Abstract
A 25 de abril de 1974 um golpe de Estado levado a cabo pelo Movimento das Forças Armadas (MFA) põe fim a 48 anos de ditadura do Estado Novo e inicia o período que ficaria conhecido como Revolução dos Cravos. O MFA granjeia de imediato apoio popular e mais tarde um crescente prestígio político que o levará a ocupar um lugar de destaque na estabilização do Estado e na consolidação do regime democrático. Porém, sucumbirá na crise de governação imposta pela tensão social da segunda metade de 1975. Neste artigo analisamos a ascensão e queda desse movimento de oficiais, a forma como ganhou apoio popular e as razões explicativas do seu desmoronamento, um caso de estudo a nível mundial pela participação destacada que teve no derrube da mais longa ditadura militar da Europa Ocidental do século XX.
Highlights
On 25 April 1974 a coup d’état by the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) put an end to 48 years of the Estado Novo dictatorship in Portugal, starting what would become known as the Carnation Revolution
The most organized party in Portugal at that time, which probably had between two and three thousand members,[1] the Portuguese Communist Party (Partido Comunista Português – PCP), advocated the overthrow of the dictatorship with an alliance between the “masses allied to the progressive military sectors,” to overcome the country’s ‘backwardness.’ the regime fell at neither the hands of the ‘masses’ nor of the soldiers, but at those of a group of middle-ranking officers in the Movimento dos Capitães, who no longer wanted to fight in a war they considered to be lost.[2]
A combination of factors which led on 25 April the Movimento das Forças Armadas (MFA), the majority of whose members came from the intermediate layers of society, were not very politicized, and limited to the objective of bringing about an end to the war, carried out a coup d’état and formally handing leadership of the country, through the Junta for National Salvation (Junta de Salvação Nacional – JSN), to a sector of the Portuguese elite represented by António de Spínola, the general who had previously published the famous Portugal e o futuro (Arcádia, 1974) in which he advocated a political solution to the war
Summary
On 5 September 1975, the Grupo dos Nove succeeded in removing Vasco Gonçalves and isolating the military left in the MFA Assembly – which would become known as the Assembly of Tancos – and in the Revolutionary Council, inverting in these structures – but not in the barracks – the correlation of forces in favor of the Grupo dos Nove. The Assembly restructured the Revolutionary Council: Gonçalves’ supporters and the military left, which until had been in the majority, had three members, while the Grupo dos Nove had seven Part of it were Pinheiro de Azevedo and Morais da Silva, increasingly on the side of the Grupo dos Nove (Rezola, 2006, p.399), and Otelo and Costa Gomes, the former in a tottering position, while the latter was the arbitrator of various fractions which politically ended up on the side of the Nove. Thy aimed to bring an end of the revolutionary process underway, and in the words of Manuela Cruzeiro, to replace it with a “ongoing constitutional process.”[60]
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