PORTUGAL: The Only Free Man

• Share

Along Lisbon's sunny streets last week nearly all available space was filled with election posters. One bore the likeness of Dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar and of President Antonio Oscar de Fragoso Carmona, a 79-year-old general and pompous figurehead. The legend on the poster was: "Dois homens uma só obra"—two men with one work. Opponents of the regime had crossed out the a in uma, which changed the meaning: two men, one goes to the bathroom.

This Sunday, Portugal's "qualified" voters may, if they wish, go to the polls. Since Salazar seized power 20 years ago there have been several presidential "elections," but this was the first in which an opposition candidate was permitted. Once a seminarist slated for the priesthood, later a university economist, devout, self-effacing Dictator Salazar believes the masses incapable of governing themselves. Every now & then he lets the opposition show its head, to make a show of "democracy."

Carmona's opponent is an 81-year-old democratic liberal, Norton de Mattos, a retired general and diplomat who reads treatises on topography and mathematics for relaxation. He heads a forlorn rabble of socialists, democrats, Communists, and some monarchists.

Making the most of its brief freedom (controls will be clamped on again after the election), the opposition newspaper Republica addressed the dictator thus: "Senhor Salazar, the world will not tolerate the direction in which you are walking against the will of the nation. You govern by force and you call it right. You are the only free man in Portugal."

The government's campaign for Candidate Carmona predicts civil war if Mattos should win and circulates outlandish whispering-campaign stories, one of them to the effect that Mattos once became enraged when he was thrown from a horse, and ordered the animal shot. In a village near Lisbon, a truck dropped handbills which boasted that the government had brought electricity, a school, a cemetery to the district. In his dirt-floored stone house, an old man read the handbill—by the light of a kerosene lamp. Said he: "We've never lacked space to bury our dead."