Carnation Revolution
The Carnation Revolution, code-named Operation Historic Turn, also known as the 25th of April, was a military coup in Portugal by officers that overthrew the Estado Novo regime on 25 April 1974. The coup produced major social, economic, territorial, demographic, and political changes in the European country and its overseas colonies through the Ongoing Revolutionary Process. It resulted in the Portuguese transition to democracy and an end to the Portuguese Colonial War. It also had worldwide repercussions by marking the beginning of the third wave of democracy.
The revolution began as a coup organised by the Armed Forces Movement, composed of military officers who opposed the regime, but it was soon coupled with an unanticipated popular civil resistance campaign. Negotiations with African independence movements began, and by the end of 1974, Portuguese troops were withdrawn from Portuguese Guinea, which became a UN member state as Guinea-Bissau. This was followed in 1975 by the independence of Cape Verde, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe and Angola in Africa and the declaration of independence of East Timor in Southeast Asia. These events prompted a mass exodus of Portuguese citizens from Portugal's African territories, displacing over 1 million Portuguese known as the retornados.
The Carnation Revolution got its name from the fact that almost no shots were fired, and from restaurant worker Celeste Caeiro who offered carnations to soldiers when the population took to the streets to celebrate the end of the dictatorship. Other demonstrators followed suit and placed carnations in the muzzles of guns and on soldiers' uniforms. In Portugal, 25 April is a national holiday that commemorates the revolution.
Background
By the 1970s, nearly a half-century of authoritarian rule weighed on Portugal. The 28 May 1926 coup d'état implemented an authoritarian regime incorporating social Catholicism and integralism. In 1933, the regime was renamed the Estado Novo. António de Oliveira Salazar served as Prime Minister until 1968.Although there are documented cases of some local elections where an independent candidate who was allowed to run did actually win, those were exceedingly rare and the vast majority were sham elections where the government candidate usually ran unopposed, while the opposition used the limited political freedoms allowed during the brief election period to protest, withdrawing their candidates before the election to deny the regime political legitimacy.
The Estado Novo's political police, the PIDE, persecuted opponents of the regime, who were often tortured, imprisoned or killed.
In 1958, General Humberto Delgado, a former member of the regime, stood against the regime's presidential candidate, Américo Tomás, and refused to allow his name to be withdrawn. Tomás won the election amidst claims of widespread electoral fraud, and the Salazar government abandoned the practice of popularly electing the president and gave the task to the National Assembly.
Portugal's Estado Novo government remained neutral in the Second World War, and was initially tolerated by its NATO post-war partners due to its anti-communist stance. As the Cold War developed, Western Bloc and Eastern Bloc states vied with each other in supporting guerrillas in the Portuguese colonies, leading to the 1961–1974 Portuguese Colonial War.
Salazar had a stroke in 1968, and was replaced as prime minister by Marcelo Caetano, who adopted a slogan of "continuous evolution", suggesting reforms, such as a monthly pension to rural workers who had never contributed to Portugal's social security. Caetano's Primavera Marcelista included greater political tolerance, but not a complete freedom of the press, and was seen as an opportunity for the opposition to gain concessions from the regime. In 1969, Caetano authorised the country's first democratic labour union movement since the 1920s. However, after the elections of 1969 and 1973, hard-liners in the government and the military pushed back against Caetano, with political repression against communists and anti-colonialists.
Economic conditions
The Estado Novo regime's economic policy encouraged the formation of large conglomerates. The regime maintained a policy of corporatism which resulted in the placement of much of the economy in the hands of conglomerates including those founded by the families of António Champalimaud, José Manuel de Mello, Américo Amorim and the dos Santos family.One of the largest was the Companhia União Fabril, with a wide range of interests including cement, petro and agro chemicals, textiles, beverages, naval and electrical engineering, insurance, banking, paper, tourism and mining, with branches, plants and projects throughout the Portuguese Empire.
Other medium-sized family companies specialised in textiles, ceramics, porcelain, glass and crystal, engineered wood, canned fish, fishing, food and beverages, tourism and agriculture by the early-1970s. Rural families engaged in agriculture and forestry.
Income from the colonies came from resource extraction, of oil, coffee, cotton, cashews, coconuts, timber, minerals, metals, bananas, citrus, tea, sisal, beer, cement, fish and other seafood, beef and textiles. Labour unions were subject to severe restrictions, and minimum wage laws were not enforced. Starting in the 1960s, the outbreak of colonial wars in Africa set off significant social changes, among them the rapid incorporation of women into the labour market.
Colonial war
Independence movements began in the African colonies of Portuguese Mozambique, Portuguese Congo, Portuguese Angola, and Portuguese Guinea. The Salazar and Caetano regimes responded with diverting more and more of Portugal's budget to colonial administration and military expenditure, and the country became increasingly isolated from the rest of the world, facing increasing internal dissent, arms embargoes and other international sanctions.By the early-1970s, the Portuguese military was overstretched and there was no political solution in sight. Although the number of casualties was relatively small, the war had entered its second decade; Portugal faced criticism from the international community, and was becoming increasingly isolated. In 1973 the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling for Portugal's immediate withdrawal from Guinea. Atrocities such as the Wiriyamu Massacre undermined the war's popularity and the government's diplomatic position, although details of the massacre are still disputed.
