The 25th of April Coup—A Personal Memoir

The author looks back on his thoughts 50 years ago yesterday when Portugal went from a conservative, nationalist, Catholic State to just another Jacobin republic.

From The European Conservative

By Jaime Nogueira Pinto

I knew that Portugal—the great Portugal of the Discoveries and the Empire—was over.

Fifty years ago, on 25 April 1974, I was in Lisbon, at the Army General Staff, awaiting departure for Angola. I was an APSIC (Psycho-Social Action) officer and, as a defender of what we then called a pluri-racial and pluri-continental Portugal, it didn’t occur to me to stop serving overseas. That’s why I volunteered. Considering how few there were and that my offer, exchanged with a comrade already mobilised, was made around a month earlier, I suspect that I must have been the last volunteer for the war, which we on the Right called the “Overseas War,” and which the Left still calls the “Colonial War.” 

On that Thursday morning, 25 April 1974, a column of military vehicles from the Practical Cavalry School in Santarém, commanded by Captain Salgueiro Maia, marched on Lisbon.

The Causes of the Military Coup

At the time, there was great tension and division among the leaders of the Estado Novo, the authoritarian regime created by Salazar in 1933, which had succeeded the military dictatorship installed in 1926. It was out of those tensions, the corporate discontent of the military, the convergence of divisions within the ruling class, and the unease of the Armed Forces, that this exotic revolution was born: a military coup in a European nation only two and a half decades from the end of the 20th century.

Portugal’s political history doesn’t differ much from that of other countries on the continent: the end of the Ancien Régime in 1834, after the legitimist-liberal civil war that the liberals won; then unstable liberalism until 1851, followed by the stability of the Regeneration with two very similar governing parties—one more conservative, the other more progressive. It was also the time of the first industrialisation, with public improvements and railways. From the reign of King Carlos, at the end of the 19th century, and the humiliation of the English Ultimatum, a revolutionary republican party appeared and gathered some support in the middle classes of Lisbon and Porto. In 1908, the Republicans assassinated King Carlos and the Crown Prince and, two years later, through a military coup, proclaimed the Republic.

In 1910, there were only two republics in Europe: France and Switzerland. The Republicans, greatly influenced by the anti-Catholic agenda of the Third French Republic, killed priests, imprisoned bishops, expelled the Jesuits, and installed a veritable PRP (Portuguese Republican Party) dictatorship. There were around 50 governments in 16 years. In the end, a military movement of middle cadres, captains, and lieutenants, seeing the discontent of the country, overthrew the regime.

In 1933, Salazar created the Estado Novo—a nationalist and conservative regime, strongly supported by Catholics, the middle classes, and the rural areas. The widespread support originated in the people’s experience of Leftist rule during the First Republic, which, rather than being the people’s government, was the government of a left-wing party that always won elections.

The problem of the Estado Novo was the problem of succession, of a regime that Salazar personalised and designed in his image and likeness. His successor—Marcelo Caetano, another law professor—was, unlike Salazar, a Hamlet, incapable of deciding on important things. After Salazar’s death, a conservative and authoritarian national regime, with civil liberties but no political freedoms, was an exception (along with, with Franco’s Spain) in democratic and liberal Western Europe. And there was the problem of the African War, fought for 13 years with 200,000 men under arms in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea. Portuguese troops held off the guerrillas of the MPLA, UNITA, and FNLA in Angola, FRELIMO in Mozambique, and the PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau. This was possible because some of the troops were local: half of the 70,000 men in Angola were local recruits, and the figure in Mozambique was almost 60%. In Guinea, of the 40,000 troops, two-thirds came from Portugal—from the Metropolis, as they used to say—with only a third being local.

The trigger for the 25 April Revolution arose in the officer corps, which had to accommodate all these people. Candidates for the operational arms—infantry, cavalry, and artillery—began to be scarce at the army’s Military Academy. To resolve the impasse, Marcelo Caetano’s government, through the minister of defence, General Sá Viana Rebelo, issued a decree creating an Officer’s Special Cadre, where ex-rankers officers who had combat experience and wanted to continue their service could join by attending a shorter course at the Military Academy.

