On this date in 1979, Jesse Bishop was gassed in Nevada.
The third person executed under the “modern” U.S. death penalty regime — after Gary Gilmore in 1976 and John Spenkelink earlier in 1979 — Bishop was a career felon with a years-long rap sheet of armed robberies and drug crimes.
In 1977, he was engaged in his customary business of knocking over the (now defunct) El Morocco Casino when a newlywed groom left his nearby wedding reception to stage a heroic intervention. Bishop gunned down David Ballard, “like a dog.”
Like Gary Gilmore in neighboring Utah, Bishop was a resolute volunteer for taking his punishment. In his last hours he had a telephone provided him, so that resuming his abandoned appeals would be within arm’s reach at any moment he desired. Bishop never touched it.
Breezily calling the death penalty an “occupational hazard” in his line of work, he was the calmest guy in the place when they sat him down for his hydrogen cyanide sauna. Time magazine cast the scene thus:
Dressed in a crisp white shirt and pressed Levis, he strode purposefully into the freshly whitewashed chamber at Nevada State Prison, near Carson City. “He looked as if he were ready to go to a disco,” recalls TIME’s Guy Shipler, one of 14 official witnesses.
On this date in 1972, (former) King Ntare V of Burundi was summarily executed at the outset of the 1972 genocide of ethnic Hutus.
He was the son of Mwambutsa IV, whose half-century reign dated all the way back to the German colonial period which gave way (in 1916) to the Belgian colonial period and finally to independence in 1962. He had a job all the while to manage relations between the majority Hutus and the elite Tutsis: it was this conflict that would write the unpleasant end of this family’s dynasty.
In 1965, a Hutu coup attempt forced Mwambutsa to flee into exile — although the coup did not succeed, and our principal Crown Prince Charles Ndizeye succeeded him as Ntare V. Ntare was all of 18 years old, the only surviving son of his generation but a mere shadow of the half-brother who had seemed destined for this inheritance until an assassin‘s bullet struck him down in 1961. He was not equal to the tumultuous political situation.
Before 1966 was out, Ntare too had been chased into exile by a coup executed by officer-turned-prime minister Michel Micombero — Burundi’s military dictator for the subsequent decade. In 1972, Burundi lured the expatriate prince back to his homeland with a pledge of safekeeping — in the words of the note conveyed to Uganda, whose government arranged to helicopter him back to Burundi,
Your excellency can be assured that as soon as Mr. Charles Ndizeye returns to my country he will be considered an ordinary citizen and that as such his life and his security will be assured. I will do all that I can so that he may participate in the building of Burundi’s society as an honest citizen.
But he was quickly placed under house arrest in Gitega, accused of attempting to invade Burundi at the head of an army of mercenaries.
On April 27, 1972, a Hutu rebellion became the trigger for a genocidal crackdown thought to have claimed 100,000 to 300,000 lives and the cream of the Hutus’ intelligentsia — teachers, civil servants, and community leaders who were systematically hunted by death squads working from kill lists. Hundreds of thousands more preserved their lives only by escaping from Burundi.
Sometime the night of April 29, Mr. Charles Ndizeye became one of the earliest casualties in this bloodbath. The circumstances of his killing have never been entirely clear; the official line at the time was that he was shot spontaneously when supporters tried to liberate him from custody; the counterclaim is that he was lined up and gunned down in cold blood.
In the name of the Nigerien officers and soldiers aware of the incessant evil perpetuated by a regime of men who are unstable, cowardly, who are enslaved by a dictator inspired by Satan, I, who speak to you, Major Bayere Moussa, announce to you that from this moment, liberty is recovered at the end of this incompetent and tyrannical regime. I would like to assure you that this noble action comes from the “base,” that is to say inspired and wanted by conscientious soldiers and countrymen.
On or about this date in 1974, French journalist Marc Filloux was killed in Khmer Rouge captivity along with his Laotian translator and girlfriend Manivanh.
Before resuming native soil, Filloux took a trip to Cambodia seeking interviews with the leadership of the Khmer Rouge — at this point still a Maoist guerrilla insurgency, although a growing one that now stood within a year of seizing power.
