Template:On this day - February 19

Felipe Pedrell

• 1493 – The Portuguese navy tries to seize Christopher Columbus in the Azores islands on his return voyage, to prevent him from making known the other route to the Indies that he believes he has discovered.
• 1549 – In Valladolid, King Charles I creates the General Archive of Simancas by royal decree.
• 1600 – In the Viceroyalty of Peru, the Huaynaputina volcano (80 km ESE of Arequipa) erupts, ejecting some 32 million tons of particles into the atmosphere, the most violent volcanic eruption on record in South America.
• 1836 – In Spain, Juan Álvarez Mendizábal decrees the sale of all the property of the suppressed religious orders, as part of the confiscation process.
• 1841 – Birth of Felipe Pedrell, regarded as the initiator of Spanish musical nationalism (d. 1922).
• 1845 – In Tolima (Colombia), the Nevado del Ruiz volcano erupts, leaving some thousand dead.
• 1847 – Death of José Joaquín de Olmedo, Guayaquil politician, hero of the Independence of Guayaquil.
• 1868 – In Uruguay, the Colorado former president Venancio Flores is assassinated, 4 days after leaving office.
• 1868 – In Uruguay, the former president of the National Party of Uruguay, Bernardo Prudencio Berro, is assassinated in reprisal for the assassination of Venancio Flores.
• 1913 – The Mexican revolutionary and politician Gustavo Adolfo Madero is murdered during the events of the double coup d'état known as the Ten Tragic Days.
• 1913 – In Mexico, Pedro Lascuráin Paredes takes office as interim president; he governed for only 45 minutes.
• 1913 – In Mexico, Victoriano Huerta assumes the presidency after the resignation of Pedro Lascuráin.
• 1913 – General Alfau Mendoza takes the city of Tetuan without resorting to arms, as part of the establishment of the Spanish protectorate in Morocco.
• 1919 – In Spain, the Ultraist Manifesto, signed by Guillermo de Torre and Pedro Garfias, among others, appears in the magazine Grecia and various newspapers.
• 1936 – In Spain, the first government of the Second Spanish Republic begins, headed by Manuel Azaña after the elections that gave victory to the Popular Front.
• 1937 – Death of Horacio Quiroga, Uruguayan short-story writer, playwright and poet (b. 1878).
• 1942 – In Ecuador, the Cotopaxi volcano becomes active and causes great damage.
• 1981 – In Spain, the terrorist group ETA kidnaps the honorary consuls of Austria and El Salvador (in Bilbao) and that of Uruguay (in Barcelona).
• 1983 – At the abandoned Moreno station, 66 km north of Empalme (Sonora) and 75 km south of Hermosillo (Sonora), a freight train crashes into a passenger train (stopped because of technical problems) without proper signaling. Hundreds of people die.
• 1987 – Morocco begins building a sixth wall in the Sahara to block the Polisario Front's access to the Atlantic.
• 2008 – In Cuba, Fidel Castro declines to be re-elected as President of the Council of State and Commander in Chief, after exercising executive power in his country for almost 50 years.