This made sense given the lack of middle officers, mainly captains, and company leaders. However, with the creation of the Special Cadre, some of these new captains would overtake some Permanent Cadre captains on the seniority and promotion rosters. It was this reason—promotions and seniority overruns—that sparked 136 permanent cadre captains to start a protest movement that was initially professional, and which included people of all political persuasions.

At the time, Marcelo Caetano’s government was also worried about the ‘extreme Right’ and the possibility of a coup by right-wing generals. So the government actively instigated and conspired to divide the generals against each other. General Spínola, with a reputation for both physical courage and extreme vanity, was pushed into signing and publishing a book, Portugal e o Futuro (Portugal and the Future), which justified dissent in relation to the policy of defence of the Overseas Territories.

As has been said of De Gaulle and Algeria, to end a colonial empire, the ideal is always a military leader who has served that empire. Spínola played that role. He had been governor of Guinea, and wrote a book in which he turned the Portuguese Empire—with its rich and extensive territories of Angola and Mozambique, great economic progress, large cities, and more than 800,000 settlers—into Guinea-Bissau, a province of 36,000 square kilometres, with almost no settlers, where war was more difficult, and which was less developed.

This created divisions in the political and social sectors that supported the regime and its African policy in a period that was one of great economic and social progress, and where the Portuguese economy was growing at an average of 7% a year. There was also great confusion in public opinion.

The problem with the Permanent Cadre was real: they did service commissions in the operational theatres on two-year commissions, then returned and could spend two years in the Metropolis until they were mobilised again. Not that the casualties were high (in Angola, in 1973, there were 50 dead in a force of 70,000), but there was a tiredness that weighed on the ranks, and a desire to find a ‘political solution.’

The Left and the Revolution

On 16 March 1973, General Spínola’s supporters attempted a coup; among the conspirators, they were the best operatives and the least left-wing. The coup began in Caldas da Rainha, a small town 80 kilometres from Lisbon, and was easily subdued. In fact, by order of the government, it was state security personnel from PIDE-DGS, the political police, who arrested the rebel officers.

This was something Salazar had always been very cautious about: respecting the military’s jurisdiction, never bringing state security into the barracks, making sure that any arrest of officers was always carried out according to military practice—that is, by an officer of equal or higher rank than the detainee, and always more ‘senior.’ After 16 March, these old practices were not respected; the detainees were locked up and treated well, but those suspected of sympathising with the movement were moved to other units, which allowed them to evangelise their comrades in other garrisons.

Thus, 25 April 1974 was the last victorious military pronouncement in Western Europe. That same day, the Left and the extreme Left began to discreetly seize power and influence the new organs of power: the Junta de Salvação Nacional and the Movimento das Forças Armadas (MFA). The communists only had around three thousand militants, but they were also the only organised political force. Thus they became the main force on the ground, activating a series of parallel powers. Within the MFA, they had a Left wing, which they influenced and which quickly took control: within six months, Spínola and the moderates were ousted, the cadres of the nationalist and conservative Right were imprisoned or exiled, and decolonisation was irreversibly begun.

In 1975, on the pretext of a coup by Spínola on 11 March, the country’s banks and main companies were forcibly occupied and nationalised. Overseas, there was a forced exodus of around a million people. And, in Angola and Mozambique, long civil wars followed which, as well as destroying the economy, resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Even so, the propaganda of the Left, with the tolerance of the Centre- Right, fills the streets of Lisbon these days with stories of the Bloodless Revolution.

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Post Scriptum: On the evening of 25 April 1974, I went for a walk around downtown Lisbon. After holing himself up in the old Carmo Barracks, countering everything that had been foreseen in the Defence and Security Plans, Marcelo Caetano had already surrendered. The crowds were already starting to loot some shops, although they withdrew when the police showed up. The military, perched in their combat cars, left no room for doubt.

I thought then that ‘Portugal’—the great Portugal of the Discoveries and the Empire—was over. Then, in Africa, I watched the final scenes. These things I have told in two non-fiction books Portugal – Os anos do fim and Jogos Africanos (Portugal – The End Years and African Games) and in a novel, Novembro (November).