Students against Salazar: the academic crisis of 1962

On Saturday 24 March 1962, a student of agronomy called Berta threw pebbles at a bedroom window on Avenida do Brasil in Lisbon. It was her boyfriend's 23rd birthday, but she had come to warn him. Eurico Figueiredo, a medical student who led the provisional students' association of the Faculty of Medicine, ran with her to the Cidade Universitária, the university campus nearby. The riot police had got there first.1 source1 source

That day was meant to be the Dia do Estudante, Students' Day, a programme of events ending in a dinner that the student associations organised. The associations had asked the Ministry of National Education and the rectorate for permission and heard nothing. When they went ahead, the ministry banned the event, saying the programme had not been handed in on time, and the police occupied the campus.2 sources2 sources

The student leaders went to the rector of the University of Lisbon, Marcelo Caetano, who asked the Minister of Education, Manuel Lopes de Almeida, to see them that afternoon. Thousands of students waited at the Estádio Universitário, where youth championships of the Mocidade Portuguesa, the regime's youth organisation, were under way. They turned their backs on the games. The minister did not receive the delegation, and two of its four members tried and failed to reach Salazar. By the time they got back, the police had charged.2 sources2 sources

Caetano arrived at the stadium in his official car, calm, in a hat and dark overcoat. With the police still in place, he proposed that students and teachers meet at the Castanheira de Moura restaurant in Lumiar instead of holding the Students' Day dinner. As the crowd walked down the Campo Grande towards it, the riot police charged again, injuring and arresting students. “They split my head open, which gave me a lot of credit,” Figueiredo recalled fifty years later (in translation).2 sources2 sources

Portugal in 1962 was a dictatorship, the Estado Novo (New State) of António de Oliveira Salazar, with censorship, a political police, the PIDE, riot police, and no right to strike, demonstrate or form free associations. University students were a small elite. About 30,000 of them studied at the country's four universities, and a Catholic Action survey directed by the sociologist Adérito Sedas Nunes found that only 5 to 6 per cent came from working-class or peasant families.4 sources4 sources

Students' Day had no fixed date. Associations had tried to hold and institutionalise it since the 1950s, and the authorities had let it go ahead from 16 to 19 March 1961, when the closing dinner, with hundreds of students, was held in the canteen of the Instituto Superior Técnico. In Lisbon the associations coordinated through the RIA (Reunião Inter-Associações), a semi-clandestine body whose secretary-general in 1962 was Jorge Sampaio, a sixth-year law student.3 sources3 sources

The regime was also under strain. The year 1961 had brought the seizure of the liner Santa Maria by opposition rebels, the start of the war in Angola, a failed coup involving the Defence Minister, Botelho Moniz, and India's invasion of Goa, and on New Year's Eve rebels attacked the barracks at Beja. In February 1962 the associations of Lisbon, Coimbra and Porto decided to set up a National Secretariat of Portuguese Students, and on 9 to 11 March they held a first National Students' Meeting in Coimbra, although the authorities had banned it.3 sources3 sources

On Sunday 25 March the student leaders met at the association of the Instituto Superior de Ciências Económicas e Financeiras and declared a luto académico, an academic mourning. Strikes were illegal, so the word described a boycott of classes. Figueiredo remembered the decision being taken the evening before, on the restaurant steps. On Monday 26 March the Técnico's association was handing out leaflets calling for it, under a slogan the Communist Party later recalled as “ofenderam-te, enluta-te!” (“they offended you, go into mourning!”). Most faculties in Lisbon stopped, and Coimbra's students backed them.4 sources4 sources

At first the government gave way. On 27 March Lopes de Almeida received a delegation and lifted the ban, and Students' Day was rescheduled for 7 and 8 April. The students suspended the mourning. Then, after a Council of Ministers on Thursday 5 April, Salazar made his minister go back on his word: the new Students' Day was banned as well.3 sources3 sources

The decision also overruled the rector. Caetano had already asked to be relieved of his post on 25 March, according to a chronology published by Correio da Manhã in 2012. On 5 April, in the words of José Medeiros Ferreira, a student leader in 1962 and later a historian, he resigned “irreversibly and immediately” (in translation). Some faculty directors resigned with him. The University of Lisbon lists his rectorship as 1959 to 1962. His successor, from 1962, was Paulo Cunha.3 sources3 sources

The crackdown widened. On 7 April a student march to the Ministry of Education was broken up, and on 13 April the ministry suspended the elected boards of the Lisbon associations. In Coimbra the police surrounded students in the Academic Association on 20 April. Medeiros Ferreira noted that the director-general of the PIDE, Colonel Homero de Matos, also left his post that April.2 sources2 sources

Coimbra had its own fight. The rector there, Braga da Cruz, refused to speak to the students, who called for his resignation. The minister revoked the statutes of the Academic Association and named new presidents for its general assembly, its women's council and even its football section. All of them refused the posts, and a football match between Académica and Beira-Mar was called off.1 source1 source

Students were not the only people protesting. In late April two miners were killed when the GNR, the rural gendarmerie, broke up a protest at Aljustrel, and on May Day in Lisbon a 25-year-old, Estêvão Giro, was killed by the PSP, the public security police, near the Largo do Caldas. Farm workers in the Alentejo would soon stop work in their thousands to demand an eight-hour day.3 sources3 sources

The censored press printed mostly the ministry's official notes, so the students made their own news. Leaflets were handed out by hand, and open-air plenaries took decisions by majority vote. Maria João Gerardo, then a second-year student of Germanic languages, remembered that Carris conductors on Lisbon's buses and trams often let students ride free as a sign of support. The journalist Maria Antónia Fiadeiro, then a philosophy student, recalled wearing flat shoes to outrun the police, who sprayed blue ink at demonstrators to identify them.2 sources2 sources

