nists were awarded a substantial share of these local government appointments.

In addition to these advantages, the Communists benefited from an already strongly-entrenched position in the labor unions, where they had constantly worked to keep alive labor opposition to the corporative state of Salazar and Caetano and to infiltrate the union leaderships. Under Salazar, the latter efforts had met with only slight success because union heads, though elected by the union members, had to be confirmed in their posts by the state, and confirmation was withheld whenever the state authorities suspected an elected person of being a Communist or a Communist sympathizer. After Caetano succeeded Salazar in 1968, however, the regulations were not as consistently enforced, and this enabled the Communists to gain control of the leadership of many of the unions.

In 1969, the Communists attempted to solidify their position further through the establishment of an Interunion Commission (Commissão Intersindical) largely dominated by pro-Communist elements, which they tried to utilize for the purpose of mobiliz-❘ ing the unions against the Caetano regime .The commission was then proscribed by the government on the ground that it was heavily infiltrated by the Communists, but the PCP nevertheless kept it operating underground and openly reestablished it immediately after the 1974 uprising. It was then given the title of Provisional Interunion Commission because its members were not elected; instead, they were designated from among union leaders on whom the party could rely, thus ensuring continued Communist control.

The situation in the information media was again one that the Communists were in an advantageous position to exploit in the wake of the 1974 upheaval, and here, too, the causes were partly rooted in the past. Over the long period of dictatorship, extreme dissatisfaction had developed among journalists and others in the press, radio, and television as a result of the rigid official controls imposed on the media. Outside of a few commercial radio stations, both radio and television had been pure state monopolies, while the media generally had been subjected to an official censorship that was petty, spiritually deadening, and regarded as scandalous and oppressive even by journalists not opposed to the regime. Moreover, there was no recourse against the censorship because it was exercised by a commission of censors whose identities the media were officially not supposed to know.

Having frequented journalistic circles in Portugal for years under the old regime, this writer can attest that the censorship aroused among those working in the media-and indeed among intellectuals generally-a resentment of the system that was only matched by the hatred directed at the state secret police. It also created sharp tensions within the media between the middle-level and younger writers and reporters, many of whom were neither reconciled to the existing regime nor corrupted by official favors, and the publishers and media executives, who generally were. The accumulated antiregime sentiments of the mid-level and younger professionals were such that these personnel tended increasingly to lean toward the more radical opposition groups, including the Communists.

The MFA uprising finally released these pent-up feelings, and at the same time a vacuum was created by a sweeping purge of top-level media executives tainted by their close association with the old regime. Those who had until then been mid-level professionals, and who for the most part had by now become converted to some form of leftist ideology, whether moderate or extremist, set up new editorial boards that assumed de facto authority to set the political line to be followed. In many cases, moreover, they were backed up by shop committees of printing and technical workers that were under Communist control.

Communist Influence in the MFA

All the factors described above helped the Communists to achieve their rise to major influence in Portuguese politics following the April 1974 uprising, but the party would hardly have been able to make such rapid progress and would have found its early gains far less easy to consolidate if it had not also been able to count on significant support within the Armed Forces Movement itself, the prime mover in the final overthrow of the old regime. It was the MFA that commanded the weapons and therefore the decisive power.

This poses the question of the extent to which the Communists had managed to win covert adherents within the MFA prior to the 1974 uprising. Evidence is admittedly lacking to prove that individual officers who played important roles in the MFA were secret members or supporters of the PCP. However, there is evidence which suggests that Communist ideas had substantially influenced

the thinking of important segments of the military, particularly the younger, middle-grade officers who constituted the real driving force in the MFA.

One significant indication is that the "Program of the Armed Forces," drawn up just before the uprising and published immediately afterward,' appeared to be based on some of the same fundamental concepts embodied in the 1965 program of the PCP 10 (still in force in April 1974) and in the programs put forward by the Communist-led opposition front (CDE) in the pre-electoral campaigns of 1969 and 1973. For example, the MFA program called for an "anti-monopolistic" economic policy, echoing the 1965 PCP program's call for "liquidation of the monopolies." More important, on the subject of the future character of the Portuguese state, the MFA program envisaged a transition to "democracy," and it became clear after the uprising that some of the revolutionary officers who drew up the program interpreted "democracy" to mean something close to the PCP's conception of it. These points of convergence between the ideas. of the revolutionary officers and those of the PCP are not surprising in view of the known fact that some of their leaders, who were to become members, first, of the powerful Coordinating Commission of the MFA and, later, of the Revolutionary Council which became Portugal's highest decisionmaking body in March 1975, had contacts-initially occasional and then systematic-with leaders of the underground democratic opposition, who in turn were in close touch with members of the PCP."

