The Beja revolt: a New Year's night attack on Salazar's army, 1962

A storm had blacked out Beja. The rebels were meant to meet at eight in the evening of 31 December 1961, but the journeys down from Lisbon went badly and the group only came together after midnight. Raul Zagalo, a 20-year-old clerk in the statistics office of CP, the railway company, who was supposed to fire a bazooka he had seen only in drawings, said nobody suggested turning back. As the civilian leader, Manuel Serra, had told them, you could not move more than seventy people from Lisbon to the Alentejo on empty roads without leaving a trace.2 sources2 sources

At about two in the morning of 1 January 1962, two cars stopped at the gate of the 3rd Infantry Regiment. The officers inside were met by Captain Francisco Vasconcelos Pestana, who was in on the plot. The officer of the day, Ensign Arantes de Oliveira, said he was not ready to join a revolution and handed over his pistol; by Zagalo's account it was given back to him once he had given his word of honour to stay neutral. RTP's 2022 account says instead that he joined them.4 sources4 sources

That left the regiment's second-in-command, Major Henrique Calapez, who also commanded the Beja district of the Portuguese Legion, the regime's militia. The colonel was away in Lisbon for New Year. At around 2.20 a.m. Captain João Varela Gomes, the military leader of the rising, climbed to the major's quarters and knocked. Asked who it was, he gave the name of the sergeant of the guard, a man with a strong Alentejo accent.4 sources4 sources

Calapez opened the door a crack and fired twice. Varela Gomes fell with wounds to the upper abdomen and left thigh. He later admitted that, as the operation's leader, he should not have gone to arrest the major himself.4 sources4 sources

Portugal in 1961 was the Estado Novo, the authoritarian regime of António de Oliveira Salazar, with censorship, a single official party and a political police, the PIDE. Elections were held but not fairly fought. In 1958 that routine broke: General Humberto Delgado, an air force officer who had served the regime in Washington and at NATO, stood for president against the official candidate, Rear-Admiral Américo Tomás.2 sources2 sources

Asked by a journalist what he would do with Salazar if he won, Delgado answered “Obviamente, demito-o!”: “Obviously, I'll sack him!”. Hundreds of thousands filled squares in Porto and Lisbon for him, and he became known as the “General sem Medo”, the fearless general. The official count on 8 June 1958 gave Tomás more than three times his votes; the Panteão Nacional today says plainly that he lost by fraud.4 sources4 sources

The regime suspended Delgado from the army in January 1959. Fearing arrest, he took refuge in the Brazilian embassy and left for Rio de Janeiro on 21 April. From exile he called openly for armed revolt and scorned the “oposição sentada”, the opposition that sat and talked. One of the men who came to him was Manuel Serra, a former merchant navy officer from the Catholic workers' movement who had been arrested after the failed Cathedral Revolt of March 1959 and had escaped from prison.3 sources3 sources

Varela Gomes, an artillery officer born in Lisbon, had backed Delgado in 1958 and was sent to the Azores for it. He was also involved in the Cathedral Revolt. In the parliamentary election of November 1961 he stood as an opposition candidate and was the loudest voice of that campaign.4 sources4 sources

The Santa Maria affair and the fall of Goa have their own articles in this series. For the Beja conspirators, Goa mattered in one specific way: Varela Gomes recalled, as Pimentel quotes him, that the “military disaster in Goa, on 19 December” gave some hesitant officers “the argument that was missing” to join.1 source1 source

The idea was Delgado's. In exile he and Serra drew up what they called Operation Íkaro: take a barracks in the south, arm civilians with its rifles and use it as a base from which Delgado would call the country to rise. Serra entered Portugal clandestinely in 1961 with two companions, Raul Marques and José Silva Graça, to organise it. After looking at the ground, the two judged that a national movement could not succeed in the short term. Serra carried on.3 sources3 sources

If the barracks fell, one column would take Beja's Republican National Guard (GNR) post, a commando would head for Barreiro, and the rest would make for the Caldeirão hills on the edge of the Algarve to wait for other units to join. Delgado was to broadcast an appeal from the state radio transmitter at Faro. Conspirators in Alentejo villages would try to bring people into the streets, and others would blow up the bridge at Alcácer do Sal to slow the regime's response. There was no agreed political programme beyond ending the dictatorship.3 sources3 sources

Recruiting was hard. Serra's men came from the working-class districts of Lisbon such as Bairro da Liberdade and Campolide, from the industrial towns of Almada and Barreiro across the Tagus, and from the opposition circle around the magazine Seara Nova. José Hipólito dos Santos, one of the plotters, described communists, Catholics, a priest, republicans and even a monarchist among them. The communists joined as individuals: the Communist Party's leadership replied that it did not take part “in adventures”.3 sources3 sources

