ISCEF, in the Quelhas

Towards the end of Marcelo Caetano’s rule, the student struggle was at its height in Lisbon, and so was the repression: associations closed down, police charges at the Economics school and at the Técnico, the surveillance of the “gorillas”. For 12 October 1972 a “meeting against repression” was called in a prefabricated lecture theatre of the Higher Institute of Economic and Financial Sciences (ISCEF), in the Quelhas.¹²

The students spotted a stranger who would not identify himself and whom they took for a DGS informer. The school called the political police, who sent two agents; they said they did not know the man, but wanted to take him away. A confrontation broke out, and the agent António Joaquim Gomes da Rocha opened fire: he killed José António Ribeiro Santos, aged 26, a fourth-year law student and an activist of the Federation of Marxist-Leninist Students, and wounded José Lamego.³⁴

Aurora Rodrigues was in the room; after this she joined the MRPP, and she would be arrested and tortured in 1973.⁵ Isabel do Carmo was arrested by the DGS later in 1972, in the wake of the killing.⁶ That night, three hundred students meeting at the Técnico decided to bring the university to a standstill; the funeral, two days later, left from Ribeiro Santos’s home and was one of the largest demonstrations of the final phase of the dictatorship.²

The agent was never tried: he was one of the PIDE/DGS men who escaped from Alcoentre prison on 29 June 1975.¹³