Communist influence on the thinking of the revolutionary officers has been still more clearly corroborated by the recent disclosure by some of their leaders that certain points in the MFA program, as originally drafted, encountered opposition from General Antonio de Spínola, head of the original military junta, to whom the draft program was presented for review just before the uprising." The contro

9 This document has been individually published as well as reproduced in many places. See, e.g., Amadeo José de Freitas, Setembro 28, a negra madrugada (September 28, The Black Dawn), Lisbon, no publisher, 1973, pp. 18 ff.

10 Programa do Partido Comunista Portugués (Program of the Portuguese Communist Party), Lisbon, Edições Avante, 1974. This program was first published underground in 1965, and a second underground edition was published in 1970.

11 See Rodrigues et al., op. cit., pp. 205 ff.

12 Interview with three leading revolutionary officers-Colonel (now General) Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, Major Vitor Alves, and Captain Vasco Lourenço-broadcast on Portuguese television on April 25, 1975, first anniversary of the 1974 uprising; reprinted in República (Lisbon), May 7, 1975, pp. 13-14 and 18.

versy involved, above all, the question of Portugal's African colonies, with Spínola insisting on "selfdetermination," while the revolutionary officers were already thinking in terms of "immediate independence," as called for in the program of the PCP. Similarly, Spínola insisted that the term "fascists," which had been used in the draft program and in most PCP statements with reference to the Salazar/Caetano regime, be deleted. Spínola, who was then in the driver's seat, had his way, but the controversy was nonetheless revealing of the thinking of the revolutionary officers.

It should be noted here that the influence of radical-leftist ideas had become strong not only in the Army but even more so in the Navy, which came to be regarded following the April 1974 uprising as the "reddest" of the Portuguese armed services. This was apparently true not just among the noncommissioned ranks of seamen, most of whom stemmed from poor fishermen's backgrounds and had good reason to be dissatisfied with the existing social system, but among many of the officers as well. Commenting on this phenomenon in a May 1975 interview, Admiral Vitor Crespo, who had been Portuguese High Commissioner for Mozambique at the time of the uprising and later became a member of the Revolutionary Council, remarked:

In the Fleet we have developed these ideas for 15 years. . . . Books in foreign languages were never forbidden in Portugal. Under the old regime, whoever understood French or English could read any book he wanted.13

Crespo's statement appeared to confirm that radical leftist ideologies had been an important ingredient in the buildup of opposition within the Navy to the Salazar and Caetano regimes.

The PCP Since the Uprising

These, then, were the principal background factors that contributed to the Communists' immediate successes in the wake of the MFA's assumption of power. Now it is necessary to assess what the party has subsequently been able to accomplish by way of consolidating and extending its initial gains.

From the first, the PCP leadership recognized

13 Ibid., p. 5.

that the party's future role depended above all on its ability to preserve collaborative relations with the Armed Forces Movement. Therefore, in line with its ideology, the party interpreted the MFA's main slogan, "Cooperation Between the People and the MFA," to mean that the PCP, as the selfproclaimed "representative of the people," should cooperate as closely as possible with the military leadership, and the party has consistently hewed to that line ever since. For a party which had spent most of its existence underground and most of whose leaders had suffered years of imprisonment, exile, and police persecution," such a course offered

14 Cunhal himself spent 14 years in prison, seven of them in total isolation, while other members of the party Central Committee served sentences ranging up to 20 years. Cunhal's escape from the Peniche prison in 1970 together with some of his comrades is one of the epics of the party. On this episode, see report by Marcel Niedergang originally published in Le Monde (Paris), June 1974, as reprinted in Portuguese in O 25 de Abril na imprensa estrangeira (The 25th of April in the Foreign Press), Lisbon, Novos Cadernos d. Quixote, No. 20, 1974, pp. 117 ff.

