Adriano Moreira (1922–2022): Salazar’s reformer in democracy’s parliament

Adriano Moreira died on the morning of Sunday 23 October 2022, seven weeks after his hundredth birthday. The Diário de Notícias broke the news, citing his family, and the CDS-PP, the party he had once led, confirmed it to the Lusa news agency.2 sources

By early afternoon President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa read a short statement at the Palácio de Belém, his official residence. He said Moreira had “crossed two regimes”, and then listed the roles of a single life.2 sources

Few Portuguese lives covered as much ground. Moreira was jailed by António de Oliveira Salazar’s dictatorship in his twenties, served it as Overseas Minister when war broke out in Angola, was purged after the 1974 revolution and came back to sit for 15 years in the parliament of the new democracy. On his centenary Lusa called him the longest-lived politician in the history of Portuguese democracy.3 sources

His death reopened an old argument. Admirers remembered the minister who abolished the legal category of “native” in Portugal’s African colonies. Critics remembered a senior figure of a regime that went to war to keep those colonies.2 sources

The Estado Novo (New State) was the dictatorship that grew out of a military coup in 1926 and was shaped by Salazar; it lasted until the revolution of 25 April 1974. It governed Angola, Mozambique, Guinea and the smaller colonies from Lisbon. The Colonial Act of 1930 declared that colonialism belonged to the “organic essence of the Portuguese Nation”.2 sources

After 1945, with the new United Nations pressing for decolonisation, Lisbon changed its vocabulary. A constitutional revision in 1951 renamed the colonies “overseas provinces” and the empire the “Portuguese Overseas”. The historian Fernando Tavares Pimenta calls this a change that was “above all aesthetic, that is, of terminology”.1 source

In the 1950s the regime found an intellectual defence in the work of the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre. His theory, which came to be called lusotropicalism, held that the Portuguese had a special talent for living and mixing with tropical peoples. The Overseas Minister Sarmento Rodrigues invited Freyre on a seven-month tour of the empire, from August 1951 to February 1952.3 sources

Historians are blunt about what the theory was used for. João Medina calls the idea that Portugal could not be racist or colonialist, because it was by nature multiracial and spread over several continents, a myth, and names Moreira among the academics and ideologues who voiced it. African nationalists rejected it early: the Angolan sociologist Mário Pinto de Andrade, a founder of the MPLA, challenged it in an article in 1955.2 sources

Moreira was born on 6 September 1922 in Grijó de Vale Benfeito, a village in the district of Bragança in the far north-east. His father was a police officer, his grandfather a miller. The family moved to Lisbon before he was two and settled in Campolide. He went to the Liceu Passos Manuel, entered the Lisbon law faculty at 16 and graduated in 1944.3 sources

In 1945 he signed a list of the MUD, the Movement of Democratic Unity, a post-war opposition movement that called for free elections. Soon afterwards he took on a case that put him on the wrong side of the regime.3 sources

General Marques Godinho, held on suspicion of plotting a coup against Salazar, died in prison. Moreira had petitioned for habeas corpus for him and for Admiral Mendes Cabeçadas, arguing that officers could not be held in the Júlio de Matos psychiatric hospital on the orders of the political police. RTP and the Diário de Notícias call it the first habeas corpus petition on record in Portugal. He also accused the War Minister, Fernando Santos Costa, of the voluntary homicide of the general.3 sources

He was then held in the Aljube prison in Lisbon for about two months. The Diário de Notícias says this followed his refusal, on grounds of professional secrecy, to tell the PIDE political police who had talked to him about the case. Viriato Soromenho-Marques, drawing on Moreira’s memoir, writes that the order came from Santos Costa.3 sources

In the Aljube he met Mário Soares, then a young opponent of the regime; RTP says the two shared a cell. “Until then I knew him only by name,” Moreira recalled in 1995, adding that they held opposite views. He was released on Salazar’s orders, and in his memoir he recalled the dictator’s words.3 sources

In 1950 Moreira joined the staff of the Escola Superior Colonial in Lisbon, the state’s school of colonial studies. It became the Instituto Superior de Estudos Ultramarinos (ISEU) in 1954 and is today the ISCSP, the Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas. He ran it from 1958.4 sources

His road to colonial policy ran through prisons. In 1953 the Overseas Minister, Sarmento Rodrigues, asked him to study the prison system in Angola and Mozambique. His thesis, O Problema Prisional do Ultramar, was published in 1954 and won a prize from the Lisbon Academy of Sciences. He gave the 80 contos of prize money to his mother, to rebuild the chapel in his home village.3 sources

In 1956 he founded and directed the Centre for Political and Social Studies of the state’s overseas research board. In 1957 the centre sent three study missions to the colonies to carry out direct surveys. According to the historian Cláudia Castelo, as summarised by João Alberto da Costa Pinto, the researchers found racism among Portuguese settlers, and proposed to re-educate the settlers already there and to select future ones more carefully.2 sources

