Maria Machado

She was born in 1949 in Vale de Vargo, in the municipality of Serpa, into a communist family. Her father was arrested on the eve of May Day 1954. When her parents went underground, she stayed with her grandparents, near Beja, and only joined them in 1960, at the age of eleven, in a clandestine house that held a printing press producing Avante! (Forward!) and O Militante (The Militant), the newspapers of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP).¹

In 1966 she went to study in the Soviet Union, where her sister, Úrsula, already was. In Moscow she met Raimundo Narciso, and they started going out together. She returned to Portugal in 1967 and, in 1970, was part of the group that set up Armed Revolutionary Action (ARA), the PCP’s armed organisation against the colonial war and the dictatorship, and took part in preparing several actions.¹ The first was the sabotage of the freighter Cunene, in the Alcântara dock.³ She lived underground with Raimundo Narciso, who, with Jaime Serra and Francisco Miguel, made up the ARA’s central command; they had a daughter and a son.²

She came out of hiding on 1 May 1974 and was reunited with her parents, whom she had not seen since 1968. She was never arrested, unlike her sister, her father and her mother — her mother’s health was left badly weakened by torture.¹