Lisbon's Armed Doves

Alone among the old European colonial powers, Portugal has doggedly tried to hold onto its overseas possessions. Last year more than 40% of the country's $1.3 billion budget was spent on a military effort to put down insurrection movements in the three African territories of Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau. Now an influential Portuguese leader has openly questioned the government's sacrosanct policy that the overseas provinces must be preserved at all cost. Ironically, this dovish challenge comes from General Antonio de Spinola, a hero of the African wars. Meanwhile, hawkish devotion to the status quo prevails in the civilian-dominated National Assembly.

Last month Spinola, who was then deputy chief of the armed forces, published a book called Portugal and the Future, in which he argued that to "try to win a subversive war by military means is to accept defeat in advance." For that reason, he suggested, a political solution in the territories was the only answer. The book caused a sensation when first copies appeared in Lisbon. Spinola's iconoclastic views were well known before it was published and were widely shared by many of his fellow officers in the armed forces. He also reportedly had the ear of moderate Premier Marcello Caetano, who had succeeded to power after illness forced Dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar's resignation in 1968.

Ineffectual Band. One man Spinola definitely did not have the ear of, however, was Americo Thomaz, Portugal's President, who wields great influence as a leader of the nation's wealthy, privileged "100 families." Thomaz has been unbending in his allegiance to Salazar's conviction that "the provinces" are an integral part of "Metropolitan Portugal." Backed by powerful conservatives in the government and in the National Assembly, Thomaz pressured Caetano into sacking Spinola and his sympathetic boss General Francisco Costa Gomes. The move caused tremors in the armed forces and set rumors afoot that a military coup might be in the offing. Ultimately, a brave but ineffectual band of 200 soldiers marched on Lisbon; the protesters were easily disarmed and all troops in Portugal were ordered confined to barracks. Rather ignominiously, some garrisons were put in the custody of the National Republican Guard, a paramilitary police force. Since then the purge has continued. Among the victims losing their jobs: the head of the Lisbon military academy and the deputy commander of the navy.

At week's end the government had still not decided what to do with 5 Spinola, who was stripped of his job but not his military rank. A dashing combat commander who often helicoptered to rebel fighting fronts armed only with a swagger stick, Spinola is admired not only by the 45,000 troops in Portugal but also by both black soldiers and white settlers in Africa. After he left his position last year as commander and military governor of Guinea-Bissau (where he reportedly met in secret with leaders of the rebel forces), troop morale there plummeted.

Ringing Rhetoric. In diamond-and oil-rich Angola, white settlers are restive under Portuguese rule, and have considered breaking away as Rhodesia did from Britain in 1965; they too like Spinola because he advocates greater autonomy for the provinces. Moreover, Spinola cannot be dismissed as just another left-wing critic. During the Spanish civil war he fought as a volunteer for Franco, and then went to Hitler's Third Reich for military training.

President Thomaz and Portugal's rightist ultras are faced with a highly uncomfortable dilemma. The general's arrest or exile would surely shatter already shaky morale, if it did not lead to open revolt by the military. On the other hand, Spinola at liberty represents a viable symbol of an alternative to the moribund colonial policies of the regime. Already, countless thousands of Portuguese have been caught by the ringing rhetoric of his message: "A government policy can never be genuine unless it is guided by the desire of those who are governed. Those who really believe in the binding force of Portugality have nothing to fear from a move toward federation. It is not national unity that is at stake but imperial unity, and today's conscience does not accept empires."

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