Aurora Rodrigues
Aurora Rosa Salvador Rodrigues was born on January 20, 1952, in Vale da Azinheira, Minas de São Domingos, in the Alentejo region. Her father was an anarcho-syndicalist.
In 1969, at the age of 17, she entered the Lisbon Faculty of Law and became involved with the Reorganizational Movement of the Proletariat Party (MRPP). After the murder of student José Ribeiro dos Santos by the PIDE (Independent Intelligence Service), which she witnessed in the Economics auditorium in October 1972, Aurora formally joined the MRPP and its student organization, the Federation of Marxist-Leninist Students (FEML).
She was arrested on May 3, 1973, after a student meeting. Detained in Caxias, she was held in strict isolation. The PIDE/DGS subjected her to threats and humiliation, statue torture, 16 consecutive days of sleep torture, violent beatings, and simulated asphyxiation by drowning, forcibly plunging her head into a sink of water. But she never spoke. Three months later, she was released without charge, without trial, and without being allowed to contact a lawyer.
After the April 25th Revolution, she was arrested again on May 28, 1975, in a COPCON operation that detained more than 400 MRPP activists.
She left the MRPP in 1977 and never again became a party activist.
Aurora was one of the students most brutally tortured by the political police. She shared her painful experience of torture and imprisonment in the book Common People – A History of the PIDE, edited by António Monteiro Cardoso and Paula Godinho.
Date of Collection: 12.10.2016
Keywords: Peasants, Students, Student Movements, Murder of Ribeiro Santos, MRPP, Prison, Caxias, Interrogation, Torture, Women, PIDE, Violence.