In the late 1950s he also sat in Portugal’s delegation to the UN General Assembly in New York, as former colonies were becoming new member states. “There I could hear for the first time, in freedom, the voices of peoples who were treated as mute or as dispensable,” he later said. The philosopher Viriato Soromenho-Marques, an admirer, writes that the experience showed him how isolated Portugal was becoming, even among NATO allies.4 sources

In 1961 the empire caught fire. On the night of 3 to 4 February nationalists attacked prisons in Luanda to free political prisoners. On 15 March the UPA, a movement based in the Congo, launched an uprising in northern Angola that massacred white settlers and also mixed-race and African workers; Soromenho-Marques puts the dead at more than 5,000. In the Luanda slums, far-right whites organised by PIDE men killed Black and mixed-race residents.2 sources

In Lisbon the Defence Minister, General Botelho Moniz, prepared a coup to force a political way out of Africa. Salazar struck first. On 13 April 1961 the plotters’ dismissals appeared in the official gazette, and the same day Moreira, an under-secretary for overseas administration since 1960, replaced Rear Admiral Lopes Alves as Overseas Minister. He was 38. General Venâncio Deslandes went to Luanda as Governor-General and commander-in-chief.2 sources

Moreira travelled to Angola within days. In May 1961 he announced a policy of “progressive and irreversible autonomy” for the overseas provinces. On 6 September 1961 a decree-law repealed the Estatuto do Indigenato and gave all natives of the colonies Portuguese citizenship, which Pimenta calls “at least nominal”.1 source

In words quoted by the Diário de Notícias in his obituary, the old statute “was the negation of citizenship” and “allowed savage abuses”. According to his memoir, cited by Pimenta, he also had the Angolan nationalist Agostinho Neto, held since June 1960, released, and invited the Mozambican Eduardo Mondlane to teach at the future university of Mozambique.2 sources

The reforms came with repression. In 1961, under Moreira’s ministry, the Tarrafal penal camp on Santiago, in Cape Verde, reopened as the Chão Bom “labour camp”. Tarrafal had held the regime’s political prisoners from 1936 until the mid-1950s; Medina says it closed in 1954, the Diário de Notícias in 1956. RTP gives Chão Bom room for 500 prisoners and adds a labour camp at Missombo, in Angola.3 sources

Critics hold Moreira personally responsible. Observador wrote in 2016 that he signed the reopening of Tarrafal, and quoted Domingos Abrantes, a Communist leader who had escaped from Caxias prison while Moreira was minister. In 2022 the Left Bloc said Moreira had decided to reopen Tarrafal and to open a camp at São Nicolau in Angola to hold independence fighters.2 sources

Resistance came from inside the regime. From late 1961 the “integrationists”, who wanted the colonies run as ordinary parts of Portugal, argued that the war had been won and the reforms were unnecessary. Big metropolitan and foreign companies defended their privileges. Salazar, Pimenta writes, was not insensitive to these arguments.1 source

In Luanda, Deslandes governed as if Angola were already autonomous. He taxed the diamond company Diamang to pay for defence and had Angola’s Legislative Council approve university study centres without Lisbon’s authorisation. On 17 July 1962 Lisbon annulled the decree; six days later Moreira announced the Estudos Gerais Universitários to calm the colony. Deslandes was summoned to Lisbon and dismissed on 25 September 1962.1 source

That autumn the Overseas Council in Lisbon debated a new Organic Law for the colonies. Under pressure from Angola, Moreira let three observers from the settlers’ business associations attend. Their demands for wide autonomy shocked the integrationists, who blamed his opening. In Pimenta’s reading, with the guerrillas contained and his authority over the army restored, Salazar decided the reforms had become unnecessary and divisive.1 source

Moreira’s own account, which Soromenho-Marques repeats, is that Salazar asked him to change his African policy and he refused. On 4 December 1962 Commander Peixoto Correia replaced him. Many sources, including parliament’s mourning vote, give his term as 1961 to 1963.4 sources

Pimenta concludes that Moreira was aiming at a “neocolonial” political solution, like the one de Gaulle had found in French West and Equatorial Africa: growing self-government for the colonies, with white settlers given a larger share of power. Salazar, he writes, saw the reforms only as a way to buy time to win the war, while Moreira saw them as a way to end by political means a war he knew could not be won by arms.1 source

Without him the reforms stalled. The new Organic Law of April 1963 kept power in Lisbon, and Angola’s electorate stayed tiny.1 source

Looking back, Moreira said: “I did what I could in that whole period, but it was very great toil, because it hit brutal interests; a structure was changed.” The Diário de Notícias adds that several scholars saw the changes as an attempt to bring the regime’s actions into line with its political discourse.1 source

Out of government, Moreira went back to teaching, and from 1965 he presided over the Lisbon Geographical Society. In 1968 he married Mónica Lima Mayer; they had six children, among them the Socialist deputy Isabel Moreira.2 sources

