Portugal’s silent rebellion against Salazar

Revolution, yes, good, but what comes next, asked Ryszard Kapuscinski in Iran in the eighties. Dostoevsky would have answered a century ago that what comes before is important: «Revolutions do not bring rapid changes. Recognizing and confessing guilt, original sin, is still a little, very little: we need to get rid of them completely, and that doesn’t happen so quickly.” Changes must happen internally; the regime must fall from within.

Perhaps, without such reflection, everything would have been different in Portugal on this day 49 years ago, when at dawn on April 25 Radio Renasccença broadcasted Grandola, Vila Morena for the Movimento das Forças Armadas to prepare for a coup that would end Salazarism.

A story that travels around the world once a year. But to complete it, you have to go back a few years, to the end of the summer of 1968, when Antonio de Oliveira Salazar he took the first blow that would remove him from power. Literally. His regime was no longer what it had been; Undermined by internal divisions and the apparent senility of the dictator, everything was left in the hands of censorship and the International and State Defense Police (PIDE). Things accelerated in the most prosaic way, when the autocrat was about to receive his callista. In the office, he fell off his chair and hit his head, after which he spent several days with memory loss and other complications. On September 16, he was operated on for a blood clot in the brain and, with the dictator in a coma and all hope lost, on the 27th. President Américo Tomás invited Marcelo Caetano to power.

Until then, everything is within normal limits. What happened next is a figment of the imagination, which the Italian writer Marco Ferrari just had to document and order to get the surreal The incredible story of António Salazar, the dictator who died twice (The Debate), which looks like a spooky Shakespearean tragedy, but is real. Preamble in Portuguese Goodbye Lenin. Ferrari tells how, half recovered, Salazar returned to his residence to continue his work. On medical advice and fearing that he would not survive the displeasure of his relief, the Estado Novo leadership applied their best censorship skills to make the dictator believe he is still dictating. “Salazar himself, still partially paralyzed and allegedly severely impaired in speech and perception, is still unaware that he has been replaced as Prime Minister» reported the magazine Time in February 1969.

So every day, family members, friends, and even ministers went to his office, which he never left, to listen to orders and report on major issues. Senior retired officials, who were worried about the disqualification of Marcelo Caetano, came to cooperate in the farce. Also a now retired magazine editor the newspaper Every evening he returned to the newspaper offices to prepare a special edition, in a single copy, which was delivered the next morning to the dictator, as dilapidated as his empire. He will die in that lie on July 27, 1970.

Often the fundamental misconception is fear, the assumption that something is not as it should be. And this farce would have been quite subversive if Caetano, after a brief attempt at openness, had not shown the same inability to adapt to the needs of Portuguese society as Salazar. What would it cost him, yes, the end of the dictatorship further April 25, 1974.