Word: salazarism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Pockets Inside Out. When an army junta called Dr. Salazar from the obscurity of the economics chair at the ancient (1290) University of Coimbra one day in 1928 to bail out Portugal's swamped fiscal position, the national budget had been balanced only twice in the previous 74 years. Salazar took over with a strong hand, made even the generals his servants. Today Portugal enjoys relative stability: she has no inflation, her payments with the outside world are in balance, her national wealth is 150% above 1946, her escudo (29 to $1) is respectable. Her wartime neutrality brought good...
...Salazar's corporative system binds the nation's economy, from farming to foreign trade, into tight, firmly controlled corporations or syndicates. Though Economist Salazar has won from friend & foe a reputation for selflessness and honesty (he promises to turn his pockets inside out when, and if, he resigns), the system's complexities and red tape have produced much graft. In his Cabinet are 15 ministers, but Dr. Salazar ultimately makes all the hard decisions himself, occasionally lectures government officials, and Portugal's industrial and business leaders with dry, essay-like speeches which he laboriously composes himself...
...still a poor country where initiative withers in the gloom of resignation. The people who grow Portugal's olives, make its port, strip its cork, net and pack its sardines, mine its rich wolfram ore deposits, live in limpidly beautiful villages with white-painted cottages (a 1949 Salazar decree requires a new paint job every two years) amidst some of the world's grandest scenery. But Dictator Salazar has never balanced his people's household budgets. Poverty and disease are widespread. Illiteracy...
Political opposition is still a risky business, subject to the eagle eyesight of Dr. Salazar's efficient security police. But there has been increasing lenience with dissenters, and several opposition groups-the Monarchists, Socialists, Communists-are known to be operating underground. Political trials are now public. The dictator's new leniency in elections may be, as skeptics see, a mere transient gesture. But it could also be that the ex-professor now recalls, in his quiet old age, what he once said years ago: "Dictatorship is essentially a formula of transition ... It should not seek permanence...
Reduced Charge. In Los Angeles, jailed on suspicion of auto theft, ex-Convict Henry Segura swiped Cellmate Manuel Salazar's clothes and identification cards, paid Salazar's $25 fine for drunkenness and calmly walked out the front door...