To be and not to be — the Portuguese Revolution of 1974/75

{The victorious military movement of 25 April 1974 gave rise, from the first day, to the eruption of a mass, revolutionary movement. It was a true shifting of techtonic plates which subverted the established order at all levels of society. There were attempts to create and link together new forms of democratic organization and expression of the popular will in thousands of companies, in poor urban neighbourhoods and rural communities in the south, in schools, hospitals, local and central government offices, and even in the Armed Forces.

It was a mass, revolutionary movment that, at different stages  of its advance, occupied factories, big landholdings and vacant housing estates; it discovered self-management and workers’ control, imposed the nationalization of the banks and other strategic sectors of the economy, reorganized bosses and managment, created Collective Production Units for the Agrarian Reform and managed the lives of thousands of the poor from the north to the south of the country. Through its own initiative and strength on the streets, it was able to impose, as its own conquests, respect for public liberties, political democratization of the state, the destruction of the hard core of the previous regime’s repressive aparatus and the charging of its key personnel, trade union liberties and the right to strike, and the foundations of a new system of social justice. The world was turned upside down and for 19 months the future was now; a rare and brief moment when ordinary women and men, working people and the oppressed, dreamt of taking power and their own destinies into their own hands. That is what has been called, quite rightly in my opinion, the Portuguese Revolution of 1974/1975.

- From military coup to revolutionary explosion –

This Revolution had a first and essential peculiarity to which little attention is usually paid. It was triggered by a military coup with unique characteristics in the long history of military coups during the 19th and 20th centuries in Portugal. A military movement that was the result of weariness with the colonial war that had been dragging on for 13 years, with no possibility of victory and serious defeats in sight; a war fought against the tide of history, that was unjust and in the short term ruinous. In a country prevented by the dictatorship from expressing itself and deciding freely on this matter, the discontent against the war, in one of those ironies in which history is fertile, was taken up by the young officers who were leading it on the battlefield, the captains and majors who commanded the companies, the core units of the colonial military occupation.

In other words, it wasn't a plot by generals, admirals and colonels (all of whom were loyal to the regime and the war effort, with a few well-known exceptions). It was a movement of middle-ranking officers who, in the process, would be joined by junior officers and rank-and-file soldiers.1

A conspiracy that, against a backdrop of growing popular discontent and in the political and ideological environment of the time, quickly evolved from corporate-professional demands (which, incidentally, the government met in October 1973) to a subversive political purpose: from September 1973 to March 1974, from the officers' plenaries in Évora to those in Cascais, the movement would clearly become aware of the need to overthrow the regime. Without democratization, there would be no political solution to end the war.

The rapid extension and politicization of the middle-ranking officers' conspiracy, their control or neutralization of the majority of the main operational units of the three branches of the Armed Forces in the country, thus created a situation that wasn't immediately noticeable but was decisive: it drastically deprived the state and the military hierarchy of operational strength. In other words, it transformed this hierarchy, and its notorious oath of obedience to the regime on 14 March 1974, into a pathetic and useless “rheumatic brigade" (as the top brass loyal to the regime became known)2 ; a head without a body and that was unaware of the fact that it didn't have one. But it also took that power of intervention away from the few dissident generals who were convinced that they had a private military coup of their own in hand. The first hours of “25 April" and its aftermath were a bitter surprise both for the loyal senior commanders and for General Spínola and the officers who followed him.3 During the long night of 25 to 26 April in the Pontinha barracks, where the movement's general staff had taken shelter, the spinolistas had their first close contact with an Armed Forces Movement (MFA) that was willing to make some programmatic concessions regarding the colonies, but totally unwilling to give up its place in the process that was to follow.

This gives rise to a second central characteristic: the neutralization/annulment of the traditional role of the armed forces. The victory of the middle-ranking officers' movement actually broke the military's hierarchical chain of command and removed it from its traditional control by the state and the leaders it appointed, thus paralysing the military's role as the main organ of the state's organized violence. In this sense, strictly speaking, the Armed Forces ceased to exist and was succeeded by the MFA, which was something quite different, and which would soon control the bulk of the most important operational military power through COPCON (Operational Command of the Continent). During this initial period of Spinola's leadership, until his defeat on 28 September 1974 at the earliest, there was a desperate struggle by the remnants of the old hierarchy (which was, in fact, very largely eliminated by the mutinous officers during the “night of the generals” on 6 May) to eliminate the MFA as the de facto organ of power. The defeat of Spinola thus consolidated this kind of annulment of the Armed Forces as the backbone of state violence.

