Francaise, was much admired by Salazar and corresponded with him until his death in 1952.[226]
The general standard of living in Salazar’s Portugal was more characteristic of contemporary Africa than continental Europe: per capita annual income in 1960 was just $160 (compared with e.g. $219 in Turkey, or $1,453 in the US). The rich were very rich indeed, infant mortality was the highest in Europe, and 32 percent of the population was illiterate. Salazar, an economist who had for some years lectured at the University of Coimbra, was not only unperturbed at Portugal’s backwardness, but saw it instead as the key to stability—upon being informed that oil had been discovered in Portugal’s Angolan territories he commented merely that this was ‘a pity’.
Like the Romanian dictator Ceausescu, Salazar was obsessed with the avoidance of debt, and conscientiously balanced every annual budget. Fanatically mercantilist, he built up unusually high gold reserves which he took care not to spend on either investment or imports. As a result, his country was locked into poverty, most of the population working on small family farms in the north of the country and
Right up to his death in 1970, it was Salazar’s proud boast that not only had he kept Portugal out of the devastating foreign wars of the century, but he had navigated his country between the Scylla of rapacious market capitalism and the Charybdis of state socialism. In fact, he had all too successfully exposed his subjects to the worst of both: material inequality and exploitation for profit were more marked in Portugal than anywhere else in Europe, while the authoritarian state in Lisbon smothered all independent opinion and initiative. In 1969 just 18 percent of the adult population was eligible to vote.
In the absence of domestic opposition, the only resistance to Salazar came from the military, the country’s sole independent institution. The Portuguese armed forces were ill paid—rather than expend scarce resources on wages, Salazar actively encouraged impecunious army officers to marry into the better-heeled bourgeoisie. But until 1961 the regime could count on at least their passive loyalty, in spite of two abortive and easily crushed military coup attempts in 1947 and again in 1958. Reform-minded junior officers in the army or navy might chafe at the stagnation around them, but they lacked allies or any popular base.
All that changed in 1961, when Delhi forcibly annexed Portugal’s mainland Indianterritory of Goa and armed revolt broke out in the African colony of Angola. The loss of Goa was a national humiliation, but rebellion in Africa was more serious still. Portugal’s considerable African ‘provinces’, as they were known, comprised Angola, Guinee-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands in West Africa, and Mozambique in the south-east. Of these Angola, with nearly half a million European residents in a total population of under six million, was by far the most important. Its untapped material wealth—in iron, diamonds and recently-discovered offshore oil—had led Salazar reluctantly to permit foreign investment (notably by the US company Gulf Oil), and in the course of the Sixties the territory was taking on growing economic significance for Portugal itself.
It was also in open revolt. In order to crush the growing Angolan nationalist movement, Lisbon inaugurated in 1967 a ‘counter-insurgency’ strategy based upon resettlement of the population into large, controllable villages: by 1974 more than one million peasants had been moved. The plan failed to break the insurgency, although it had baneful and enduring effects on Angola’s society and rural economy. It did, however, increasingly alienate the soldiers who were called upon to enforce it: both the impecunious officers who had joined the colonial army as a route to upward social mobility and the reluctant conscripts sent abroad to suppress the rebels.
In Angola the rebels were divided between different factions and the Portuguese army was able to contain them, at least for a while. In Mozambique, where 60,000 Portuguese soldiers were kept busy protecting a European settler population numbering just 100,000, or in Guinee and Cape Verde, where the charismatic Amilcar Cabral tied down over 30,000 Portuguese troops in thankless guerilla warfare against ten thousand insurgents, the situation was becoming untenable. By the beginning of the 1970s its African wars were consuming half the annual defense budget of Europe’s poorest country. One in every four Portuguese men of military age was being conscripted to serve in Africa—and, after 1967, for a compulsory minimum term of four years. By 1973, 11,000 of them had died there: a mortality rate considerably higher, as a share of the national population, than that suffered by the US Army at the height of the Vietnam War.
Portugal’s defense of its colonial holdings was expensive, bloody and increasingly hopeless; the armed forces knew this better than anyone. And they had other reasons to feel frustrated. To secure his own power and distract attention from the country’s overseas woes, Marcello Caetano—Salazar’s anointed successor—had eased credit restrictions, borrowed heavily from abroad and encouraged the flow of imports. In the years 1970-73, further fuelled by remittances from Portuguese working abroad, the country underwent a brief consumer boom. But it was followed in short order by spiraling inflation brought on by the oil crisis. Wages in the public sector began to fall far behind prices.
For the first time in many years Portugal was hit by strikes. The residents of the shanty towns around the capital, many of them recent arrivals from the impoverished Alentejo region, suffered not just their own endemic indigence but the sight of a new and showy wealth in nearby Lisbon. The army increasingly resented fighting the country’s ‘dirty wars’ in far-away lands on behalf of an unpopular government run by unelected technocrats, and its discontent was now finding a widespread echo at home. The grievances of junior officers and their families, unable to subsist on already low wages further reduced by inflation, were now shared by a rising generation of businessmen frustrated at their rulers’ incompetence and who understood that their country’s future lay in Europe, not Africa.[227]
On April 25th 1974, officers and men of the Armed Forces Movement (Movimento das Forcas Armadas— MFA) ousted Caetano and his colleagues from office and declared a provisional government whose goals were to be democratization, decolonization and economic reform. The coup (like the young officers’
The revolution was immensely popular everywhere.[228] Spinola brought centrists and socialists into his provisional cabinet and in July he publicly announced plans to offer the African colonies full self-determination. Within a year the colonies were all independent—and Indonesia had seized control of Portuguese East Timor. The decolonization was more than a little chaotic—guerillas in Guinee and Mozambique ignored Spinola’s insistence that they first lay down arms and Angola deteriorated into civil war—but seen from Portugal it had the virtue of being quick. It also precipitated, in the wake of the army’s retreat and violent clashes in the Angolan capital, Luanda, the return to Portugal of some 750,000 Europeans. Many of them settled in Portugal’s more conservative north and would play a significant political role in coming years.
These rapid changes disturbed Spinola, whose conservative instincts were at odds with the increasingly radical projects of his younger colleagues, and in September 1974 he resigned. For the next fourteen months Portugal appeared to be moving towards a full-scale social revolution. With the enthusiastic support of the MFA and Alvaro Cunhal’s uncompromisingly Leninist Communist Party (PCP), banks and major industries were nationalized and a massive agrarian reform was undertaken: notably in the Alentejo, the grain-producing region of southern Portugal where most holdings were still in the hands of large, often absentee landlords.
Nationalization was popular in the towns, and agrarian reform in the South—essentially collectivization of the land—was driven initially by ‘spontaneous’ occupations and land seizures by local tenants and labourers mobilized by the Communists and their allies, the Communists in particular benefiting from their well-deserved reputation as the best-organized and most effective clandestine opponents of the old regime. But the same practices in the center and north of the country, where the land was already sub-divided into thousands of small, family-run property holdings, were decidedly unwelcome. Rural and small-town northern Portugal was also (and still is) actively Catholic, with an average of one priest for every five hundred souls in 1972; the figure for south- central Portugal was 1:4500, and lower still in the far south. The anti-clerical, collectivizing projects of Communist unionists and peasant leaders thus encountered strong and vociferous opposition in the populous northern regions.
