João Arruda

He was born on the island of São Miguel, in the Azores, on 13 January 1954, one of the thirteen children of a road worker and a housewife and washerwoman. At 9 he entered the Minor Seminary of Angra do Heroísmo and, in 1972, went to study Philosophy at the Catholic University in Braga. Shortly afterwards he broke with religious life and, in September 1973, entered the Lisbon Faculty of Letters; he also worked at the National Employment Service. He is thought to have taken part in actions of the PCP and the MRPP.¹

On 25 April 1974 he went down to the Baixa, like thousands of others, and he appears in RTP footage filmed in Largo do Carmo. In the early evening he was among those demanding the surrender of the political police outside the DGS headquarters, on Rua António Maria Cardoso. The agents fired from the windows into the crowd. At around 20:30, João Arruda was hit in the head; he died at São José Hospital at 00:30 on 26 April, aged 20.¹² To this day, the identity of whoever killed him is unknown.¹

In 1980, a group of citizens put up a plaque by the building with the names of the four dead; his appears, by mistake, as “José Guilherme R. Arruda”.⁴ In 2010, Lisbon City Council also put up a plaque there about what happened and about the history of the building.¹