Today is the bicentennial of the July 28, 1819 execution by firing squad of Bolivarian independence heroine Maria Antonia Santos Plata.
Monument to Antonia Santos in Socorro, Colombia.
This New Grenada peasant (English Wikipedia entry | the more extensive Spanish) led Bolivar-aligned guerrillas resisting the Spanish reconquest in her home Province of Socorro.
She was captured during the last months of Spanish hegemony, but even as she awaited execution of her sentence her comrades in arms continuing in the field played a part in the crucial Bolivarian victory at the Battle of Pantano de Vargas.
She was shot at 10:30 in the morning on the main square of Socorro, along with Pascual Becerra and Isidro Bravo.
A battalion of the Colombian army’s Seventh Brigade is named for Antonia Santos.
On this day..
- 1999: Anthony Briggs, last(?) in Trinidad and Tobago
- 1731: Captain Daniel McGuire, griller
- 1795: Charles de Virot, after the Quiberon debacle
- 1925: Con O'Leary
- 1941: Ben Zion bar Shlomo Halberstam, the second Bobever Rebbe
- 1938: Vladimir Kirshon, Bulgakov antagonist
- Daily Double: Scenes from the Purge
- 1976: Christian Ranucci, never yet rehabilitated
- 1865: Edward William Pritchard, MD
- Unspecified Year: Tess of the d'Urbervilles
- 2009: Hiroshi Maeue, suicide website murderer
- 1540: Thomas Cromwell
- 1794: Maximilien Robespierre, Saint-Just and the Jacobin leadership