The war became unpopular in Portugal, and the country became increasingly polarised. Thousands of left-wing students and anti-war activists avoided conscription by emigrating illegally, primarily to France and the United States. Meanwhile, three generations of right-wing militants in Portuguese schools were guided by a revolutionary nationalism partially influenced by European neo-fascism, and supported the Portuguese Empire and an authoritarian regime.
The war had a profound impact on the country. The revolutionary Armed Forces Movement began as an attempt to liberate Portugal from the Estado Novo regime and challenge new military laws which were coming into force. The laws would reduce the military budget and reformulate the Portuguese military. Younger military-academy graduates resented Caetano's programme of commissioning militia officers who completed a brief training course and had served in the colonies' defensive campaigns at the same rank as academy graduates.
Revolution
By December 1973, it had become clear to several military officers that the Colonial War was unsustainable and the only solution to end it should be a political one, therefore Vasco Lourenço, Vítor Alves and Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho formed a commission to prepare a military coup to topple the regime.In February 1974, Caetano decided to remove General António de Spínola from the command of Portuguese forces in Guinea in the face of Spínola's increasing disagreement with the promotion of military officers and the direction of Portuguese colonial policy. This occurred shortly after the publication of Spínola's book, Portugal and the Future, which expressed his political and military views of the Portuguese Colonial War. Several military officers who opposed the war formed the MFA to overthrow the government in a military coup. The MFA was headed by Vítor Alves, Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho and Vasco Lourenço, and was joined later by Salgueiro Maia. The movement was aided by other Portuguese army officers who supported Spínola and democratic civil and military reform.
In March 16, 1974, a group of 200 soldiers headed by Armando Marques Ramos organized a failed military coup in Caldas da Rainha. The unsuccessful attempt managed to convince Marcelo Caetano that the level of unrest in the military against the regime was overrated, and gave the leaders of the MFA the opportunity to learn from the mistakes made.
The coup was given the code name "Operation Historic Turn" and it had two secret signals: First, the disc jockey at Emissores Associados de Lisboa gave the time signal Falta cinco minutos às vinte e três at 22:55 on 24 April before turntabling Paulo de Carvalho's "E Depois do Adeus". This alerted rebel captains and soldiers to begin the coup. The second signal came at 00:20 on 25 April, when Rádio Renascença broadcast "Grândola, Vila Morena". The MFA gave the signals to take over strategic points of power in the country. The content of the songs was largely uncontroversial—censorship would have prevented more inflammatory songs—but their broadcasting was a signal, not a direct call to arms.
Six hours later, the Caetano government relented. Despite repeated radio appeals from the "Captains of April" advising civilians to stay home, thousands of Portuguese took to the streets – mingling with, and supporting, the military insurgents. A central gathering point was the Lisbon flower market, then richly stocked with carnations. Some of the insurgents put carnations in their gun barrels, an image broadcast on television worldwide which gave the revolution its name. Although no mass demonstrations preceded the coup, spontaneous civilian involvement turned the military coup into a popular revolution "led by radical army officers, soldiers, workers and peasants that toppled the senile Salazar dictatorship, using the language of socialism and democracy. The attempt to radicalise the outcome", noted a contemporary observer of the time, "had little mass support and was easily suppressed by the Socialist Party and its allies."
Caetano found refuge in the main headquarters of the Lisbon military police, the National Republican Guard, at the Largo do Carmo. This building was surrounded by the MFA, which pressured him to cede power to Spínola. President Tomás was kept on the sidelines during the revolution and was only informed about the events that unfolded by Fernando da Silva Pais, head of the GDS. Tomás, his family and some members of the president's staff took refuge at the fort of Giribita, returning, later in the same day, to his personal residence in Lisbon. On the morning of April 26, however, he was sent to Madeira on his way to exile. Caetano and Tomás were sent to Brazil; Caetano spent the rest of his life there, and Tomás returned to Portugal a few years later. The revolution was closely watched by neighbouring Spain, where the government were planning the succession of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Franco died a year and a half later, in 1975.
The military operation itself ended at 18:00 on 25 April having lasted 19 hours, however hostilities continued in Lisbon until the end of the siege of the national headquarters of the General Directorate of Security, the siege ended on 09:45 of the next day. At the national level, hostilities continued for several days afterwards with some districts still not recognizing the revolution at Lisbon. That situation continued until the fall of Coimbra district to the new regime on the 30th.
Hostilities in Lisbon are considered to have ended after the end of the siege of GDS when Fernando da Silva Pais, its last director-general, removed, in the presence of commander Luís Costa Correia, the portraits of Salazar, Caetano, and Tomás from the wall of his office.
The movement still had to ensure the control of all Portugal however, given the resistance by local authorities in other district capitals, the revolution in Lisbon had no practical effects in those districts as the former regime's authorities were still in place there. That was the case of Coimbra where only on 30 April, with the direct involvement of the military, after a four-day siege of the GDS branch in Coimbra headquarters, the new democratic powers were constituted at the university, the city, at the civil government of the district and at the municipalities belonging to it.
During the siege of the GDS headquarters, at 20:15 on 25 April, GDS authorities started shooting warning shots towards the crowd outside the building, killing four civilians and injuring 45. That same evening and the following days, several GDS personnel were arrested. At 21:20 the same evening, a low level GDS staff member, was shot dead by MFA forces. A member of the shock police was also shot dead at the Luís de Camões square by the MFAs when in a misunderstanding, they started targeting a motorcade of police cars which the agent was part of. The identities of the perpetrators of all these deaths are still unknown.