Portugal

THE present regime in Portugal shows increasing signs of internal stress and fragility. This year alone, the 72-year-old Salazar, who has ruled Portugal for the last twenty-nine years (a longer period in office than that of any other dictator in this century), has had to face four separate challenges to his authority. And though three ol these challenges proved almost immediately abortive, all of them constitute unmistakable signs that Salazar’s grip is slipping.

The first of these challenges took place last January, with the piratical seizure of the luxury liner Santa Maria in the Caribbean. That romantic venture proved a total failure and only threw discredit on a Portuguese opposition which it was supposed to electrify and mobilize.

The Santa Maria never came close to the Azores, still less close to Angola, where the standard of revolt was to have been hoisted, and the rebels were ignominiously forced to seek asylum in Brazil. When the luxury cruise ship finally steamed back into Lisbon Harbor on February 16, it was greeted by a huge dockside crowd and by Salazar himself.

A second challenge to the Portuguese dictator’s authority was more serious. It began last November with a letter which a group of moderate oppositionists addressed to Admiral Américo Tomas, the figurehead President of the Republic whom Salazar had elected over General Humberto Delgado in the rigged elections of June, 1958.

The letter, requesting an audience with the President for the submission of a petition of grievances, went unanswered, but when the petitioners renewed their request in late January, three of them were, surprisingly, granted an audience on February 6. The following day, a newspaper in Oporto, a traditional hothed of opposition sentiment, managed to slip a rather flamboyant account of the interview by the censor, and the government was forced to issue a statement.

Nothing further was heard of the petition of grievances until early May, when a lawyer named Acacio de Gouvcia called a press conference in his Lisbon office and distributed a forty-page “Program for the Democratization of the Republic,” signed by sixty-eight members of the opposition, many of them lawyers and doctors.

This manifesto called for the restoration of democratic liberties, new electoral laws, the authorization of political parties other than the official União Nacional (“National Union”), the lifting of press censorship, the release of all political prisoners (estimated to number between 200 and 300), the recognition of the worker’s right to strike, and the dissolution of all fascist organizations and the secret police — in a word, the liquidation of everything that the Salazar dictatorship is based on.

The government cracks down

The government’s response to this act of defiance was typical of the subtle cat-and-mouse game it has long played with the frustrated opposition. The day after the press conference, Acacio de Gouveia and two of his colleagues were put behind the bars of the notorious Lisbon prison of Aljube, where political prisoners are incarcerated, and there they were joined shortly afterward by two other signers from Oporto.

These arrests were intended to be a warning that the government was standing no further nonsense of this kind; a warning which is often sufficient in a country where anyone can be arrested and placed in “protective custody” for six months without trial, for “manifesting a spirit of opposition” toward the regime. When a number of other signers sought to be arrested likewise, they were turned away by the authorities, who had no intention of creating an unnecessary number of political martyrs.

The third and most serious challenge to Salazar’s rule occurred in April. Early in the month, the then Defense Minister, General Botelho Moniz, presented Salazar with a letter from General Albuquerque de Freitas, the commander in chief of the Portuguese air force, and a memorandum which had been circulated among a number of high-ranking officers with regard to the situation in Angola. Both expressed grave doubts about the government’s administrative and military policies and demanded new and more energetic methods and men to meet the threat of black nationalism in Africa.

When no immediate reaction was forthcoming, the Supreme Council for Defense convened and passed a vote of no confidence in Dr. Salazar. A delegation was sent to the President of the Republic with the request that he dismiss the Prime Minister, which he is empowered by the Constitution to do. I he President, who is a Salazar stooge, temporized, and Salazar had time to alert the Security Police and the National Republican Guard.

For some time it was touch and go, and on April 12, Salazar actually had to slip out of his usually wellguarded residence at the Villa of Sâo Bento and take refuge in the headquarters of the Republican Guard. He found an unexpected ally in the former Defense Minister, General Sanchez Costa, who rallied a few troops and managed to cut off the Defense Ministry’s telephone communications with the outer world. The next day at noon, Salazar dismissed General Botelho Moniz and his associates, took over the Defense Ministry himself, and announced a sweeping revision of his Cabinet. He acted hours before the army, under orders from the Defense Ministry, was to have seized all key government offices.

The war in Angola

Many have since wondered why these top-ranking officers, having gone so far, allowed themselves to be outmaneuvered so easily. Perhaps the strongest reason is that no one in Portugal today is anxious to have to pick up the pieces after Salazar goes. For Salazar’s successor, whoever he is, will have to face an agonizing problem which is not just a challenge to Salazar’s personal rule, but a challenge to all of Portugal — the war in Angola.