It should be added that this situation had another important consequence: the paralysing, pulverization and general weakening of the power and authority of the state itself. What emerged from the military coup was a multifaceted power centre with conflicting and weakened competences: a National Salvation Junta with no real power inside the Armed Forces, a Provisional Government with no powers over the Armed Forces and with the police forces and ministries paralysed, a Council of State with largely rhetorical powers and, outside this institutional framework (although represented in the Council of State), the Programme Coordinator of the Armed Forces Movement (MFA), the only seat of effective power, but in strong dispute with the Spinola faction in the Armed Forces and other bodies. The old power structure had collapsed, no longer threatening anyone and leaving a empty space that was susceptible to drastic changes in the social and political balance of power.

Finally, the process described above had another effect: an end in the short term to the colonial war on all three fronts (Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique) and the emergence, both among the armed forces in Africa and in Portuguese public opinion, of a strong oppostion to sending any more troops to the colonies. They demanded the return of the troops and their confinement to Portuguese territory, alongside immediate negotiations with the libertation movements on their terms. In the combat zones, fighting gave way to fraternization with the “enemy”. Strictly speaking, in political and military terms the colonial army accepted its defeat and surrendered. Both the colonial army and public opinion refused to continue the war. Decolonization was thus negotiated by the MFA and the Provisional Government, with no segment of public opinion in favour of continuing the war, with no part of the military disposed to continue fighting and with no international support for anything other than self-determination and independence for the peoples of the colonies. The end of the empire was underway.

The combination of these factors (the interruption of the Armed Forces’ role as the main guarantor of “order” and the weakening of the power of the state) with the build up of poltical and social tensions in the final days of the Marcelo Caetano regime, gave rise to the revolutionary explosion. The largely spontaneous mass movement, in one these “mysteries” that are typical of mature revolutionary situations, on the very morning of the coup – the emblematic outcome of the confrontations in Ribeira das Naus and Rua do Arsenal played their part here4   – came to the twin conclusions that it could and should take the initiative. It understood both the opportunity and its own strength: “the time is now, because they no longer have an army and we are stronger than them”. It was an almost intuitive understanding that the balance of forces, at that unmissable moment, was favourable to an initiative by the people. From being a spectator, the mass movement became the main actor. Before the military coup, despite its radical character and strength, it could not on its own overthrow the regime. But now it seized the opportunity offered by this peculiar military movement, bursting through ‘the doors that April opened’. The coup, contrary to Alvaro Cunhal’s attempts to incoporate it into the old narrative of a “national uprising”5 , was not itself an armed expression of the people’s revolt (at first it tried to head off such a revolt). It was not itself the revolutionary explosion, because of its particular characteristics, but it contributed decisively to unleashing that explosion.

- The PREC (Revolutionary Process Underway) -

In its unstoppable initial momentum, between May and September 1974, the revolutionary popular movement conquered much of what was essential, on the streets, in the factories, in the working class neighbourhoods, in the schools, in the countryside: the foundations of political democratization, fundamental public freedoms, the liquidation of the organs of political repression and censorship and the fascist militias, long before all of this was sanctioned by law. Political democracy in Portugal was not a gift from those in power. It was a popular conquest imposed on the powers that be. The same goes for democratization in the social sphere, the right to strike, freedom of association, the minimum wage, paid holidays, shorter working hours, the foundations of a universal social security system or the occupation of vacant houses by poor residents. The mass movement achieved all of this by pitting its organs of popular power, elected in factory plenaries or residents' assemblies, against the systematic opposition of the National Salvation Junta (JSN), the Provisional Government (GP) and even the leadership of the PCP and the Intersindical, which at that stage had taken on the role of guardians of the “democratic order" against “irresponsible leftism". However, it was the strength of this movement that proved decisive in defeating the first counter-revolutionary attempt by the Spinola movement on 28 September 1974, somehow imposing the MFA as the hegemonic political-military force in the process.

From October 1974 onwards, the economic crisis, the closure or plundering of many companies by their fleeing bosses, skyrocketing unemployment, changed and radicalized the forms of action: workers occupied companies and, from January onwards, the rural estates of the Alentejo and Baixo Ribatejo, experimented with self-management or demanded the intervention of the state or the MFA, tried out various forms of workers' control and did so through Workers' Committees or residents' committees elected by themselves. Keeping companies running, defeating economic sabotage and securing jobs soon raised the question of nationalizing the strategic sectors of the economy (starting with banking). This was achieved in the aftermath of the defeat of the Spinolists' second counter-revolutionary attempt on 11 March 1975. The nationalization of the banks (in practice, of the big financial groups) was officially approved and the Agrarian Reform, which was already underway, was made law. Workers' control was on the agenda. The revolutionary process seemed to be taking a big step forward. In reality, it was its last.