A Khmer Rouge patrol seized Filloux and Manivanh almost immediately upon their entry into Cambodia, apparently taking them as spies. They would never emerge from custody.
Italian correspondent Tiziano Terzani reported hearing rumors that the Khmer Rouge had executed them as spies, but specifics on their fate have never been confirmed.
Cambodia in 2013 unveiled a monument in Phnom Penh to the journalists killed and disappeared during the Cambodian Civil War. Both Marc Filloux and Manivanh are on it.
Wire report via the Baltimore Sun, March 14, 1979:
12 shot by firing squads in Iran
Tehran, Iran (AP) — Firing quads executed two generals, a legislator, the former head of the national news agency and eight other men yesterday, continuing the purge that has killed dozens of former supporters of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Eleven men were executed in Tehran and one in the holy city of Qom, 100 miles to the south, after secret trials without the aid of defense attorneys.
Since the shah’s government fell February 12, Islamic revolutionary courts are known to have ordered the execution of 57 persons, including 12 generals, for alleged political and sex crimes. The shah is in exile in Morocco.
Meanwhile, there were indications yesterday that the new government is having success in bringing the economy back to life. The National Iranian Oil Company announced that production in the country’s oilfields had reached 2.5 million barrels a day, up from 1.6 million barrels a day last week.
The company said all but 700,000 barrels a day was marked for foreign consumption. Before anti-shah strikes paralyzed the economy, Iran exported about 6 million barrels of oil a day.
The company said it will resume selling Iranian crude on a contract basis to American, European and Japanese companies April 1. In recent weeks, oil has been sold on a spot basis to the highest bidder. Spot prices are in the range of $20 a barrel, compared to the OPEC price of $13.55.
At Tehran University, 40,000 young Iranians rallied to condemn Mideast peace efforts by President Carter and Egyptian President Anwar el Sadat.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Council announced the 12 executions on radio.
Among those shot were Air Force Gen. Nader Jahan-Bani, former director of the National Iranian Sports Organization; Army Gen. Vali Mohammad Zandkarimi, former director of prisons, and Gholam Hussein Daneshi, a Muslim clergyman and former member of parliament who supported the shah.
Also executed were Mahmoud Jaafariian, former head of the official Pars news agency and former deputy director of the national radio and television service, and Parviz Nik-Khah, also a former deputy director of the radio-TV service. Both were former Communists who were sentenced to death by the shah in 1967, but who were pardoned and later went to the shah’s side.
Firing squads in Tehran also executed a corporal in the shah’s Imperial Guard and in Qom a former police officer was shot. Also executed were five members of the shah’s former secret police, SAVAK.
More than one hundred prisoners awaiting their sentence have also been slain in their attempts to escape. Here, too, the official story has been written not to be believable, but rather to show the guerrillas and the political parties that even those who have been acknowledged as prisoners are held on strategic reserve: the Corps Commanders use them in retaliation depending on how the battles are going, if a lesson can be learned, if the mood strikes them.
That is how General Benjamin Menendez, Commander of the Third Army Corps, earned his laurels before March 24: first with the murder of Marcos Osatinsky, who had been arrested in Cordoba, and then with the death of Hugo Vaca Narvaja and another fifty prisoners through various, merciless applications of the escape law; the official story of these deaths was told without any sense of shame. The murder of Dardo Cabo, arrested in April 1975 and executed on January 6, 1977, with seven other prisoners under the jurisdiction of the First Army Corps led by General Suarez Mason, shows that these incidents do not constitute the indulgences of a few eccentric centurions, but rather are the very same policies that you plan among your general staff, that you discuss in your cabinet meetings, that you enforce as commanders-in-chief of the three branches of government, and that you approve as members of the Ruling Junta.
On or very near this date in 1977, Argentinian social activist Dardo Cabo was executed by the Argentine military junta.
Cabo (English Wikipedia entry | Spanish) had public notoriety from a 1966 airplane hijacking, for which he served three years in prison; by the 1970s, he was associated with the Montoneros, a Peronist urban guerrilla/terrorist organization.