Twice the civilians went to Beja and turned back. On 2 December there were too few of them. On 9 December (8 December in Pimentel's account) contacts failed again, too few people turned up and a car broke down. Varela Gomes, unimpressed by such amateurism, at first stayed out. He changed his mind when he learned, through the brothers José and Alexandre Hipólito dos Santos, that several officers inside the Beja regiment opposed the regime, among them the commander of its public order company. He agreed on 15 December to lead the military side.4 sources4 sources

Delgado was supposed to wait for a second signal before entering Portugal. Around Christmas a messenger phoned him in Morocco to say the rising was close. Delgado, who had sworn to be in Portugal by the end of the year, set off at once: he went to Spain, took a scheduled coach from Seville to Lisbon and crossed the border on a false passport at the PIDE post of Vila Verde de Ficalho, on 30 December, according to a 2012 article in the local newspaper A Comarca. The officers in the plot did not know he was in the country.4 sources4 sources

Even the size of the attacking force is disputed. Zagalo counted about 50 men and one woman, the nurse Mariana Esteves, inside the walls, with 25 more waiting in Alentejo towns; RTP's 2022 account gives five military men and about 80 civilians, and other reports mention some 20 or nearly 100. Pimentel names six officers who entered; Pedroso Marques, one of them, later spoke of eight military men in all.6 sources6 sources

After Varela Gomes fell, Lieutenant Jaime Carvalho da Silva, a reserve officer and medical student, held Calapez at gunpoint. By the account Carvalho da Silva later gave Zagalo, his cellmate, the major dropped his weapon and begged for his life. Carvalho da Silva locked him in his room and went to help Varela Gomes, whom Alexandre Hipólito dos Santos and Pedroso Marques drove to the city hospital. The room had a window, and Calapez climbed out.3 sources3 sources

Meanwhile about fifteen civilians under Serra had gone over the wall at around 2.40 a.m. and taken the guardhouse with almost bare hands, disarming the sergeant and the sentries. The three officers in the mess, probably still celebrating New Year, were locked in there, and so was a fourth who arrived later. When Zagalo picked up a Mauser rifle and could not load it, he asked the soldier he had just disarmed to show him how; the young conscript said he had first taken them for terrorists.3 sources3 sources

Calapez knew the huge building and the rebels did not. Firing from positions they could not see, he shot David Abreu, a barber, from about two metres away. He then hit Zagalo in the knee and António Vilar, a driver, in the abdomen as they came round the chapel to help. Vilar lay in the yard all night and died in hospital. The exchange of fire lasted about an hour, until Calapez got out of the barracks and went to the GNR.3 sources3 sources

Jornal de Notícias reported in 2019 that the rebels hit Calapez in the chest; RTP's 2022 account says Varela Gomes's return shots missed him. Participants and RTP agree on one point: apart from Calapez, almost nobody in the garrison resisted. The court of 1964, RTP found, avoided naming him as the only man who fired on the insurgents.3 sources3 sources

The rebels held part of the barracks for some hours, but without their military leader the operation had no direction. Believing a siege was imminent, the remaining civilians slipped away in the dark. By Zagalo's account the GNR commander refused to move until daylight; by Pimentel's account, officers in the mess had already told the city police at around 3 a.m., and word reached the government in Lisbon that night.2 sources2 sources

And Delgado? According to the account later written by his Brazilian secretary and companion, Arajaryr Campos, they reached Beja late at night and drove around for about forty minutes, surprised to find everything calm, until police waved them down and their driver sped off. Other sources say he waited in the village of Vila de Frades, some 25 kilometres away. Either way, he was close by when the rebels lost their commander, and the two sides never made contact.3 sources3 sources

Lieutenant-Colonel Jaime Filipe da Fonseca had recently become under-secretary of state for the army, replacing Francisco da Costa Gomes after the failed Botelho Moniz coup of April 1961. Warned by telephone at home, he drove to Beja so fast, a deputy later said, that his car nearly crashed. He arrived with a single companion, Captain Alves Ribeiro, both in civilian clothes.3 sources3 sources

At around 6.30 a.m., in pouring rain, he walked towards the gate of the barracks, which by then was surrounded by the GNR and other forces. He was shot and killed on the spot. Who fired is the most contested question of the whole affair, and the answer changed with who was speaking and when.2 sources2 sources

Not every loyalist was so sure. Speaking in the same session, Beja's own deputy, Meneses Soares, said Fonseca was struck down “by murderous bullets” as he was about to enter the barracks, “perhaps between the crossfire of besieged and besiegers”. By Zagalo's account the other rebels had left by then; he and the dying Vilar lay wounded in the yard, and he surrendered after daybreak.2 sources2 sources