In fact, the disparate revolutionary camp suffered three successive and decisive defeats in the following months. The first was the elections to the Constituent Assembly in April 1975. It wasn't just the modest results of the PCP (12.5 per cent), the MDP (4.1 per cent), the MES (1.02 per cent) and the UDP (0.7 per cent): it was the change in society's perception of what legitimized the new power structure, that had irrevocably flowed from this. In reality, with the April 1975 elections, electoral legitimacy definitively prevailed over revolutionary legitimacy. And the truth is that the PS won the constituent elections with 37.8 per cent of the vote. The revolution could neither postpone nor ignore them, much less annul them (which was unthinkable in a country where the opposition had made free elections its constant watchword). It didn't even have the strength to win them.

The crisis of legitimacy that affected the revolutionary camp could not even be compensated for by the rhetoric of the military vanguard's tutelage over future democratic institutions, which the first MFA/party pact tried to promote. The PCP's self-centred strategy, which became more acute after the turn of events in March 1975, underpinned by its harnessing of the prevailing ideas of a kind of military vanguardism on the left of the MFA (the notorious People/MFA alliance), further exacerbated the divisions in the revolutionary camp. Firstly, between its various components. Some Maoist organizations responded to the PCP's offensive by treating it as the “main enemy". Those that didn't go that far viewed it with criticism and distrust.

But more importantly, this crisis of hegemony alienated a large part of the intermediate social sectors; those who didn't recognize the totalizing hegemony of the PCP or the “people’s democracies" as the model of the future society they aspired to, and didn't see the radical left as an alternative. It was precisely after the April 1975 elections that they began to abandon the uncertain camp of the revolution.

It doesn't make sense, however, to say that the PCP had given up on taking power or that it hadn't even defined a line for its conquest. The PCP consciously applied the so-called Ponomariev strategy to control power: gradually taking over the vital sectors of the state (the municipalities, the intelligence services, the military apparatus), as well as the nationalized media and the trade union apparatus, and calling for the “mobilization on the streets" when this process “ got bogged down" anywhere. It was a covert action, often resorting to force and administrative methods of control, which began to generate strong reactions in society, particularly in the working class, local authorities, public opinion, the military, etc. The crisis of legitimacy of the revolutionary process and its internal fragmentation derive largely from this kind of bureaucratic authoritarianism that had been established in advance.

In any case, the camps became more polarized and the consensus that had sustained the political-military institutions after April was shattered. There was an explicit and open rupture on the part of the camp that, in the name of democratic socialism or the “European model", opposed the socialist revolution (the definition of which was far from clear or consensual). The Fourth Provisional Government fell with the departure of the PS and PSD (reacting to the imposition of trade union unity and the “República affair") and the growing and already undeniable disintegration of the MFA became clear. Extreme right-wing terrorists began to take action across the country against the headquarters and militants of the left, and the Catholic hierarchy distanced itself from PREC on the pretext of the occupation of Rádio Renascença.6 Mass mobilization against the revolutionary process began with the large rallies and demonstrations called by the PS in favour of parliamentary and “European" democracy and the concentrations in support of the bishops in the north and centre of the country. In reality, in July 1975, with the formalization of the “Group of 9"7 , a political-military camp was set up, with the “Nine" and the PS at its core, to oppose the divided revolutionary camp and which began to compete with it for key positions in the military apparatus and the government, as a first step towards defeating it in terms of social mobilization. This was a camp openly supported by the political right and its interests, by Maoist sectors that emphasized the danger of a regime under the tutelage of the PCP and, more in the shadows, as we know all too well today, by the broad branches of the fascist and terrorist extreme right of the ELP/MDLP and similar groups.

The second defeat of the camp of socialist revolution, in August/September 1974, was the removal of the “military left", above all the so-called “Gonçalvista" wing close to Vasco Gonçalves and the PCP, not only from the leadership of the Provisional Government but also from their strong positions in the military apparatus. The V Division was closed down, Vasco Gonçalves himself8 was removed as Prime Minister and prevented from taking up the post of Chief of the General Staff, Eurico Corvacho was dismissed as head of the Northern Military Region (RMN), and the “gonçalvistas" were placed in a minority in the Council of the Revolution, losing 9 members, while the members from the “group of 9" were reinstated. The new Sixth Government was a clear shift to the right. Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho and COPCON remained, but the siege of this last nucleus of the military revolution began immediately. What emerged from this clash was a substantial change in the correlation of forces at the political and military level: the leaders of the three branches of the FA and the government were now all opposed to the revolutionary course. It wasn't the end, but it was the beginning of the end.

