during which time I endured all forms of physical and psychological torture. My interrogators were men and I was tied to the bed with handcuffs. They would hit and kick my face and head, my body and the soles of my feet and use electric batons and cables in their beatings. At the time I didn’t even speak or understand Farsi properly. When their questions were left unanswered they would hit me until I pass out. They would stop as soon as they would hear the call for prayers and would give me time until their return for as they said to come to my senses only to start their beatings as soon as they returned – again beatings, passing out, iced water …

When they realised I was insistent on my hunger strike, they tried to break it by inserting tubes through my nose to my stomach and intravenous feeding; they tried to break my [hunger] strike by force. I would resist and pull out the tubes which resulted in bleeding and a great deal of pain and now after two years I’m still suffering the consequences and am in pain.

One day while interrogating me they kicked me so hard in the stomach that it resulted in immediate haemorrhaging. Another day, one of the interrogators came to me – the only one whose face I saw, I was blindfolded all other times – and asked irrelevant questions. When he heard no reply he slapped me and took out his pistol from his belt and put it to my head, “You will answer the questions I ask of you. I already know you are a member of PJAK, that you are a terrorist. See girl, talking or not talking makes no difference. We’re happy to have a member of PJAK in our captivity”.

On one of the occasions that the doctor was brought to see to my injuries I was only half conscious because of all the beatings. The doctor asked my interrogator to transfer me to the hospital. The interrogator asked, “why should she be treated in hospital, can’t she be treated here?” The doctor said, “I don’t mean for treatment. In hospital I will do something for you to make her sing like a canary.” The next day they took me to hospital in handcuffs and blindfold. The doctor put me on a bed and injected me. I lost my will and answered everything they asked in the manner they wanted and they filmed the whole thing. When I came to I asked them where I was and realised I was still on a hospital bed and then they transferred me back to my cell.

But it was as if this was not enough for my interrogators and they wanted me to suffer more. They kept me standing up on my injured feet until they would swell completely and then they would give me ice. From night till morning I would hear screams, moans, people crying out loud and these voices upset me and me nervous. Later, I realised these were recordings played to make me suffer. Or for hours on end cold water would be dripped slowly on my head and they would return me to the cell at night.

One day I was sitting blindfold and was being interrogated. The interrogator put out his cigarette on my hand; or one day he pressed and stood on my toes for so long that my nails turned black and fell off; or they would make me stand all day in the interrogation room without asking me any questions while they filled in crossword puzzles. In short they did everything possible.

When they returned me from hospital they decided I should be transferred to 209. But because of my physical condition and that I couldn’t even walk 209 refused to accept me. They kept me for a whole day in that condition by the door of 209 until I was transferred to the clinic.

What else? I couldn’t tell night from day anymore. I don’t know how many days I was kept at Evin Clinic until my wounds were a little improved and was transferred to 209 and interrogations started. The interrogators at 209 had their own methods and techniques – what they called hot and cold policy. First of all, the brutal interrogator would come in. He would intimidate me threaten and torture me. he would tell me that he cared for no law and that he would do what he wanted with me and … then the kind interrogator would come in and ask him to stop treating me in this way. He would offer me a cigarette and then the questions would be repeated and the futile cycle would start all over again.

While I was at 209 especially at the beginning when I was interrogated, when I wasn’t well or had a nose bleed they would inject me with a pain killer and keep me in the cell. I would sleep the whole day. They wouldn’t take me out of the cell or take me to the clinic…

Shirin Alam Hoolo?Nesvan Wing, Evin?28/10/88 (18 January 2010)

On this day..