Portugal: Twilight of a Dictator

For nearly 40 years, António de Oliveira Salazar has been the unusual dictator of an unfortunate land. An austere, almost monastic man who once taught economics, he has shunned publicity and raised few monuments to himself. Yet he built a tightly run, corporate state modeled closely on Mussolini’s Italy, and his secret police have harshly repressed most discussion and all dissent. He has ruled longer than any other European political leader in this century. Early this month, after injuring his head in a fall from a deck chair, Salazar, 79, underwent surgery for removal of a blood clot on his brain. Last week he lay near death after a massive stroke that left him in a coma and partly paralyzed. After decades of his monolithic rule, the Portuguese seemed in paralysis as well.

Portugal is Western Europe’s poorest nation. Its population numbers under 9,000,000, and its natural resources are scant. Before Salazar came to power, the land was in chronic economic chaos and political disarray: in 161 years it had had 45 governments, some lasting only days. As Premier after 1932, Salazar squashed partisan quarreling with dictatorial measures and brought order to the economy by applying conservative, pre-Keynesian fiscal policies. By the late 1930s, he was flirting openly with fascism. He backed Franco against the Spanish Republicans. While Portugal remained neutral in World War II, Salazar at first sympathized with the Axis; when it became clear that that was the losing side, he granted bases in the strategically located Azores Islands to the U.S. and Britain.

Unlikely Role. Though Salazar has accumulated an impressive $1.2 billion in gold and foreign-exchange reserves, the cost has been excessive. The annual rate of economic growth is only 3%, industry is stagnant and the country’s infrastructure is outdated. Per capita income is $400 a year, the illiteracy rate 40%. Though the economy is underdeveloped, Salazar has clung grimly to an increasingly costly empire; its colonies extend as far as Macao on the Chinese coast and Portuguese Timor in the East Indies. Tiny Portugal is cast in the unlikely role of Africa’s last major colonial power. With 125,000 troops fighting three little-publicized wars in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea, the country spends 40% of its budget on defense.

More dismal still, civil liberties are nearly unknown in Portugal. Press censorship has been in force almost continually since 1926. The secret police, P.I.D.E., have banned books by such seemingly noncontroversial writers as Will Durant and Paul Claudel. Political opponents of the regime are regularly put into preventive detention for up to six months. The P.I.D.E. jailed Mario Scares, a lawyer and leading critic of the Salazar regime, a total of 13 times before exiling him without trial last March to the tiny island of Sao Tome in the Gulf of Guinea. The number of legal emigrants and clandestinos voting against Salazar with their feet rose dramatically from 34,000 in 1961 to some 150,000 in 1966.

No Entertainer. The man responsible for this choking repression was born in Vimieiro, a small village of whitewashed cottages with red tiled roofs and rose gardens in the prosperous Santa Comba Dão wheat and vineyard country of central Portugal. The son of the bailiff of a large farm, Salazar attended a Jesuit seminary, seriously considered the priesthood before choosing economics. He took a law degree at the University of Coimbra in 1917, accepted a chair there a year later as professor of economics and finance.

He was elected a Catholic deputy to the National Assembly in 1921, but soon gave up his seat in dismay at Portugal’s political factionalism—and at his colleagues’ indifference to the Salazar plans for economic reform. Though the leaders of a 1926 military coup d’état tried to bring him into the government as Finance Minister, he refused because the army would not give him all the powers he demanded. Like France’s Charles de Gaulle 20 years later, he went into self-imposed retirement until he could return to hold undisputed sway. Salazar has rarely ventured outside Portugal, travels only occasionally even inside the country. Instead he cloistered himself with his books and papers in his high-walled home behind Lisbon’s National Assembly. “One cannot entertain the crowd and govern them all at the same time,” he once insisted. He never married. Dona Maria da Piedade Caetano, 73, for more than 40 years his housekeeper, organized his routine and became known, only half-jokingly, as the one person who could tell him what to do.

“Ultras or Technocrats.” Last week the Portuguese were floundering because, for the first time in almost 40 years, there was no one to tell them what to do. Salazar never designated a successor. “No one could succeed him,” says one possible inheritor. “Whoever follows will have to share authority.”

There is always the possibility of a takeover either by rightist “ultras” of the army and the secret police or by apolitical military and civilian technocrats. The current favorite in Lisbon speculation, however, is Marcello Caetano, 62, a personable law professor and long a collaborator of Salazar’s.

He is believed to be somewhat more progressive than Salazar, while still conservative enough to keep the military happy. His choice would hardly bring immediate change to somnolent Portugal. Without Salazar, the country may nonetheless emerge from its long hibernation—perhaps into turmoil.