16. The Execution of an Eight Months Pregnant Girl in the Name of Morality
Camila O’Gorman and Father Ladislao Guiterrez eventually fled Buenos Aires to a small provincial town. There, they posed as a married couple, lived as husband and wife, and launched the town’s first school. Back in the Argentine capital, their love became a scandal that soon took on political tones. Opponents of the country’s dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas used it as an example of moral decay, and that hit close to home because Rosas was a notorious womanizer. So Camila and Ladislao were tracked down, kidnapped, and returned to the Argentine capital.
The dictator’s daughter pleaded for clemency for her friend, but Rosas 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 personally signed a decree for the execution of the lovers. Accordingly, on August 18th, 1848, Camila O’Gorman and Father Ladislao Gutierrez were shot dead by a firing squad in a prison town near Buenos Aires. She was twenty years old at the time, 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.