-Jean Guyaux.

not only the best guarantee of future security but also the best means of achieving political influence. The party leaders have consequently made a systematic effort to conform to the will and wishes of the MFA. This would not have been possible, however, had it not been for the points of convergence noted earlier between the ideas of the PCP and the thinking of a large number of the revolutionary officers.

In any case, the MFA leadership has taken practically no initiatives or decisions that have not received immediate approbation and praise from the PCP and its political front, the MDP/CDE. The other revitalized democratic parties-i.e., the Socialist Party (Partido Socialista-PS), and the Popular Democratic Party (Partido Popular DemocráticoPPD) have occasionally tried to oppose or argue with the officers, but the PCP has so far carefully avoided doing so. This strategy has by and large proven highly beneficial to the party. Through its close collaboration with members of the military

15

leadership, the PCP has had repeated opportunities to influence the course of events and move them in the direction it desired. This has been evident not only at the national and local political levels but also in the struggles for control of the unions and the media.

On the political front, it became increasingly clear in the first few months of the military regime that the MDP/CDE, originally organized as a joint movement of all the democratic parties, was actually becoming a tool of the PCP. Some of the nonCommunist groups withdrew to form their own separate parties, the already-mentioned Socialist Party and Popular Democratic Party. Thereafter, by order of the PCP, only those non-Communists who supported the party were allowed to remain in the MDP/CDE, and it became a typical Communist-led front designed to capture the votes of those reluctant to cast their ballots for candidates wearing the PCP label.

In order to make the MDP/CDE more useful as a political instrument, the PCP subsequently insisted that that organization be officially recognized as a party, which would entitle it not only to field its own candidates in future elections but also to

be represented in the government. This demand was strenuously opposed by the PS and PPD, but the MFA leadership decided the dispute in the PCP's favor. This decision prompted many Portuguese to refer sarcastically to the front organization as the "No. 2 Portuguese Communist Party," and its showing in the April 1975 elections to the Constitutional Assembly, which will be dealt with in more detail later, proved unexpectedly poor: in spite of massive campaign propaganda, the front's candidates amassed only four percent of the total vote. Nevertheless, the decision of the military leadership helped the Communists not only to retain their entrenched position in the local government structure but also to gain control of the economic ministries in the provisional national government, giving the party a decisive voice in shaping future economic policy.

Military influence also helped the Communists in their efforts to consolidate their initial control of the union movement through the earlier-mentioned Provisional Interunion Commission. Toward the end of 1974, the PCP and the unions and union leaders allied with it began pressing for legal action by the government to authorize only a single union organization under the interim leadership of the Interunion Commission. This unreasonable demand encountered strong opposition from the Socialists and other democratic parties, and a bitter struggle ensued in January and February 1975 over the issue of "Unidade-Unicidade," or unity vs. uniformity of the unions. Instead of a single union organization

15 What connections there may be between individual members of the present Revolutionary Council and the PCP are not clear. General Vasco dos Santos Gonçalves, the present Prime Minister as well as a member of the Revolutionary Council, has occasionally been asked if he is a party member but has refused to answer the question (e.g., see H.U. Kempski, "Are You a Communist, Mr. General?" an interview published in Süddeutsche Zeitung [Munich], March 25, 1975). Some significance may also attach to Gonçalves' reported role in connection with an abortive coup attempt against the Salazar regime in 1959. Then a captain, Gonçalves was reportedly among the group of military officers and civilians originally involved in the conspiracy but withdrew from it shortly before the coup attempt. His withdrawal came after the PCP had refused to join the conspiracy, evidently because it was unwilling to sign a pledge of obedience to the military junta that was to assume power if the coup was successful. (On this episode, see Rodrigues et al., op. cit., pp. 166-70.) Other officers who have been reported to be close to the PCP include Colonel Varela Gomes, who once led a military rebellion at Beja on New Year's 1964; and Navy Vice Admirals Rosa Coutinho and Pinheiro de Azevedo. The same thing has been said, though probably with less reason, about General Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, who acted as "coordinator" of the original "April 25th Movement" and who, in addition to his membership on the Revolutionary Council, is currently Commander of COPCON (Commando Portugal Continente), the Army's internal security force.

