Template:On this day - September 16

Emilia Pardo Bazán

• 1320 – Bishop Berenguel de Landoria orders the murder of twelve representatives of the burghers of Santiago de Compostela who had gone to negotiate with him at the Castle of Rocha Blanca in Padrón (present-day Spain).
• 1343 – Death of Philip of Évreux, King of Navarre (present-day Spain) (b. 1306).
• 1410 – In the course of the campaign against Granada, Ferdinand I of Aragon conquers the city of Antequera (present-day Spain).
• 1492 – In the Atlantic Ocean, the two caravels and the nao of Christopher Columbus reach a wide expanse covered with seaweed that would later be called the Sargasso Sea.
• 1498 – Death of Tomás de Torquemada, Dominican priest, confessor to Queen Isabella the Catholic and first Inquisitor General of Castile and Aragon (b. 1420).
• 1700 – In San Francisco Cajonos, Oaxaca (present-day Mexico), the Zapotec Martyrs of Cajonos, Juan Bautista and Jacinto de los Ángeles, are tortured and murdered by an enraged mob, which drinks their blood and throws their hearts to the dogs.
• 1702 – Death of Cipriano Barace, Spanish Jesuit missionary and martyr, founder of the towns of Trinidad, Loreto and Baures, among other settlements in the Beni Department (in present-day Bolivia) (b. 1641).
• 1810 – In Pueblo de Dolores (New Spain, present-day Mexico), the local parish priest Miguel Hidalgo calls for armed struggle, an event celebrated as the beginning of the Mexican independence war.
• 1816 – In Buenos Aires Province (Argentina), the town of Rojas (240 km west of the city of Buenos Aires) is destroyed by a tornado.
• 1856 – Near Tipitapa (Nicaragua), at the San Ildefonso hacienda, the American filibuster Byron Cole dies from two machete blows dealt by a ranch hand, two days after the defeat of his troops at the Battle of San Jacinto (b. 1829).
• 1851 – Birth of Emilia Pardo Bazán, novelist, journalist, essayist, literary critic, poet, playwright, translator, editor, professor and lecturer, who introduced naturalism into Spain (d. 1921).
• 1920 – The Audiencia of Valencia sentences Miguel de Unamuno to 8 years of prisión mayor and a fine of 500 pesetas for insulting the King in the newspaper El Mercantil Valenciano.
• 1940 – Birth of Pedro Saad Herrería, Ecuadorian writer, filmmaker, politician, diplomat, historian and journalist (d. 2014).
• 1955 – In Argentina, the military overthrow the government of Juan Domingo Perón in a coup d'état, within the self-styled "Revolución Libertadora".
• 1973 – At the Estadio Chile, in Santiago de Chile, agents of the Pinochet dictatorship torture and murder the singer-songwriter Víctor Jara (b. 1932).
• 1976 – In La Plata (Argentina), the Night of the Pencils takes place, during which several secondary school students who were campaigning for a free student bus fare are kidnapped, tortured and murdered by agents of the dictatorship.
• 2010 – Death of Silo (Mario Rodríguez), Argentine writer, founder of the Humanist Movement (b. 1938).
• 2013 – Death of Eduardo García de Enterría, Spanish jurist, first Spanish judge at the European Court of Human Rights (b. 1923).
• 2015 – In Chile, a high-intensity earthquake of magnitude 8.4 on the moment magnitude scale strikes, accompanied by aftershocks and a tsunami, leaving 16 dead and many affected.