Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me

Max Pearson where we relive some dramatic moments from the past in the company of people who were there at the time.

This week, as the world contemplates the remarkable scenes on Capitol Hill in Washington this month,

we recall an earlier threat to Western democracy, the 1981 attempted coup in Spain.

15, 20 minutes after they invaded, they called for the main political leaders and they brought them to a different room. We were not

told aware of what has happened with them. Also songs for freedom in Estonia,

the Cassini Huygens mission to Titan, and the extreme danger faced when fighting for

women's rights in late 19th and early 20th century India.

I wrote a note to the chaplain at the cathedral saying that if I did not send a message by the following

Thursday, he was to understand that my head was on that threatened charger and he should break

the news to my people.

That's all coming up later in the podcast.

But we begin on Capitol Hill in Washington, where this month's extraordinary invasion of Congress

by President Trump's supporters has landed him with an unprecedented second impeachment, and has raised

questions about the security of the democratic process in the US. How could it be that

protesters, some of them armed, were able to gain access to the debating chambers.

Well, as it happens, that's the exact same question that was being asked back in 1954,

after a group of Puerto Rican Revolutionaries, opened fire from the public gallery of the

U.S. Congress. Five members of the House of Representatives were wounded. In an attack which made headlines

around the world and made its leader, the former beauty Queen Loleita Lebron, a nationalist heroin on the Caribbean

island.

Simon Watts has been listening to first-hand accounts of the incident from the archives.

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