Unlike Pombal, who had used the power of the state to1
ruthlessly force through a crash program of modernization,
Salazar froze Portugal’s economic and social patterns. “We are
antiparliamentarians, antidemocrats, antiliberals”, Salazar said4
in 1936. “We are opposed to all forms of internationalism,
communism, socialism, syndicalism.” To govern, he said,
without apology, “is to protect the people from themselves”.7
Yet Salazar enjoyed sizable support. He had rooted his
regime sufficiently in Portuguese social realities to garner for
it a small measure of popular approbation. The church and the10
small landholders of the heavily Catholic north backed him. So
did the latifundiários, the owners of big farming estates in the
central and southern regions who feared a loss of their holdings13
if the left took power. The outlawed Portuguese Communist
Party, formed in 1921, was especially strong in the south.
But Salazar could not freeze the world. In 1961, India16
seized Goa from a 3,500-man Portuguese garrison that had
been ordered to “conquer or die”. In Africa, as the French and
British were freeing their colonies, African nationalist guerrillas19
rose up against the Portuguese in Angola (1961), Guinea
(1962), and Mozambique (1964).
Portugal was the last European power in Africa to cling22
tenaciously to the panoply of formal domination. This was no
accident. For a long time Portugal very successfully disguised
the nature of her presence ____ a skilful amalgam of historical25
mythmaking, claims ____ multiracialism, and good public
relations.
Adapted from Kenneth Maxwell. The making of
portuguese democracy. CUP, 1997, p.18-9.