The regime buried Fonseca as a hero. The President of the National Assembly paid tribute to him on 3 January, and a deputy described thousands following his coffin in his home city of Leiria. Participants and RTP call his death friendly fire that propaganda pinned on the insurgents. The son of one of the Lisbon doctors sent to Beja, writing in 2017, says the circumstances were never fully cleared up.5 sources5 sources

Varela Gomes reached the Misericórdia hospital in Beja in a grave state. Local surgeons operated on him, and so did Sérgio Sabido Ferreira, who had come from Lisbon with an emergency team sent on the health minister's orders. The PIDE wanted to interrogate him first; the doctors said he would die if they waited, refused to let the agents into the operating theatre and threw them out. Sabido Ferreira also refused to go back to Lisbon until the wounded rebels had been treated.4 sources4 sources

Police set up vehicle checks across the Alentejo, the Algarve, Setúbal and Lisbon. An official note of 3 January announced that the officers involved had been dismissed as “unworthy to wear the same uniform” as the soldiers fighting overseas. Pimentel points out what that did: once they were no longer soldiers, they could be handed to the PIDE instead of a military court. Serra was caught in Tavira; Maria Eugénia Varela Gomes, the captain's wife, was arrested too.4 sources4 sources

Hundreds of people were detained, whether or not they had taken part, and at the end of June 1962 close to a hundred were still in prison; Pedroso Marques later put the arrests at more than a thousand. Some escaped into Latin American embassies. Pedroso Marques himself spent almost three years in the Brazilian embassy in Lisbon, then slipped past the police watching it and reached France clandestinely.3 sources3 sources

Delgado got away. By Arajaryr Campos's account they hid, reached Porto on 3 January, and Delgado left the country on 10 January through the PIDE post at Barca d'Alva; the A Comarca article gives 2 January instead. That article also says he later mocked the police by telling how he had slipped past them in disguise. In Pimentel's summary of his own report, he called the PIDE a “paper tiger”.3 sources3 sources

On 3 January Salazar came to the National Assembly to give his statement on the loss of Goa and asked its president to read it for him. The record has him explaining that “with the emotions of recent weeks” he had suffered a mishap that took his voice. The rebels' declaration of 2011 claimed Beja was what struck the dictator dumb; the president of the Assembly said comments on Beja would have to wait for a later session.2 sources2 sources

The trial before the Plenary Court, the special court for political crimes, ran from 28 January to 29 July 1964. For the first time civilians and soldiers sat together in the dock. Pimentel counts 82 defendants, of whom 49 received major sentences, 16 correctional prison terms and 17 were acquitted; the rebels' 2011 declaration, Zagalo and Pedroso Marques all speak of 87 accused. In a linked case, Zagalo recalls, seventeen defendants charged with belonging to the Communist Party were all acquitted of that charge.4 sources4 sources

By the standards of the Plenary Court these were mild terms, and the defendants were allowed to attack the regime from the dock while foreign newspapers followed the sessions. Zagalo thought Salazar chose leniency once it was clear the revolt had not come from the Communist Party. Calapez, the obvious witness for the prosecution, never appeared.2 sources2 sources

The PIDE did not forget Delgado. The historian Luís Farinha, a former director of the Museu do Aljube, writes that the PIDE's plan to lure him to the border was drawn up after Beja. On 13 February 1965 a PIDE squad killed the general and Arajaryr Campos near Olivenza in Spain, and hid their bodies near Villanueva del Fresno. His remains were brought to Lisbon in 1975 and to the National Pantheon in 1990.3 sources3 sources

Serra was released in 1972. After the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974, Varela Gomes was taken back into the army as a colonel and became the leading figure of the Fifth Division of the armed forces staff, which ran the Armed Forces Movement's information and cultural campaigns during the revolutionary period. After 25 November 1975, when moderate officers defeated the radical left of the army, he went underground and into exile in Cuba and Angola, returning in 1979. He died on 26 February 2018, aged 93; parliament passed a vote of condolence with only the CDS-PP voting against, though four of its deputies abstained.5 sources5 sources

Calapez's career went the other way. He sat in the National Assembly for Beja in its last legislature, from 1973 to 1974, and later refused a decoration offered under Prime Minister Cavaco Silva. In 1987, visiting Beja as President, Mário Soares remarked, as Jornal de Notícias recalled, that without “a certain Major Calapez” the 25 April would have come fifteen years earlier.3 sources3 sources

For decades the revolt sat in a historical footnote. Pimentel argues that its memory was erased by the regime and also by the part of the opposition that had stayed away and preferred to see the rebels as reckless. In 2011, twenty-two survivors signed a declaration to rescue what they called its “erased memory”, and in January 2012 most of the surviving participants met at the Museu da República e Resistência in Lisbon. Zagalo has argued that Varela Gomes and his officers deserve to be called the first “captains of April”.3 sources3 sources