Last Thursday was the fiftieth anniversary of the Portuguese revolution.
Just by chance, I was reading about the Nazi gold that the dictator Salazar squirreled away during World War II. Speaking of rodents, Salazar was a funny bunny—not at all how you’d expect a dictator to be.
Not a nutcase like Hitler or Stalin, a firebrand like Saddam, a general like Franco, or even a generalissimo like Mussolini—Salazar was celibate, and every picture I ever saw of him showed an avuncular soul. His speeches were tedious and he had the charisma of a poached egg, but he had the low cunning of a village priest—he was educated at seminary school.
In 1939, Portugal’s gold reserves were at 63.4 metric tons. By the end of the war, they had risen to 356.5 tons, roughly a six-fold increase. The narrative is that one third of that gold came directly from the Reichsbank—the central bank of Nazi Germany.
At the present time, Portugal’s gold reserves are estimated at 382.5 tons—not much more that eighty years ago.
The great sources of gold during the Second World War were the wolfram mines that produced tungsten needed by the German arms industry. Salazar was happy to sell tungsten to the Nazis, but only for gold. A complex financial web was set up involving Germany, Switzerland, and Portugal to deliver payments—not least because a good part of the gold was stolen from Jews, many of who were later killed in concentration camps.
The dictatorship continued to fill its coffers with gold—by 1974, when the Portuguese revolution toppled the Salazar regime, by then headed by a former university professor called Marcello Caetano, gold reserves were at a monstrous 865.9 tons.
So, somewhere between then and now, 480 tons of gold were sold to offset public spending—and this has been kept very quiet.
During the austerity period between 2011-2013, the country came under substantial pressure from the EU to sell its gold—it refused, but desperate citizens sold two hundred million euros of gold—anything from wedding rings to necklaces was melted down and made into ingots that were sold to Germany.
Fifty years on from the revolution, Portugal is a very different nation—in 1974, much of the country couldn’t read and write, the previous fourteen years it had been fighting in multiple African wars of independence, and there was no national health service. Elections were of the Putin variety, people were imprisoned for their political beliefs, and it was extremely unwise to express an anti-government opinion.
Records by all the sixties bands that I learned to love were banned, jeans were a rarity, and long hair was, well… short. Salazar’s motto was Deus, Pátria, Família (God, Country, Family), which the wags promptly translated into the three F’s: Fado, Futebol, e Fátima.
No publication, no radio show, no TV program could be presented without prior censorship, and inventive reporters found a thousand ways to dodge the blue pencil of the censor—now known as redaction.
Practically no bullets were fired in anger on the 25th of April, 1974—the exception being the secret police, who fired at the crowd from their headquarters. The same building where on the 31st of July, 1958, a man was thrown to his death from a third-floor balcony. The murder was witnessed by the Brazilian ambassador’s wife, who reported it to the cardinal of Lisbon. Days later, Salazar’s ministry of the interior sent her a note, explaining that ‘there was no reason to be so concerned, it was only a communist of no importance.’
The carnation revolution happened on a Thursday. Fifty years later, the date fell again on a Thursday.
Two generations is a long time, and children growing up in Portugal today should be excused for not knowing or caring much about all that happened back then. They also can’t relate to the events of the previous forty-eight years—that’s how long fascism lasted in Portugal: longer than Spain, Italy, or Germany.
How can kids know that Hitler’s Gestapo was modeled on the PVDE—Salazar’s secret police—rather than the other way round? Or that Portugal kept a concentration camp in Cape Verde, where political prisoners were kept in atrocious conditions?
No, the kids that pass me in the street don’t need to know.
Freedom is all about being free.
The India Road, Atmos Fear, Clear Eyes, and Folk Tales For Future Dreamers. QR links for smartphones