Sign up to receive email notices of recent acquisitions.

Photographs of Puerto Rico Criminal Executions.

[Ponce, Puerto Rico, 1899]. 5 bromide photographs, 5” x 7” on larger mounts.

A lot of five photographs documenting the garroting of five murderers in Ponce, Puerto Rico during the country’s first year under American rule, including one particularly phantasmagoric image altered in the negative to depict the Judgment of the Lord in the form of a sky aflame.

These five photographs, successively capturing each man’s “turn” with the garroting machine, trace the grim progression of their twitching corpses across the executioner’s platform. The doomed group, including two sets of brothers, was just one fourth of a party of 20 armed men that had apparently entered and robbed the home of one Prudencio Mendez in the town of Yauco in the autumn of 1898, murdered him, assaulted his wife and daughters, and forced them to join in dancing around his dead body. Of the only seven men who were caught, one apparently escaped and another died in prison. The sentencing was announced in the San Francisco Call and the execution was reported in the Friends Intelligencer: a Religious and Family Journal, but a New York Times article the day after the April 7th execution offers a sickeningly vivid narrative:

Each man had a cart to himself [on the way to the platform], and was accompanied by a priest. The executioners’ cart led the horrible procession. The condemned men were manacled, hands and feet, and wore black caps and robes, which were adjusted upon them by the chief executioner, who told the men to be brave and reminded them that it was not a personal matter with him, but simply the carrying out of the law.

Eugenio Rodriguez resisted the executioners, and in the scuffle his clothing was torn. Before he was subdued, five officers were required to overpower him… Some of the condemned men walked up, but others had to be carried to the platform, where they were seated and bound with their backs to the posts. As the executioner tightened the screw rapidly the bodies twitched for two or three minutes, and then all was over. The bodies remained in position on the platform for four hours. Thousands of people, unmoved, viewed the spectacle and heard the speeches of three of the condemned men from the platform…The crowds dispersed in an orderly manner after the execution, and the business houses were reopened. The last body slipped from its fastenings and fell to the floor an hour later.

The photographs are especially shocking in their quality as “action shots”: as the two garroting apparatuses leapfrog their way down the dreadful line we see their operators in a flurry of strained movement, legs planted wide and spinning as fast as possible, while the priest offers his cross and blessing and the sentencing judge turns away, his black hat held up to shield his eyes. By far the most dramatic image is the fourth, printed from a negative that has been altered to show an elongated burst of fire above the horrific tableau of murderers and executioners, attended on the platform by the priests in their long robes. It is a scene one can only describe as Catholic Gothic. In contrast, the view below the platform contains an almost bucolic jumble of soldiers, a cart and horse, and a serenely rooting pig. The Spanish garroting method of execution was unpopular with the Puerto Ricans, who, fresh from centuries of Spanish dominion, criticized American authorities for allowing it to be employed.

REFERENCES: “Five Murderers Garroted.” The New York Times, April 8, 1900; “Murderers Sentenced to be Garroted.” San Francisco Call, Vol. 87, no. 29, 29 Dec. 1899; The Family Intelligencer: A Religious and Family Journal, Vol. 57, p. 298.

CONDITION: Images generally very good, a few minor blemishes, one with a few brown spots, mounts foxed.

Item #3695

Sold