January 8 is the execution day in 1878 of Argentine folk saint “Gauchito Gil”.

Nobody knows for sure if he really existed, but thousands flock to his sanctuary near Mercedes on this remembrance date while roadside red-flagged shrines throughout Argentina pay him homage all the year round.

If he was real at all, or even if he wasn’t, Antonio Mamerto Gil Nunez was an freelance ranchhand gaucho who ditched his conscription into the Argentine Civil Wars for life as an outlaw — flourishing in the classic social bandit guise as a friend to the put-upon peasantry with beneficence extending all the way to saintly healing powers.

Ambushed and captured at last, Gil’s last charity was reserved for the policeman who decided to have him summarily executed — whom Gil warned was about to receive an en-route pardon. The cop didn’t buy this obvious dilatory gambit and slit the bandit’s throat, only to return and find the promised clemency riding on up. As Gil had also prophesied, the policeman’s son had fallen quite ill and now he prayed to the brigand he had just put to death, who posthumously secured the boy a miraculous recovery.

The reports of the duly impressed executioner proliferated and soon fathered a flourishing popular veneration. Although Gauchito Gil is of course entirely unrecognized by the institutional Catholic Church, many devout pilgrims visit his site to pray for, or to offer thanks for, a favorable intercession in life.

On this day..

• 1889: Louisa Collins, the last woman hanged in New South Wales
• 1795: Franz Hebenstreit, Wiener Jakobiner
• 1999: Dobie Gillis Williams
• 1932: Asbury Respus, North Carolina serial killer
• 1900: The private, decent, and humane execution of a human being named George Smiley
• 1690: Andrei Ilyich Bezobrazov, stolnik
• 1813: The Yorkshire Luddites, for murdering William Horsfall
• 1908: John Boyd, by John Radclive
• Themed Set: 2010
• 2010: Jeong Dae-Sung and Lee Ok-Geum, for escaping North Korea
• 1603: Not Tommaso Campanella
• 1864: Two Dodds, as two spies, in two states, and twice botched
• 1697: Thomas Aikenhead