The torturous agony of Manuel Pardo

Throughout 1878 the struggle between the head of state, Mariano Ignacio Prado, and the Congress of the Republic, with a civilian majority, became more acute. Prado tried a legicidal maneuver, a plebiscite that would allow him to dissolve both Chambers. He didn’t get it. In the legislative elections of that year, two prominent political figures were elected senators, former President Manuel Pardo (1834-1878) and Rear Admiral Lizardo Montero, for Junín and Piura, respectively. Pardo, who was in exile in Chile, returned to Peru in September and was elected president of his House.

On November 16, at the beginning of the afternoon, Pardo arrived at the local Trade, in Calle de la Rifa, to personally correct the proofs of a speech he had given the day before. Shortly before two o’clock, accompanied by his colleague Manuel María Rivas and by the doctor Adán Melgar, he took a rental car to go to the Senate, located at that time in the building where the Inquisition had operated. Arriving at his destination, Pardo received military style honors before entering the compound and, when he was already doing so, a sergeant from the Pichincha battalion, who had participated in the protocol ceremony, raised his rifle and shot him in the back. The murderer, later tried and shot in 1880, was called Melchor Montoya. Manuel María Rivas, who was next to Pardo, would remember: “I heard the detonation of a rifle shot and felt a light blow and intense heat in my left hand. The crime was consummated. I looked at Pardo and saw him motionless and mute. I thought he was dead and hugged him tightly to prevent his corpse from collapsing. At this moment, his face, already disfigured by pain, turned towards me, leaned heavily on my body, compressing the wound with both hands, and exhaled a heartrending moan, so intimate and so deep that it broke my soul, making me lose all hope. I spoke to him, he wanted to answer me and nothing but anguished moans came out of his chest ”.

Leaning on Rivas, Pardo was able to keep walking, stumbling. Upon reaching the second courtyard, he took four or five more steps and fell between the two doors that separated him from the session room. At that moment the doctors began to arrive, doctors Vélez, Mariano Macedo, Sánchez Concha, León, Bambarén, Castillo, Villar, Rosas, Moreno y Maiz and Belisario Sosa. All declared the wound to be fatal. To avoid the progress of the hemorrhage, they did not move him. A small mattress was taken from the porters’ room and the doctors carefully lifted the body and deposited it on it.

With a broken voice Manuel Pardo said: “I owe a lot”… “A confessor”… “My family”. Then he asked who he had shot and upon learning that he was a sergeant from Pichincha, he whispered: “I forgive him.” Father Caballero heard a very short confession and the parish priest of the Tabernacle administered Extreme Unction. Nineteen people who surrounded him, including Amaro G. Tizón, Manuel González de la Rosa, Manuel Adolfo Olaechea, Augusto Althaus, Mariano Bolognesi and the aforementioned doctors and priests, heard his last words: “Sit me down”, “I suffer”. , “I’m drowning”. At three o’clock in the afternoon he expired.

The autopsy stated: “The projectile entered the posterior part of the trunk, almost at the level of the scapula (shoulder), fracturing the fourth and fifth ribs in its posterior part, and the second and third ribs in the anterior part. The left lung was pierced. The heart had not been touched. A quantity of two liters of blood was found in the cavity of the interested lung”. Until then it had been believed that in his youth he suffered from tuberculosis and that is why he spent a long time in Jauja, but his lungs were in perfect condition as were his other organs. One of the doctors who performed the autopsy said that if the projectile had not been fired from a Comblay rifle he might have been able to save his life. Those rifles were bought in Europe by Colonel Francisco Bolognesi and they arrived in 1870. They were excellent.

The assassination took place less than a year before Chile declared war on us. Thus died the illustrious politician and statesman, founder of the Civil Party, the first to exist in Peru. Trade, in a special edition, said that tragic night: “Lima is in mourning and scared. Since the savage attack that has deprived the country of the best of its children, all the doors of the houses have been closed. In the streets one notices a terrifying solitude”.