Abstract
Former clandestine militants’ voices and stories have been recurrently silenced in the Portuguese “battle over memory”, because their activities were linked to events, such as the Revolution of 25 April 1974, which have themselves been politically and socially depreciated in mainstream political narratives. Only recently did the traditional political narratives start to be questioned and debated by Portuguese scholars. Such political narratives took root in the country in the decades that followed the April Revolution, with various scholars and politicians denying the fascist categorisation of Estado Novo and adopting an authoritarian, non-totalitarian and non-fascist perspective, while recurrently depicting the Revolution as highly negative (namely as the source of the economic troubles of the country). Thus, for a long time, Portuguese conservatives opted to avoid debates on the 48 years of the Estado Novo’s regime which, among other things, maintained a very repressive and violent political police force, a camp of forced labour in Cape Vert known as Tarrafal, and a Colonial War on three African fronts. This article examines the existent academic publications which counter such oblivion of memory regarding armed struggle in Portugal. It also explores the reasons behind, on the one hand, the whitewashing of Estado Novo and the historical revisionism typical of the 1970s and 1980s, and, on the other hand, the “rebellion of memory” which emerged in the 1990s.
Highlights
Former clandestine militants’ voices and stories have been recurrently silenced in the Portuguese Bbattle over memory^, because their activities were linked to events, such as the Revolution of 25 April 1974, which have themselves been politically and socially depreciated in mainstream political narratives
Even militants’ memoirs only began to appear, with one or two exceptions, from the late 1990s onwards, becoming more common in the early twenty-first century. This scenario leads to the question: why is this so? We argue that the answer to such a question starts in the late 1970s with the rise of post-dictatorship memory politics, which encompassed a historical revisionism that sought to whitewash the memory of the dictatorship and deny the revolutionary genesis of democracy in Portugal
The purpose of this article was to explore the reasons behind the low number of both lay and academic publications regarding the Portuguese history of armed struggle, both before and after the 25 April 1974 Revolution
Summary
The exercise of context reconstruction and exploration is greatly important for the understanding of how and why political violent organisations came into existence in Portugal (in different periods of time and in different political and social conditions), and how violence was legitimised by some and demonised by others.. In the first wave (1962-1974), Estado Novo, in a very clear and direct way, determined the emergence of the LUAR (League of Unity and Armed Revolution), the ARA (Revolutionary Armed Action) and the BR (Revolutionary Brigades) – the three revolutionary organisations which fought against the regime and its policies, predominantly the ones related to imperial, colonial and capitalist standpoints These organisations resorted to violence against a regime which in their eyes was extremely violent and repressive and which could not be defeated by pacifist means. In the second wave (1975-1976), the rise of the reactionary organisations the ELP (Portuguese Liberation Army) and the MDLP (Democratic Movement for the Liberation of Portugal) was triggered by fear of a possible communist occupation following the Revolution and by disagreement with the decisions taken by the provisional government (e.g. decolonisation) These organisations were essentially composed of right-wing military personnel, who in the majority of cases leaned towards the deposed regime. The first months of the military dictatorship established which faction of the movement which deposed the First Republic would be in power – the liberal-republicans or the
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