José Dias Coelho
Encyclopedia
José Dias Coelho was a Portuguese
Portugal
Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...

 painter and sculptor, an anti-fascist and an important member of the Portuguese Communist Party
Portuguese Communist Party
The Portuguese Communist Party is a major left-wing political party in Portugal. It is a Marxist-Leninist party, and its organization is based upon democratic centralism. The party also considers itself to be patriotic and internationalist....

.

In his youth, José Dias Coelho joined the Antifascist Academic Front. Later on, as a student of the Art Academy of Lisbon
Lisbon
Lisbon is the capital city and largest city of Portugal with a population of 545,245 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Lisbon extends beyond the administrative city limits with a population of 3 million on an area of , making it the 9th most populous urban...

, he was a member of the Juvenile MUD
Juvenile MUD
The Juvenile Movement of Democratic Unity was the youth wing of a Portuguese democratic platform that opposed the dictatorship of António Oliveira Salazar, the Movement of Democratic Unity....

. In 1947 he participated in a great number of student demonstrations and actively pressed for the creation of an Academic Association in the Art Academy and against the 1952 NATO meeting in Lisbon. As a consequence of this action, he was expelled from the Art Academy, prohibited to enroll in any other faculty of the country and dismissed from his teaching position in the technical section of the educational system. He joined the Portuguese Communist Party in his early twenties and soon became an important member of the party's clandestine net that struggled against the Fascists.

He died as a secret worker of the party when he was assassinated by PIDE
PIDE
In 1969, Marcello Caetano changed the name PIDE to DGS . The death of Salazar and the subsequent ascension of Caetano brought some attempts at democratization, in order to avoid popular insurgency against censorship, the ongoing colonial war and the general restriction of civil rights...

, the political police of the Fascist regime, on the 19th December 1961 on Lusíadas street in Lisbon.

In 1972, Zeca Afonso
Zeca Afonso
José Manuel Cerqueira Afonso dos Santos, known as Zeca Afonso or just Zeca , was born in Aveiro, Portugal, the son of José Nepomuceno Afonso, a judge, and Maria das Dores. Zeca is among the most influential folk and political musicians in Portuguese history...

released a song titled A Morte Saiu à Rua (Death is out on the Streets), a homage to Dias Coelho.
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