Word: salazar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...torn African colony of Angola were diverted to home duty instead. From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic-whipped northwestern frontier, police mounted a vast network of roadblocks known as "Operation Stop," ostensibly to crack down on auto thieves. Actual reason for the emergency: Strongman António de Oliveira Salazar's obsessive fear that maverick Henrique Galvâo, who stole the Santa Maria and world headlines in an eleven-day protest against the regime last January, plans a coup in Portugal itself...
Even so, Galvâo's Anti-Totalitarian Front took the regime by surprise. Six of his agents hijacked a Portuguese airliner as it approached Lisbon from Casablanca, dumped thousands of anti-Salazar leaflets over the capital, then flew to Tangier. Had Galvao actually landed last week, he might have met little effective opposition. So suspicious of everyone is Salazar that his soldiers were issued machine guns without bolts and rifles without bullets; fighter planes were grounded with empty gas tanks. But the real threat to the regime came from what, in the world's most durable dictatorship...
...Bitter End. At stake were the National Assembly's 130 seats, traditionally reserved every four years for members of Salazar's rubber-stamping National Union. They were contested this year by an articulate cross section that was known informally as the "Democratic Opposition" and ranged from monarchists to socialists and old-guard liberals, disenchanted doctors and lawyers to army and navy officers. The opposition platform, which the government labeled "unconstitutional," called for democratic rights, economic progress and an enlightened colonial policy. But the opposition's main target was 72-year-old António de Oliveira Salazar...
Three years ago such a temporary flush of excitement was provided by Gen. Humberto Delgado, who actually traveled around the country criticizing Salazar and polled nearly a quarter of the vote. Irritated, Salazar revised the electoral system to ensure that the Portuguese would never have another chance to choose anything but a college of electors...
Slight and ineffectual as these stirrings are, they ought at least to indicate to the Atlantic Alliance (which has never known how to treat an ally whose vicious administration of Angola has disgusted most of the world) that Portuguese politics are not entirely frozen. Salazar is 73, and when he dies sudden spurts of opposition will not vanish after November. NATO has refrained from trying to influence Salazar's regime because it fears a schism, yet the oddities of this election help to show that it may, paradoxically, be burning its own boats. The Alliance will not be able...