Word: spinola
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...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...
Ineffectual Band. One man Spinola definitely did not have the ear of, however, was Américo 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...
Because the Portuguese government tolerates less dissent than its counterparts elsewhere, it took a much-decorated military hero, General Antonio de Spinola, for four years commander of the colonial troops in Guinea-Bissau, to start the process by writing a book suggesting a Portuguese-African federation. Fearful of even such mild suggestions, Caetano's government cashiered Spinola and suppressed a first wave of sympathetic military revolts. But they were just a first wave. True peace won't come to Portugal till its people stop their government's colonizing in Africa and replace their government with one they control...
Caetano, who was reported to have some sympathy with Spinola's view that Portugal cannot win a military victory over the insurgents, fired the generals under pressure from conservative officers and Portuguese president Americo Thomaz...