Considering his prominence, he was an obvious early arrestee of the Argentina military junta in the first weeks after it overthrew Isabel Peron.
Held at La Plata Federal Penitentiary for the balance of the year, Cabo was removed along with Roberto Rufino Pirles on January 5, 1977 for a supposed transfer to another prison. On January 7, the junta “reported that during the transfer of Cab and Rufino Pirles in Zone 1, ‘subversive elements’ in ten cars attacked the vehicle carrying the prisoners. After a brief, intense firefight, the ‘delinquents’ escaped, minus four who were killed. The two prisoners were alos shot in the firefight.” (Source)
They were just two among a series of high-profile militants being held in that same prison unit who were extrajudicially executed under similar circumstances in those weeks — like Montoneros Angel Alberto Georgiadis and Horacio Rapaport, who “committed suicide” during transfer a couple of weeks later.
Dutch Jewish aid worker (A)Lex Aronson was hanged on this date in 1975 in Iraq.
Aronson (English Wikipedia entry | Dutch) had survived Bergen-Belsen as a child* — his grandfather was not so fortunate — and gone on to a peripatetic career in global relief work that took him to Israel, Syria, Gabon, Nigeria, India, Bangladesh, and points beyond.
By the accounts of his friends, Aronson was a free spirit, a man of idealism and wanderlust. By the account of the Iraqi government that arrested him, Aronson was an Israeli spy.
There’s a published collection of his correspondence; in a letter to his mother dated March 13, 1975 — the last he would post before his arrest 11 days on — achingly shows him eschewing a judicious evacuation in order to press onward into the teeth of a devastating offensive Iraq had launched on March 7.
the political bosses here have decided that all foreigners should be evacuated. By foreigners, they are referring to a few press photographers, the team of five English from “Save the Children,” and yours truly. The hospitality is so extensive here that at the first sign of a threat, they are stepping out of their way to secure the safety of their guests. The local bosses mean well. However, what daddy has in his head, he doesn’t have in his arse… by which I mean that whatever I have set my mind to, I don’t give up easily.
I was determined to go to Badinan. I went from one political office to another, pestering all the leaders save for Barzani himself. Finally, I was rewarded with a letter of introduction to all the Kurdish military commanders requesting that they give me the help necessary for me to reach my goal.
A subsequent letter by a Save Our Children doctor to Aronson’s father in early 1976 explained something of the circumstances in the following days that led to his capture,
I saw your son on 20 March 1975. He was breakfasting with me at the home of the leader of the Barzan community, Sheikh Abdullah, in preparation for a journey to Badinan. He was taking medicine and other equipment with him so that he could set up a surgery to treat the inhabitants of a single community somewhere in that area. He had bought a donkey to convey these items, but unfortunately this had got lost between Senidan and Sideka, over the pass to the east of Hassanbeg Mountain with the snow so deep that no donkey could traverse it.
The donkey was under the control of two Pesh Merga (Kurdish Freedom Fighters). Apparently they became separated from your son and he had no idea of the [whereabouts of?] this medicine or his passport and money. He was travelling against the advice of the Kurds in the border area who were keen (at that time) that all foreigners should get out as quickly as possible. For this reason, he retraced his steps to try to find the donkey, yet wanted to press on towards Amadiyah. He had spent a day or so looking. He asked me to look for the animal. I made inquiries in both Sideka and Semilan, but I could not find it. However, as at that stage there was total chaos in these villages, it was not at all surprising that I was so unsuccessful. I must explain that he was in danger, as he had no identification papers with him when I saw him.
A confusing and, for his loved ones, anguishing period ensued his arrest. The Iraqi News Agency announced his execution on November 3, only to retract that announcement shortly afterward and clarify that he remained alive, still facing execution. His parents for months thereafter received notes scribbled on cigarette packages which meandered through smuggling channels at indifferent speeds, but with the irresistible implication that their son yet drew breath — and so they kept up their struggle to save him via appeals and publicity well into 1976, when the Iraqi embassy in March 1976 finally notified them that he was long since hanged.
“Nobody can imagine how we feel now,” his father told the press. “All hopes smashed at once. There is nothing left to fight for. Now we can only try not to get too depressed.”