Socialists and their allies pressed for freedom of association that could lead to a union federation at the highest level if the workers themselves wanted it. After much argument, the Communists again won the battle, with the majority of the Coordinating Commission of the MFA deciding in their favor.

Although the Socialists were given assurances that free and secret elections would be held within the unions and that in the future the central Interunion Commission would be chosen in further elections participated in by delegates of the unions, the Socialists were not satisfied with the outcome because they feared that the existing Provisional Interunion Commission, made up of nonelected members largely subservient to the PCP, would be able to "manipulate" future union elections and hence the entire union structure from top to bottom. The decree providing for the future Interunion Commission and ordering the holding of elections within 120 days in those unions that had not yet done so was finally issued on May 7, 1975. This set the stage for a continuing struggle for influence within the now legally-established unified union structure between the Communists and their opponents, with the former apparently holding the whip hand."

16

The struggle for control of the media has been even more intense, and here again the Communists -with the undisguised blessing of dominant elements in the MFA-have made remarkable advances. As noted earlier, predominantly leftistoriented editorial boards had taken over de facto control of most of the printed media following the wholesale purge of the former publishers and toplevel executives in the wake of the MFA uprising. The Communists then proceeded to organize party cells within the newspaper and publishing establishments with a view to gaining control of the editorial and administrative boards. Their success in this effort was evidenced by a growing number of instances in which "intellectual workers" un

16 See Diario de Lisboa (Lisbon), May 7, 1975.

17 It should be noted, however, that the Communists have not always fared well in past elections within the unions. Normally there have been two lists of candidates: List A, composed of nominees sponsored by the Interunion Commission; and List B, representing those in opposition to it. In a number of instances, especially in the northern part of the country, the B lists-which frequently combine all elements opposed to the Communists, including Socialists as well as ultraleft groups such as Maoists, Trotskyists, and Anarchists-have won. This was the case in a March 1975 election in the union of bank employees in Porto, where the A list, headed by Avelino Gonçalves, an important member of the PCP and formerly a minister in the first provisional government, was defeated.

Communists and backed up by their MFA allies were fired from their jobs by the decision of board "plenaries."

In the case of the national television and radio networks, which had already been under state management, the MFA itself intervened directly, setting up commissions which at first confined their activities to settling disputes but later took over actual editorial control. Because of their close ties with MFA officers, the Communists thereby gained a measure of influence over these media as well. The visibly growing Communist influence over the media evoked strong protests from the Socialists and their democratic allies, who began pressing for government action to curb that influence. This touched off a five-month struggle over the terms of a proposed new press law, the promulgation of which was consequently held up until February 26, 1975. Although the law contained some provisions that were not to the Communists' liking, it nevertheless confirmed the broad authority of the editorial boards over the political line to be followed by their respective publications.1

The promulgation of the press law was followed almost immediately by another government action which benefited the Communists by making it more difficult for any kind of independent or opposition journal to survive. Under the old regime all except a few newspapers had been owned by the banks. Consequently, with the government's nationalization of the banks on March 11, 1975, these newspapers became property of the state. As a result, the only independent journals that remained were three nonbank-owned newspapers that had already been in the opposition the opposition under the Caetano regime: the Socialist-controlled República, headed by Raul Rego; O Primeiro de Jenero, published in the northern city of Porto; and the weekly Expresso, headed by Pinto Balsemão.

18 Relevant parts of the law are quoted in Francisco S. Costa and Antonio P. Rodrigues, Eds., O Caso República: Documentos, entrevistas, comentarios (The Case of República: Documents, Interviews, and Commentaries), Lisbon, published by the editors, 1975, pp. 57-68. The Communists and extreme left groups were not satisfied with the law because it failed to give the printing workers, along with the editorial boards, a voice in determining editorial policy, and they have since been agitating for a new law that would do so. Some of the more radical MFA officers have supported this position. Notably, General Saraiva de Carvalho has been quoted as approving the printing workers' seizure of the Socialist newspaper República (about which more below) on the ground that "the workers had the right to expel the administrators and directors if they disagreed with the pro-Socialist orientation of the paper" (Lisbon report published in Vanguardia [Barcelona], July 13, 1975).