The coup d’état against the Portuguese dictatorship took 5,000 soldiers onto the streets in the early hours of April 25, 1974, as soon as they heard Grândola, vila morena, the song by José Afonso. Each of them played a role, crucial or secondary, to contribute to the success of that historic mission, which was deployed without violence or revenge in more than 40 actions designed by artillery commander Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, one of the three members of the leadership of the Armed Forces Movement (MFA), set up by some 300 captains. The coup became a revolution within a few hours, when the Portuguese took to the streets to prevent the uprising against the regime, then led by Marcelo Caetano, from going backwards. The gesture of a waitress named Celeste Caeiro, who distributed carnations among the soldiers because she did not have cigarettes, gave a name to what was happening. But before the party that took place in the country, finally free from 48 years of repression and censorship, there were several moments of tension in which everything could have gone off the rails. Some of its protagonists remember those tensions half a century later.
The corporal who disobeyed the order to shoot. For 40 years, no one knew the name of the man who locked himself in his tank to avoid having to open fire on his companions on the morning of Thursday, April 25, 1974. In 2014, after his identity was revealed thanks to journalistic investigation by Adelino Gomes and Alfredo Cunha, José Alves da Costa received the distinction of Grand Master of the Order of Freedom from the President of the Republic. In 1974 he was in charge of an M47 tank that had taken to the streets to defend the dictatorship. Next to the Tagus River, Brigadier General Junqueira dos Reis orders Corporal Costa to shoot at Captain Maia and his troops, who have traveled the 80 kilometers that separate Santarém from Lisbon at night to overthrow the regime. Faced with the corporal’s evasiveness, the general takes out his pistol and tells him: “Either open fire or I’ll shoot you in the head.” José Alves da Costa calmed him down, got into his battle tank, closed the hatch from the inside and did not leave until several hours had passed, when the revolution was already on the street. “If he shot, only I would die. But if I shot, dozens or hundreds of people were going to die. Shooting was not an option for me, I would only have done it if I had been certain that it would not cause damage,” he explained during an interview in his village of Balazar, in the Minho region, last December.
The sergeant who guarded Marcelo Caetano in the armored vehicle. Manuel Correia da Silva was one of the 240 members of the cavalry column commanded by Salgueiro Maia. He was also one of the soldiers who received a carnation from Celeste Caeiro, when they were in the Rossio, in the center of Lisbon, without any of them knowing that they were baptizing that historic Thursday. But the most shocking thing for Sergeant Correia da Silva was having to guard Marcelo Caetano, the symbol of the dictatorship, after his surrender. The dictator remained besieged for several hours in the Largo do Carmo barracks by Captain Maia’s troops. After handing over power to General António de Spínola, who did not belong to the Armed Forces Movement (but that is another story), Caetano goes down the stairs and enters the armored vehicle accompanied by two ministers. The sergeant sits next to him. During the journey to the Pontinha barracks, where the rebel leadership was waiting for him, no one spoke. “In 24 hours the man who had all the power became a prisoner. The only words I heard from him were an answer he gave to a soldier: ‘It’s life.’ The rebels want a peaceful evacuation and protect the dictator from the anger of the citizens, who are concentrated in Largo do Carmo. “It took us forever to leave there in the direction of the MFA command post because the people wanted to take justice into their own hands. The armored car, which weighs tons, swayed like a reed and we heard people shouting ‘Death to fascism’ and ‘Death to Marcelo Caetano.’
The commander who assaulted the radio. The Air Force distanced itself from the uprising against the dictatorship, carried out exclusively by Army units, but some of its officers participated in a personal capacity. This was the case of José Manuel Costa Neves, an aeronautical engineer with the rank of commander, who led the occupation of Rádio Clube Português, the station from which all the Armed Forces Movement’s communications were broadcast starting at 4:26 in the morning. on April 25, 1974. Costa Neves starred in a famous story on a day given to surrealism, when he forgot the Walter pistols that his group had to carry in the assault on the station. The officer had locked the car with the weapons inside and asked a police officer to help force the door with a wire. Impressed with Costa Neves’ good manners, the agent told him: “If everyone had the same civility that you just showed now, the lives of police officers would be much easier.” Hours later, the kind policeman would end up detained in studio number 5, where the rebels were imprisoning forces loyal to the regime. “At a certain point, to calm the tension that was being generated among the police officers detained in the studio, which was not strange given the smallness of the space where they were, I tried to explain to them what was happening and I gave them water and tobacco that was in the bar. of the station,” Costa Neves recalled in an email. He spent two sleepless nights there and became friends with announcer Joaquim Furtado, who read the rebels’ first statement. The only regret that has accompanied him since that day is not having apologized to the police officer who helped him break into his own car and who ended up arrested hours later.
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