Portugal coexists better with the Carnation Revolution than with the captains who made it possible.
The recent death on Sunday 25 of Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, the military mastermind of the operation that ended on April 25, 1974 with a long dictatorship (48 years), has fueled the debate about the type of official recognition that the military that made possible the arrival of democracy in Portugal and the independence of its former African colonies.
The Portuguese Prime Minister, the socialist António Costa, decided that he would not receive a state funeral to "maintain coherence" with the fact that neither were they organized for Fernando José Salgueiro Maia and Ernesto Melo Antunes, protagonists of April 25 who died in 1992 and 1999.
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'Boy, it's tonight'
Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, mastermind of the Carnation Revolution, dies
Saraiva de Carvalho aroused at the time of her death the same conflicting passions that she generated in life.
Almost no one disputes his role in the success of the 1974 coup, but some of his later steps are questioned, especially his participation in the FP-25 terrorist group that caused 17 deaths and committed 108 robberies in seven years of existence (1980-1987 ).
The military man was sentenced to 15 years for his involvement in the organization and later amnestied by Parliament.
"It is still too early for history to observe it with due distance," the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, said in a statement.
The debate on whether or not the declaration of national mourning was deserved (it was decreed for the Japanese emperor Hirohito or the Moroccan king Hassan II, as recalled by journalist Amilcar Correia en
Público
) has unleashed a flood of opinions, analysis and testimonies in the Portuguese press .
"I regret that the President of the Government and the President of the Republic have not taken the opportunity to correct their predecessors by decreeing national mourning for the operational commander of April 25," Vasco Lourenço, one of the soldiers revolted in 1974 and current president of the April 25 association.
Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, the most controversial of the military of April 25, in June 1989. Manuel Escalera
Perhaps because of the polarization that awakens, Saraiva de Carvalho is not the best example to assess the treatment of the Portuguese institutions towards the April captains. “The military in general, and those of Abril in particular, were not treated very well. They could have been treated with more dignity when the Constitution was revised, which did away with the Conselho da Revolução and all the political and military exceptions. At that time, the big parties, the Socialist Party and the Social Democratic Party [center right], were in a hurry to get rid of the military and the special role they still wanted to play. They fired the military like someone who fires officials ”, António Barreto observes in an email,who graduated in Sociology from the University of Geneva during his exile and is the author of numerous books and documentaries on contemporary Portuguese society.
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Barreto defends the need to create a great public monument to April 25 and to the military that made democracy: "But I think it will still be difficult, because you never know which military we are talking about."
They are referred to as a homogeneous bloc and they were only so when planning and executing the uprising.
“Today it is easy for some to identify Othello with Eanes, Vasco Lourenço, Firmino Miguel, Vasco Gonçalves, Rosa Coutinho… and with the entire Movement of the Armed Forces.
In reality, those soldiers were very different from each other in relation to political options ”, adds Barreto.
Few blows enjoy the sympathy that April 25 awakens. At the international level it was mythologized: it buried the longest dictatorship in Western Europe with a peaceful rebellion. In Portugal it was celebrated en masse. Its 50th anniversary is expected to receive great institutional support, which has begun with the creation of a specific commission by the Government to prepare events that will last between 2022 and 2026 with the aim of covering the entire historical cycle that began in the coup. and it ended in democratic elections.
According to the historian Maria Inácia Rezola, it is estimated that some 1,500 streets and squares evoke April 25. Of all the urban gazetteer, the bridge over the Tagus River stands out for its symbolism, which changed the name of the dictator Salazar to the historical date on which his legacy collapsed. The rebellion is much evoked but less the rebels. “April 25 was a collective action and many were involved in the preparation and execution of the coup that overthrew the dictatorship. It is very difficult to honor or preserve the memory of the protagonists without running the risk of being unfair and forgetting important actors, ”Rezola indicates by email. Vasco Lourenço distinguishes between popular and institutional recognition. “The Portuguese people express their appreciation to us on a permanent basis, we even notice it on the street.The institutions have two different attitudes: formally they show a lot of appreciation but that does very little materialize, ”says the president of the April 25 Association.
Captain Salgueiro Maia, on the left of the photo, and his troops in Lisbon after the victory of the uprising against the dictatorship on April 25, 1975.Reuters / Reuters
The great individual honored is Salgueiro Maia, who commanded the forces that took the strategic Plaza del Comercio and received the surrender of the dictator Marcelo Caetano. Historian Maria Inácia Rezola estimates that she will have a hundred references on the streets, including a bridge over the Tagus in Santarém since 2000. She is the exception. “This fact allows us to perceive that, despite the fact that the Portuguese are apparently reconciled with their past, there may still be a controversy, a poorly resolved memory, about the 1974-75 Revolution. Salgueiro Maia is the clean hero, who took the Largo that was the symbol of the overthrow of the dictatorship and did not get into politics. Others, like Othello, were political actors in 1974-75 and that is why they generate controversy, ”says Rezola.
The former director of
Visão
, Joao García, argued in an article in the weekly
Expresso
that only two soldiers became councilors of state: "Portugal lives badly, part of the left included, with the men of April 25". Despite the fact that he is now remembered on the street, Salgueiro Maia is perhaps the crudest example of institutional oblivion. In 1988, the Government of Aníbal Cavaco Silva blocked the granting of a pension to the military for his exceptional services, the same that it would grant a few years later to two PIDE inspectors, the repressive Portuguese police of the dictatorship. Salgueiro Maia, who died of cancer in 1992 without official mourning or state funeral, was the military man who harangued his men on the night of April 24, 1974 with the least military speech in history: “My gentlemen, as everyone knows, there are various forms of state: the social state, the corporate state, and the state we have reached.Now, on this solemn night, we are going to end the state we have reached. So whoever wants to come with me, let him know that we are going to Lisbon and we are done with this. Whoever wants to come, go out and train. And the one who doesn't, let him stay ”.