* He was a passenger on the “Lost Transport”, a train of inmates evacuated from Bergen-Belsen that ended up with no destination as the Reich collapsed, and were eventually liberated by the Red Army.
Walkiria (or Walquiria) Afonso Costa was summarily executed on this date in 1974.
Sickly and emaciated, the 27-year-old was the last guerrilla left in the field after the two-year campaign of the Brazilian dictatorship to suppress the Communist insurgency in Araguaia — or at least she was the last who was taken into custody.
A pedagogy student at the University of Minas Gerais, she had learned to shoot on forest rambles with her father and so perhaps came better prepared for the wilderness life than some comrades.
According to her sister, the sociology professor Valéria Costa Couto, the military had all but wiped out the guerrillas in a Christmas 1973 ambush, with only Walkiria and a couple of others managing to escape and hold out a few months longer.
There is a street named for her in her home city of Belo Horizonte, and an epigraph from her deceased father awaits if her remains are ever located for proper burial: “Do you think they killed me? They raised an ideal. Do you think they buried me? They planted a seed.”
Horman was interrogated at the military school and then transferred to the national stadium for further questioning. He was ordered shot and killed the evening of September 19. According to [redacted] the authorities at the stadium did not know that Horman was an American … the body was taken from the stadium and left at a location to create the idea that he had been killed in a firefight with the military. However, in the confused days following the coup, and after it was known that he was an American, the military sought to hide the fact that he was dead.
On this date in 1973,* American journalist Charles Horman was extrajudicially executed by the Chilean coup junta of Augusto Pinochet.
Horman was a prizewinning U.S. journalist and filmmaker from the heyday of crusading, adversarial journalism: stateside, he’d made a documentary about napalm use in Vietnam and protested that war at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.
With his wife Joyce, Horman had been living in the Chile of socialist president Salvador Allende since the spring of 1972, reporting freelance while working as a screenwriter. He was right there in the capital on September 11, 1973, to see Allende’s vision ground under tank treads when the Chilean military with U.S. support overthrew the elected civilian government and initiated a litany of horrors.
One of the most emblematic atrocities of Pinochet in his earliest hours was his regime’s commandeering the Santiago football stadium as a makeshift concentration camp for leftists whose blood would desecrate the facility’s recreational purpose.**
The putschists did not fear to extend their terror to subversive Yanks like Horman and (a few days after him) a fellow-journalist named Frank Teruggi — their murders secretlyokayed by Pinochet’s CIA comrades.†
* There are some citations out there for September 17 (the date of Horman’s arrest) or September 19, and a good many general punts to only “September 1973” for this extrajudicial execution/murder. We’re depending for our part on the firm published findings of Chilean judge Jorge Zepeda:
the following day, September 18, 1973 at around 1:35 p.m., military officials took the remains of an unidentified male to the Servicio Medico Legal [Medical Legal Department], and this individual was later fingerprinted and identified as Charles Edmund Horman Lazar, in accordance with Protocol No. 2663/73; the Medical Legal Department concluded that his death had occurred on September 18 at approximately 9:45 a.m. The corresponding death certificate was issued on October 4, 1973 by Doctor Ezequiel Jimenez Ferry of the aforementioned Department.
** In November 1973, the Soviet Union honorably refused to set boots on this boneyard to contest a World Cup playoff and was disqualified as a result — although not before the hosts were made to take the pitch unopposed in a sham “match”.
Thanks to Chile’s consequent advance to the 1974 tourney, a Chilean player holds the distinction of being the first footballer red-carded at the World Cup finals.
† Post-Pinochet Chile unsuccessfully sought the extradition of the former American military mission commander for permitting these murders, when he as the delegate of the coup’s sponsor-empire presumably would have had the juice to forbid them.
allowing the CIA to plant men with the local police in sensitive places around the world; and after careful observation on their home territory, bringing to the United States prime candidates for enrollment as CIA employees
…
The foreign policemen themselves understood why they were being sent to Washington. Even before the coup d’etat, in July 1963, one Brazilian officer described the academy program to the governor of Sao Paulo as “the latest methods in the field of dispersion of strikes and striking workers.” He would learn, he said, how to use dogs and clubs and “to modernize the mechanism of repression against agitators in Sao Paulo.”
