The Battle of the Barracks

The former comrades-in-arms of Portugal's military revolution are beginning to look more and more like opposing forces. Last week all military units in northern Portugal were placed on strict alert and confined to barracks following the mutiny of an artillery regiment near the city of Oporto. The 650 mutineers at the Serra do Pilar Regiment ran a red banner up the flagpole and demanded the dismissal of the region's new anti-Communist military commander, General António Pires Veloso. They also demanded an end to what they called "purges" of leftists from the barracks and the reopening of a leftist-controlled military-transport center that had been shut down on orders from Pires Veloso the previous week. The general responded by threatening to bomb the rebels out of the occupied barracks. When the leftist soldiers, in control of 700 tons of light arms and ammunition, refused to move, General Pires Veloso backed down and called off the alert. By week's end clashes between civilian supporters and opponents of the soldiers had resulted in more than 50 injuries.

The mutiny at Oporto provoked a flurry of other military and civilian protests. The demand for "internal democracy" within the armed forces—meaning the right of the troops to debate every military decision—was asserted by regiments throughout the country. At the headquarters of the 1st Light Artillery Regiment outside Lisbon, hundreds of left-wing soldiers, sailors and airmen gathered to protest what they called Premier José Pinheiro de Azevedo's attempt to restore "a right-wing dictatorship under the cover of social democracy." The mutinous military men joined some 3,000 civilians chanting such slogans as "Fascists out of the barracks."

The forces challenging Pinheiro de Azevedo's attempt to restore discipline represent a mixed bag of revolutionary groups. Their capacity for disruption is at this point much greater than their numbers would seem to warrant. The political far left (see box page 36) is made up of several fringe political parties, six of which have banded together as the United Revolutionary Front. The radical military leftists, who have organized themselves illegally into a group called Soldiers United Victorious (SUV), probably represent no more than 6% of the total armed forces. They are concentrated in the Lisbon area, and may control as many as half of the eight units stationed near the capital. Many of the 30,000 weapons that have been stolen from the military in the past year are believed to have passed from leftist soldiers to members of the United Revolutionary Front.

Some Italians. For the first time last week, there was talk of a third unsettling element in Portugal: an international brigade of revolutionaries who have come to support the country's radical left. Pinheiro de Azevedo estimated their numbers at 2,500 so far, and says that they are mostly South Americans, particularly Chileans, and some Italians.