Camila O'Gorman

Camila O'Gorman was the daughter of Adolfo O'Gorman and Joaquina Ximénez Pinto. Her grandfather was the merchant Thomas O'Gorman, whom most sources describe as from Ennis, Co. Clare, and a relative of the viceroyalty's physician Dr Michael O'Gorman; her grandmother was Anne Perichon de Vandeuil, "La Perichona", once the lover of Liniers. SILAS gives her birth year as 1828 and her age at death as twenty. The historian Lucía Gálvez, writing in La Nación, calls her father's line Franco-Irish and notes that her brother Eduardo was a seminarian.

In December 1847 she fled Buenos Aires with Ladislao Gutiérrez, a priest from Tucumán who served the Socorro church. Gálvez records that they took passports in Paraná in February 1848 under false names and opened a school in Goya, Corrientes. On 16 June 1848 a priest who knew Gutiérrez recognised them, and the governor of Corrientes had them jailed. Rosas moved them to Santos Lugares. Her father had denounced them, and Bishop Medrano asked for their capture and punishment. The prison doctor certified that Camila was pregnant. They were shot on 18 August 1848. Gálvez calls the execution the most unforgivable act of Rosas's government.

The Irish part of the story is uncomfortable, and it rests on secondary accounts. According to Edmundo Murray of SILAS, citing Julianello's The Scarlet Trinity, Fr Anthony Fahy and the jurist Dalmacio Vélez Sarsfield demanded exemplary punishment, and the priest who recognised the couple was Irish. The historian Moira Casey says Rosas consulted Fahy, who agreed that the case had stained the Church and given the Irish community a bad name, and that Fahy approved the execution. No letter of Fahy's or paper of Rosas's confirming this has been found, so we attribute these accounts to their authors and do not name the priest.

María Luisa Bemberg's film Camila (1984), with Susú Pecoraro and Imanol Arias, was nominated for the Academy Award for best foreign-language film and keeps the story in public memory.