The Abrilada: how Salazar outmanoeuvred his generals in April 1961

By the afternoon of 13 April 1961 General Júlio Botelho Moniz was no longer Portugal's minister of national defence. A letter from the President of the Republic had reached his home that morning, followed by a letter of dismissal signed by Salazar. He went ahead with his meeting anyway.1 source1 source

The commanders were to gather at five in the Palácio da Cova da Moura in Lisbon. The plan was to present the regime with a united front of generals and force Salazar out, perhaps President Américo Tomás too. A former president, Marshal Francisco Craveiro Lopes, came to the meeting; Costa Gomes later said he was with them “heart and soul”.2 sources2 sources

At three o'clock the state radio, the Emissora Nacional, had interrupted its programmes to read out the dismissals and the names of the men replacing them. Most of the army's senior commanders stayed away from the meeting. The navy minister had forbidden the navy's commanders to attend.1 source1 source

General Albuquerque de Freitas, chief of staff of the air force, told the room what that meant. Legally, Botelho Moniz was no longer minister. The army and navy staffs would not follow them, nor would any other air force general. To go on they would need to bring troops into the street, and that had never been the plan. He withdrew, and the coup was over before it began.1 source1 source

That night Salazar appeared on television. He gave one reason for taking over the defence ministry himself, and it was Angola.2 sources2 sources

In 1961 Salazar had led Portugal's government for almost three decades. His Estado Novo, or New State, was a dictatorship, and the armed forces were its main support. Formally the President of the Republic appointed and could dismiss the head of government, and since 1958 the president had been Admiral Américo Tomás, a candidate Salazar had put forward himself.3 sources3 sources

In August 1958, after a presidential election in which the opposition candidate Humberto Delgado had frightened the regime, Salazar brought a group of reforming staff officers into government: Botelho Moniz at Defence, Colonel Afonso Magalhães de Almeida Fernandes at the Army ministry and Francisco da Costa Gomes as under-secretary of state for the army.4 sources4 sources

They were technocrats, many of whom had spent time in the United States or with NATO bodies, and they found the army in what Almeida Fernandes called “total inefficiency”. In August 1959 the Supreme Council of National Defence approved their plan to reorganise the forces in Guinea, Angola and Mozambique for counter-guerrilla war. The money never came. Salazar and the finance ministry kept refusing the funds.1 source1 source

Between 1958 and 1961, Costa Gomes admitted later, none of the measures needed to “prevent a war overseas” had been carried out. The hijacking of the liner Santa Maria in January and the attacks in Luanda turned frustration into alarm. At a meeting of the Supreme Military Council in late February 1961, Albuquerque de Freitas tabled a memorandum asking the chiefs to discuss “the continuation of political life in Portugal beyond the disappearance of the current head of government”.1 source1 source

After the northern rising of 15 March, Botelho Moniz called the Supreme Army Council and told it he had written to Salazar. His letter asked for “a psychological shock” to clear the air at home and abroad. The government's political base, he wrote, had narrowed to “worn-out political figures”, and it should bring in new men, including some who had lost faith.1 source1 source

Salazar saw him on 28 and 29 March. Viana de Lemos, an officer on the minister's staff, remembered Botelho Moniz coming back from the first meeting tired but smiling, sure he had convinced Salazar. That night regime loyalists leaned on Salazar, and the second meeting was harder. Botelho Moniz felt the door closing again.1 source1 source

The plotters were also watching Washington. John F. Kennedy had taken office in January 1961 determined to court the new African states, even at the cost of irritating European allies. On 4 March Secretary of State Dean Rusk told the US ambassador in Lisbon, C. Burke Elbrick, to warn Salazar that Washington could no longer back his African policy and would vote to put Angola on the Security Council's agenda.2 sources2 sources

Before he saw Salazar, Elbrick had lunch with Botelho Moniz and told him what was coming, according to the embassy's cable of 6 March. The minister agreed that colonial policy had to change. His solution was a broad government including “non-communist opposition” figures, and in time autonomous, multiracial provinces linked to Portugal in a Commonwealth-type relationship. Any change, he warned, had to look Portuguese, not imposed by Washington or the UN.1 source1 source

Elbrick then saw Salazar for an hour and a half, he reported on 7 March, and found him relaxed, friendly and “deeply concerned” at what he saw as a self-defeating American policy. In mid-March the United States voted with the Soviet Union for a Liberian draft resolution urging reforms in Angola. It failed, with 5 votes in favour and 6 abstentions, Britain and France among them.3 sources3 sources

Portugal answered in the street. On 27 March, by Soromenho-Marques's account, more than 20,000 demonstrators, many of them regime dignitaries, marched on the US embassy on Avenida Duque de Loulé and broke 47 windows with stones. He notes that Botelho Moniz made no effort to hide his frequent meetings with Elbrick. The northern massacres had also rallied opinion behind the government just as Salazar looked weakest.1 source1 source

Salazar's old defence minister, Fernando Santos Costa, pushed from the other side. Dismissed in 1958 but still close to Salazar, he wrote to him on 3 April accusing the new men of ineptitude and demanding 10,000 properly armed men for Angola at once, with another 10,000 ready for Mozambique. Three days later he wrote again: Salazar must stop suggesting and start ordering.1 source1 source

Botelho Moniz now tried what Rodrigues calls a constitutional coup. On 5 April he told President Tomás that Salazar would probably have to go. If a second audience failed, he meant to tell Tomás that the armed forces would take control and back a broader government under Marcelo Caetano or António Pinto Barbosa. On 9 April they briefed the commanders of the Lisbon military region and sent instructions to the command of the 2nd Military Region. The next day the military governor of Lisbon put the question of replacing Salazar openly to his officers.1 source1 source