The importance of Angola to Portugal is partly sentimental and partly economic. The Portuguese pride themselves on having founded one of the world’s greatest colonial empires, and they enjoy pointing out that they have been in Africa for four hundred years. They also maintain they have been the only European colonizers who have not been race-conscious and who have freely intermarried with Negro women. Most Portuguese are convinced that this distinction gives them a right of unlimited tenure in Africa.

It is said that there is not a village in Portugal that does not have someone who has emigrated to Angola or Mozambique. This is certainly an exaggeration, but it is a fact that Portugal’s African territories have attracted a good quarter of the country’s 40,000 to 50,000 annual emigrants, particularly over the last ten years.

To meet the crisis in Angola, furthermore, many officers and noncoms have been called up, and the term of military service, which was previously eighteen months, has been extended to two years. Thousands of reinforcements have been sent out to bolster the 2000 white and 6000 Negro troops who were stationed there when the first terrorist attacks broke out in February, and who had the task of garrisoning a territory fourteen times the size of Portugal itself.

The great unknown at present is just how Portugal is going to finance the fierce war of repression which has been building up over the past eight months. Portuguese superpatriots in Lisbon have talked somewhat glibly of being ready to ship in 100,000 men if the situation calls for it — a staggering military investment for a country of nine million inhabitants, with the lowest living standard in Western Europe, which normally can just afford to maintain an army of 60,000. The Portuguese government has already had to turn to West Germany for arms and ammunition, and this is not likely to improve the country’s present rather delicate balance of trade. To make matters worse, this year’s coffee crop in northern Angola, where many plantations have been ravaged or abandoned, is expected to be an almost total loss. Coffee is Angola’s biggest export, and last year the shipments to the United States alone brought a net gain to Portugal of $40 million.

With close to $800 million of gold and foreign currency reserves, Portugal is in no immediate danger of financial collapse, and the escudo, which Salazar’s prudent economic stewardship long ago made one of the strongest currencies in Europe, has yet to show serious signs of slipping in the international money market. But the financial pressures are relentlessly building up, and already the government has had to introduce a more stringent control over all money transfers to impede a possible exodus of speculative capital.

In all probability it will take time for these pressures to build up to a critical point. The Finance Ministry says it has affairs well in hand, and though overseas military expenditures have been tripled in this year’s budget, the overall budget deficit is still not expected to exceed $4 million. The government maintains, therefore, that there is no immediate danger of inflation to upset the general price level, which over the last ten years has remained remarkably stable.

Salazar’s new trouble shooter

For the moment, Salazar’s policy toward the overseas possessions is one of grimly holding on and hoping for the best. There has been no sign that he intends to depart from the established policy of granting full political suffrage only to assimilados — natives who can read and write — who in Angola do not number many more than 100,000, out of a population of 4,500,000. Likewise, the new Overseas Minister, Adriano Moreira, has specifically condemned any idea that Portugal’s overseas territories, which since 1950 have been considered transmarine provinces, might be given a fully self-governing status, similar to that enjoyed by the former African possessions of Britain and France.

Salazar’s choice of this young 38year-old ethnologist as his trouble shooter in the most serious crisis he has yet had to face is characteristic of the Machiavellian wiliness he can display in disarming his former enemies.

A one-time lawyer who flirted with Marxism in his student days, Moreira first achieved notoriety during World War II when he brought a lawsuit against the then Minister of War, General Sanchez Costa, whom he accused of having hounded a fellow general to death by refusing him the proper medical care in a prison in the Azores. The Minister of War had the brash young lawyer imprisoned, and he was allowed to languish in jail to meditate on the quixotic nature of excessive zeal in the cause of truth and justice.

He was eventually released with the tacit understanding that if he were a good boy the regime would bestow its rewards on him. He subsequently entered the Advanced Institute for Overseas Studies and later became Undersecretary of State for Overseas Territories.

Shortly after his is ministerial appointment in April, Moreira flew to Angola to make an on-the-spot investigation and to quiet the settlers’ growing apprehensions. So favorable an impression did he make that, within days of his return to Lisbon, rumors were circulating that he was likely to turn into a new political strong man and even pose a challenge to Salazar.

Such rumors are bound to be rife in a capital where the whole subject of the political succession and Portugal’s political future is officially considered taboo. Salazar has kept singularly quiet on the subject. Far from relaxing his grip on the reins, he has shown a readiness to tighten up. The electoral statutes have been amended, so that when the next presidential elections are held, in 1964, they will not be exposed to the menace of universal suffrage. Instead, the task of electing a new President will be entrusted to a carefully chosen body of several hundred electors. One hundred and thirty of these will be deputies of the National Assembly, which is due to be reelected in October. But since they will be hand-picked by the regime, as in the past, both elections promise to be mere formalities.

Whether these authoritarian measures will suffice to insulate Salazar’s regime against the winds of change now sweeping Africa and the Iberian Peninsula is another question.