On Wednesday 9 May about 6,000 students met in a plenary at the Estádio Universitário. They voted to extend the mourning to tests and final exams, and dozens of them began a hunger strike in the canteen of the Cidade Universitária. The idea came from Eurico Figueiredo. Hundreds of other students stayed in the canteen with them, partly because of rumours that the right-wing group Jovem Portugal meant to break in.2 sources2 sources

Accounts differ. Correio da Manhã's 2012 feature counts 81 hunger strikers, six of them women, and 1,500 supporters in the canteen; a Communist Party account gives 80 and “more than a thousand”. Most sources date the start of the strike to 9 May, but the main text of the 2012 feature gives 10 May.4 sources4 sources

On 10 May the University Senate asked the government to have the canteen cleared without force. At about three in the morning of Friday 11 May the police went in. According to the historian Luísa Tiago de Oliveira, the authorities took about 1,500 students out, identified them and held them for some time. The Museu do Aljube speaks of hundreds of arrests, and the party account puts the mass arrest on 10 May.4 sources4 sources

Men and women were taken to different places, the women to the Governo Civil, Lisbon's civil government building, with one of their teachers, Professor Lindley Cintra, at their side. Fiadeiro was among them. “I was arrested and I was happy,” she remembered (in translation). The women were released the next morning.1 source1 source

Lisbon talked of little else. University students were well regarded, since a degree was hard and expensive to get, and “seeing the police beat that elite was shocking,” said (in translation) the historian Fernando Rosas, who had been clubbed on 24 March as a secondary-school pupil. Medeiros Ferreira quoted the British ambassador as reporting on 11 May that most observers thought the situation more serious for the regime than the communists' street agitation.1 source1 source

The regime now presented the movement as communist-led. On 21 May it published Decree-Law 44 357, which gave the Ministry of Education stronger disciplinary powers. Between 24 and 28 May the police arrested Communist students, among them José Bernardino of the Instituto Superior Técnico and, on 28 May, Eurico Figueiredo, whose face had appeared on “Wanted” posters around Lisbon. He was held in the Aljube, a political prison beside Lisbon Cathedral, until late July and expelled from the University of Lisbon.4 sources4 sources

On 4 June the police charged students and teachers at the Faculty of Medicine, and Lindley Cintra was badly beaten. But a strike that included exams was a heavy cost for students and their families: it could mean losing a grant, or being called up and sent to the war in Angola. The Catholic students of the JUC (Juventude Universitária Católica) and many others did not support it, and on 14 June a plenary at the Instituto Superior Técnico called the mourning off.3 sources3 sources

The protests did not stop at once. On 20 June students marched towards the Aljube to support Figueiredo; riot police charged them near the cathedral, and they went on down to the Baixa shouting “Liberdade! Autonomia!” (“Freedom! Autonomy!”).1 source1 source

The punishments came at the end of the academic year. By a ministerial order of 29 June, 21 students who had taken part in the hunger strike were barred from every school in Lisbon. In Coimbra, 34 students received sentences ranging from six months' expulsion from the university to two years' exclusion from every school in the country. Medeiros Ferreira counted about 50 students expelled across the three university cities. According to the 2012 feature, Isabel Vila Maior, a married arts student, was the only one of the women hunger strikers to be expelled in Lisbon. Some of those expelled in Lisbon went on to study in Coimbra.1 source1 source

The expulsions closed the academic year, but student protest did not end. Arrests of students followed every year, according to Fernando Rosas. Students tried again to hold Students' Day and were refused; in 1964 the president of the Técnico's association, Jorge Dias de Deus, was among those expelled. In 1965, after a Communist Party official informed on them, the PIDE got hold of about 500 names of communists and association activists and arrested dozens of students in a few days.2 sources2 sources

The movement also changed character. Before 1962, one association leader told Oliveira, students had fought to improve the system; afterwards, many concluded that it could not be improved and had to be brought down. The researcher Guya Accornero describes the crisis as the moment the student movement moved beyond the corporate demands that had dominated it until then.2 sources2 sources

In September 1968, after a fall had left Salazar unable to govern, Marcelo Caetano, the rector who had resigned in 1962, replaced him as head of government. Under him the next great student revolt broke out in Coimbra, where on 17 April 1969 the president of the Academic Association, Alberto Martins, was refused the floor at the opening of the new Mathematics building. He was arrested that night.5 sources5 sources

Several students of 1962 held high office after the revolution of 25 April 1974. Jorge Sampaio became mayor of Lisbon and was President of the Republic from 1996 to 2006; when he died in 2021, the government's statement declaring national mourning recalled him as one of the leaders of the 1962 crisis. José Medeiros Ferreira, who followed him at the head of the RIA, became foreign minister. João Cravinho was later a minister, and so was António Correia de Campos, who had joined the hunger strike. The doctor Isabel do Carmo was another student of 1962.5 sources5 sources

Others who were there go further. For Fernando Rosas, the students of 1962 became the first permanent source of opposition to the regime: “That was where the regime lost its youth, lost its elites and lost its future” (in translation). Correia de Campos called the academic mourning a seedbed of the political leaders of democratic Portugal.2 sources2 sources

In 1987 the Assembly of the Republic made 24 March the Dia Nacional do Estudante, National Student Day, in homage to the student movement of the early 1960s. Law 19/87 of 1 June fixed the date, and a 1988 decree-law gave student associations the job of organising it. The Museu do Aljube calls it a day of struggle for the right to education and for students' rights. On 24 March 2024 the University of Lisbon held a colloquium on the crisis at its Reitoria; the programme listed President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa at the opening session and a screening of RTP's documentary about 1962.4 sources4 sources