On the night of 11 April Botelho Moniz and Almeida Fernandes asked for an urgent audience. Before granting it, Tomás saw Salazar at the president's home in Restelo, told him everything, renewed his confidence in him and urged “rapid and drastic action”. He then told Kaúlza de Arriaga, under-secretary of state for the air force, to take precautions. Kaúlza put the air force on alert.2 sources2 sources

At about 11pm the two ministers asked Tomás whether the time had come to replace the head of government himself, whose qualities were “much weakened”. Tomás was struck by what he took for an indirect ultimatum. He answered that this was not the only solution, that the navy and air force had not spoken for it, and that he knew the army was not unanimous either.1 source1 source

On 12 April Salazar concluded that he had to act before the military movement broke out. He and Tomás agreed that the dismissals would appear in the official gazette the next morning. On the 13th Kaúlza warned that if nothing was done by early afternoon, by five o'clock the President and the head of government could both be under arrest or the country at civil war. He also lined up General Gomes de Araújo, the incoming chief of the general staff, to keep the army's commanders away from Cova da Moura.1 source1 source

Officially, nobody had been sacked. The Diário do Governo of 13 April recorded that Botelho Moniz, Almeida Fernandes and the overseas minister, Rear Admiral Vasco Lopes Alves, had been granted the exoneration they had asked for, and a second decree did the same for Costa Gomes. Salazar, Brigadier Mário Silva and Adriano Moreira were appointed to Defence, the Army and the Overseas.1 source1 source

The Museu da Presidência's biographies of Tomás and Craveiro Lopes add that forces of the Portuguese Legion, the regime's militia, commanded by Santos Costa surrounded the rebels. Rodrigues, working from the participants' memoirs and letters, mentions no such operation, and Santos Costa had been out of government since 1958. In his account the plot fell apart from inside.3 sources3 sources

Most of the generals had wanted a pronouncement that would persuade the president, not a fight. Almeida Fernandes had already told Kaúlza he would not follow a coup by force. Costa Gomes said they did not want to start a movement without the whole of the armed forces, because civil war was the cruellest thing he knew. By the Presidency Museum's account, Craveiro Lopes was one of the few who argued for defying the government.2 sources2 sources

At the end of the day Salazar received Kaúlza and remarked that he looked tired. Kaúlza said he had slept little the previous nights.1 source1 source

That night the normal television programmes were interrupted for Salazar. He announced that he was taking the defence portfolio and that there were changes at the head of the armed forces, and he explained why. The whole declaration, broadcast on radio and television, runs to four short paragraphs in his collected speeches.2 sources2 sources

The last paragraph asked the country not to waste a single hour, since one day could spare sacrifices and lives, so that Portugal would make every effort needed to defend Angola “and with it the integrity of the Nation”. The coup was not mentioned.1 source1 source

Not everyone believed the explanation. On 16 April Albuquerque de Freitas wrote to Brigadier Pinto Resende, who commanded the military region of Angola.1 source1 source

The purge was thorough. Botelho Moniz went into the reserve. Almeida Fernandes was parked on the army staff without duties. Costa Gomes was sent to Beja to run a recruiting district, and Albuquerque de Freitas asked to be placed in the reserve. Their posts went to men Santos Costa had recommended days earlier.2 sources2 sources

The reshuffle went beyond the army. Adriano Moreira, until then an under-secretary of state, replaced Lopes Alves at the Overseas ministry on 13 April and launched reforms in Africa. In the wider reshuffle Salazar had promised, Alberto Franco Nogueira became foreign minister. Soromenho-Marques sees the changes as giving new life to a government that had seemed exhausted. Salazar kept the defence ministry until 4 December 1962.3 sources3 sources

The troops followed quickly. The first large contingents left Lisbon for Luanda by air on 19 April and by sea on 21 April, when the liner Niassa sailed packed with soldiers; it reached Luanda on 1 May. By September more than 20,000 men had been shipped, and the reoccupation of the north was declared complete on 3 October 1961. By the end of the year about 33,000 soldiers were in Angola.3 sources3 sources

The defeated generals had never argued for abandoning Africa. Their grievance was that Salazar had denied them the money to reinforce it, and Rodrigues points out that the troops could only leave six days after the Abrilada because of the preparation they had done. Their anger, Rodrigues suggests, must have been all the greater when they heard Salazar promise on television, on the day of their dismissal, to move rapidly and in force.1 source1 source

Salazar answered Washington before the National Assembly on 30 June 1961, saying that since the Security Council meeting of March the United States had openly backed the Afro-Asian group. The pressure eased later. By 1963, in the words of the historian António Telo quoted by Soromenho-Marques, the United States had stopped voting against Portugal at the UN and was abstaining instead.2 sources2 sources

Rodrigues calls the Abrilada the last significant attempt at military intervention in Portuguese politics before 1974. Its failure, he argues, closed off political change and a different colonial policy at a time when both were still possible. The war that followed lasted 13 years and spread to Guinea and Mozambique; at its height the three fronts held about 150,000 men.3 sources3 sources

It also showed where power lay. The historian José Medeiros Ferreira, cited by Rodrigues, gave Américo Tomás the decisive role: by keeping a loyal military man as head of state, Salazar forced any rebel general to put himself outside the law. In 1968, after Salazar fell ill, the same president chose Marcelo Caetano, one of the two men the plotters had wanted to lead a new government, to succeed him.2 sources2 sources

Some of the losers came back. Costa Gomes, the under-secretary who would not risk civil war in 1961, rose to be chief of the armed forces general staff in 1972 and was dismissed in March 1974 after he and António de Spínola refused to attend a ceremony of loyalty to the regime. After the revolution of 25 April 1974 he became President of the Republic, expected, the Presidency Museum says, to keep the armed forces united.1 source1 source