Domingos Abrantes

He was born in Vila Franca de Xira on 19 January 1936. A leader of the MUD Juvenil, he became a full-time worker and later a leader of the PCP. Arrested for the first time in 1959, he spent months in the “curros” (isolation cells) of the Aljube.¹

On 4 December 1961 he was in Caxias, among the PCP leaders awaiting transfer to Peniche, when he escaped, with seven other prisoners, in Salazar’s armoured car, driven by António Tereso.⁴³

He went back underground, on the south bank of the Tagus. On 21 April 1965, the PIDE lay in wait for him at the house where he lived with Conceição Matos, in Montijo, and arrested them both.¹² The PIDE tried on him what it had tried on her — making him believe that the other had talked — before torturing him; he never talked.²¹ He married Conceição Matos in Peniche prison in 1969 and was released on 23 March 1973.¹²

In February 1974 he went back underground and left with Conceição Matos for Paris, to work in the party’s organisation among emigrants. They returned to Portugal on 30 April 1974, on the plane carrying Álvaro Cunhal.¹² In 2021, by then a Councillor of State, he spoke at the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the escape, beside the sculpture at Caxias, as the “only survivor of the escape”, and recalled that it had been carried out “in broad daylight and under fire from the GNR”.³