Critics also point to his record in academia. The Left Bloc’s 2022 declaration says that in 1962, while minister, he played an active part in the persecution of the historian Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, who was dismissed from the overseas institute after backing that year’s student protests and criticising Moreira’s role there.1 source

The revolution of 25 April 1974 swept away the regime, and Moreira was purged from his official posts; RTP says the purge came with an arrest warrant. A year later, visiting Brazil on business, he learned from Admiral Pinheiro de Azevedo that the warrant was waiting for him in Lisbon during the “Hot Summer” of 1975, when the revolution swung furthest to the left.3 sources

He stayed, and after two hard months began teaching at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. Asked later whether Brazil had left him bitter, he said: “No, I’m not one for resentments.”2 sources

He came home in 1977. President Ramalho Eanes had him reinstated at the University of Lisbon, and he joined the CDS, the Christian democratic party, at the invitation of Freitas do Amaral and others. In 1980 he was elected deputy for Bragança on the Democratic Alliance list, and then four more times, for Porto and Lisbon.5 sources

He led the CDS from 1986 to 1988 and again on an interim basis in 1991 and 1992, and was Vice-President of the Assembleia da República from 1991 to 1995. He left party politics in 1995 but not public life. Parliament elected him to the Council of State, the President’s advisory body, from 2015 to 2019.3 sources

The classroom remained his base. He was a founding member of the Portuguese Political Science Association, which calls him one of the founders of the teaching of political science and international relations in Portugal, and he taught strategy and geopolitics at military schools. “My life was the school, above all,” he told Lusa in 2012. “Political intervention was more a civic obligation.”3 sources

His last year was full of honours. In June 2022 the President gave him the Grand Cross of the Order of Camões, and on his hundredth birthday Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa thanked him for his work for the armed forces, the Portuguese language and culture.2 sources

Tributes after his death came from across the spectrum. Augusto Santos Silva, the Socialist President of the Assembleia, wrote that democracy had made Moreira a deputy and party leader, and that he in turn had helped democracy “situate itself in the historical continuity of Portugal”. Ramalho Eanes said that, without fully believing in the Estado Novo’s creed, Moreira had agreed to be Salazar’s minister and produced reforms of great merit in the colonies.1 source

Others were more guarded. Carlos César, president of the Socialist Party, described a man who, “after an influential collaboration with the previous regime”, had found his way to democratic Portugal and took an active, constructive part in it.1 source

His wake was held at the Jerónimos Monastery in Lisbon from 20:00 on Monday 24 October, with a Mass there at noon the next day, followed by a funeral for the family only.1 source

On 27 October parliament read a mourning vote that recalled his term as Overseas Minister of the Estado Novo alongside his years as a deputy. It passed with the votes of the PS, PSD, Chega, Liberal Initiative, PAN and Livre. The Communists and the Left Bloc voted against, and one Socialist deputy, Rui Lage, abstained. Lisbon’s council and municipal assembly split along similar lines.2 sources

The Communists wrote that it was not possible to erase his responsibilities as a minister of the fascist regime at the start of the colonial war. The Left Bloc accepted that his democratic and academic career deserved recognition, but said the vote failed a duty of memory.1 source

Rui Lage explained his abstention with his own family story. His father, a conscript officer, was detained in 1968 and accused of being an enemy of the government’s overseas policy. Lage wrote that his father’s suffering could not be blamed on Moreira, who had left office six years earlier, and that Moreira’s commitment to democracy was unequivocal. But he could not separate his vote from a judgement on the Estado Novo’s colonial rule.1 source

Moreira’s life shows the continuities between Portugal’s two regimes. A minister of the old regime became a vice-president of the new parliament, and he taught generations of students and officers under both.2 sources

The argument over his record is an argument over the empire. His admirers see a reformer who left rather than reverse the repeal of the indigenato. Soromenho-Marques calls his acceptance of a defeat to stay faithful to a principle “a sign of rare greatness”, and the former CDS leader Paulo Portas called him the only figure of the old regime with the vision to settle the colonial question peacefully.2 sources

His critics see reforms meant to protect the empire. Amanda Palomo Alves argues that Salazar appointed him partly to shield the regime from international criticism, and that wage gaps between Black and white workers in Luanda survived the end of the indigenato. The Communists and the Left Bloc point to the war that began on his watch and lasted until 1974, and to camps such as Chão Bom.2 sources

In 2011 the Cape Verdean historian Corsino Tolentino said time would tell whether Moreira had added value to society “or whether it was an evil that the system did and that he himself served and does not reject”. Yet at the ceremony where the University of Mindelo gave Moreira an honorary doctorate, Lusa quoted him saying the former minister was “completely absolved”.1 source

On his centenary the President put the dilemma in one sentence: when the young minister tried to reform colonial policy and law, “for many, what he brought was too much rupture, and for many others, it arrived at least a decade late”. The split vote in parliament a few weeks later showed that the country has not settled the question.2 sources