4. Love Ends in Tragedy
Camila O’Gorman and Father Ladislao Guiterrez fled to a small provincial town. There, they posed as a married couple, living as husband and wife, and launching the town’s first school. Back in Buenos Aires, the scandal took on political tones, when the dictator’s opponents used it as an example of the moral decay under Rosas – a notorious womanizer. Camila and Ladislao were eventually tracked down, kidnapped, and returned to Buenos Aires. Rosas’ daughter pleaded for clemency for her friend, but the dictator replied that the case warranted “a show of my undisputed power, as the moral values and sacred religious norms of a whole society are at stake“.
The dictator himself signed a decree for the lovers’ execution. On August 18th, 1848, Camila O’Gorman and Father Ladislao Gutierrez were executed by a firing squad in a prison town near Buenos Aires. She was twenty-years-old, and eight months pregnant. As a last gesture of Christian charity, she was given holy water to drink, so her baby would go to heaven.