Brazil is where Mitrione made his bones over the course of the 1960s, years when the CIA trained some 100,000 Brazilian cops. But his mission was as universal as the toenails he ripped off and by 1969 he’d been reassigned to neighboring Uruguay further to that state’s suppression of a growing leftist revolutionary movement, the Tupamaros.*
One recruit named Manuel Hevia Cosculluela — who notoriuosly gave Mitrione’s mission statement as “the precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect” — recalled the “trainings” these Uruguayan pupils received in his now-out-of-print 1978 book Pasaporte 11333: ocho años con la CIA.
As subjects for the first testing, they took beggars, known in Uruguay as bichicones, from the outskirts of Montevideo, along with a woman from the border with Brazil. There was no interrogation, only a demonstration of the different voltages on the different parts of the human body, together with the uses of a drug to induce vomiting — I don’t know why or for what — and another chemical substance.
The four of them died.
(There’s a good deal more stomach-turning stuff about the Mitrione program in this pando.com article.)
Heightened repression also heightened the response of the Tupamaros, who had not previously shown themselves a particularly bloodthirsty bunch. The Uruguayan Chief of Police Intelligence Alejandro Otero gave an embarrassing-to-Washington interview to a Brazilian paper revealing Mitrione’s work, complaining that “The violent methods which were beginning to be employed, caused an escalation in Tupamaro activity. Before then their attitude showed that they would use violence only as a last resort.”
In their day the Tupamaros managed to take a pound of flesh from their persecutors by kidnapping Mitrione as a hostage to the release of 150 political prisoners. Mitrione was executed when Uruguay refused the exchange, although in later years Tupamaros founder Raul Sendic would reveal that the guerrillas had intended to hold Mitrione in indefinite captivity, but were spooked into conducting the execution when early-August police raids on revolutionary cadres broke the lines of communication between leadership and kidnappers ahead of a threatened drop-dead date: thus, “when the deadline came the group that was left with Mitrione did not know what to do. So they decided to carry out the threat.”** He was shot in the early hours of August 10 and his body deposited in a car for easy discovery.
Mitrione’s death met with great umbrage on his native soil; his VIP-rich funeral in his native Richmond, Ind. saw the Uruguayan ambassador vow that his killers would “reap the wrath of civilized people everywhere.” So civilized people “in the aftermath of Dan Mitrione’s death … unleashed the illegal death squads to hunt and kill insurgents.”
As for the OPS, that program wound down in 1974 as exposes made its work increasingly untenable … but the same project of barely-veiled anti-Communist suppression transitioned seamlessly to the Drug Enforcement Agency and a host of other alphabet-soup agencies around Washington.
* They were named for executed Andean revolutionary Tupac Amaru. The Tupamaros were violently suppressed over the course of the 1970s but when the dictatorship ended in 1984 its remaining prisoners were amnestied. The remnants of the movement eventually folded into the Frente Amplio center-left party, which is today Uruguay’s ruling party; Jose Mujica, President of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015, was a former Tupamaros guerrilla who served 13 years in prison.
** Sendic is obviously an interested party in the affair but there’s some corroboration to his account in that the movement held several other hostages whom it could not exchange for months, only to release them unharmed in the end. (e.g. American agronomist Claude Fly, British diplomat Geoffrey Jackson)
The third person executed under the “modern” U.S. death penalty regime — after Gary Gilmore in 1976 and John Spenkelink earlier in 1979 — Bishop was a career felon with a years-long rap sheet of armed robberies and drug crimes.
He was the son of 
Countrymen, Brothers and Sisters of Niger,
The Agence France-Presse Southeast Asia correspondent, Filloux (
Aronson (
Sickly and emaciated, the 27-year-old was the last guerrilla left in the field after the 
In their day the Tupamaros managed to take a pound of flesh from their persecutors by kidnapping Mitrione as a hostage to the release of 150 political prisoners. Mitrione was executed when Uruguay refused the exchange, although in later years Tupamaros founder 
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