With the revolutionary process underway, it wasn't enough to stop the top political and even military leaders to solve the situation. There was a mass movement willing to fight for what it had won. The “counter-offensive of people's struggles", as the PCP was to call it, would be strong and prolonged. However, despite its capacity to mobilize between September and November, it already represented a clearly defensive process against the “advance of reaction" and the imminence of a military coup, which was in fact being prepared by the “Group of 9" starting with the “cleansing" of that summer. To consider this final radicalization, which was almost desperate and had no clear direction, as the “insurrectionary moment" or the “final assault" on state power9 , seems to be an approach that has little to do with reality. The important mobilizations of that period, in general, did not pose the question of seizing power: they were calling for a recovery of positions that had been lost (Corvacho's resignation10 , the deactivation of CICAP, the silencing of the Renascença bomb, bombings...); they were denouncing the political and military plans of the counter-revolutionary camp, which were indeed offensive; in short, they were on the defensive and trying to hold on to what had been gained.

This was not incompatible, in the absence of a unified mass movement and a clear political direction, with being drawn into the incipient attempt at a counter-coup led by the paratroopers and the COPCON units of the Lisbon Military Region (RML) with the support of some trade union sectors linked to the PCP and some on the far left: the occupation of air bases and some strategic points in the capital, like the RTP and Emissora Nacional (EN) broadcast centres. On 25 November, this was the long-awaited pretext for unleashing a serious military counter-coup. What is particularly revealing in this context is the surprising ease with which, with practically no resistance (apart from the brief confrontation at the Military Police barracks), the Commandos Regiment subdued the rebel units one by one. The few hundreds of people who were “defending” them dispersed and their military leaders went to the Belém Palace to surrender in a disciplined manner. Once the COPCON military units in the RML had been consulted and the marines (the only force capable of confronting the commandos) had been stopped, the PCP ordered the Intersindical and the revolutionary defence committees to demobilize. Cunhal wasn't going to risk the party on adventures. He preferred to negotiate. The third defeat was now definitive for the revolutionary process.

- November -

The Novembrist movement was for the counterrevolution what the 25 April military movement was for the revolution. It wasn't the counterrevolution itself, but the change in the correlation of forces that it imposed opened the way for it to gradually, progressively and constitutionally establish itself as the dominant politics of the post-revolutionary situation. Covertly and prudently, it entered through the doors that November had opened. On 25 November, the coup ordered the arrest of 118 military personnel, sacked 82 workers from RTP and EN, the public TV and radio, and dismissed the administrations and directors of the state-owned press, who were replaced by people from the PS and PSD or like-minded military personnel. However, contrary to the wishes of the far right and certain sectors of the right, there were no mass arrests of “reds" and no cancellation of public freedoms, dissolution of parties or closure of trade unions and their publications. The PCP remained in the Provisional Government and the 1976 Constitution enshrined the goal of socialism, the irreversibility of nationalizations, Agrarian Reform, workers' control and the role of Workers' Committees.

In reality, according to several concurring oral sources, the Group of 9 seems to have discreetly negotiated with the PCP an agreed curbing of the revolutionary process. Álvaro Cunhal prefers to speak of an objective curbing. The truth is that the PCP stopped the trade union activists, civilian militants and military personnel who had been drawn into the adventure initiated by the paratroopers. It had been instigated by a kind of “invisible" command of Gonçalves or COPCON officers, who were less subject to any party control, from the SDCI1,11 . The result was a process that was obviously different from a classic, violent counter-revolutionary response. It was an agreement that avoided a bloody counter-revolution, but in which the victors changed the rules of the game in two crucial respects: they imposed the consolidation of electoral legitimacy over revolutionary legitimacy as the foundation of the new institutions and, above all, they liquidated the MFA, reinstated the traditional hierarchy of the Armed Forces and, in this sense, dissolved the crucial alliance with this armed body that the popular movement had enjoyed during the revolutionary process. The Armed Forces were restored as the backbone of the state's legal use of force.

The revolution was certainly over. But it left on the parliamentary democracy that succeeded it the genetic imprint of its political and social conquests, of the rights and freedoms it had won in the revolutionary struggle and whose continuation it enforced and defended in the new political situation. That's why the schematic equation that is sometimes made between the counter-revolution and parliamentary democracy12 ignores the fact that, in the Portuguese case, democracy is the result of a commitment to a revolutionary process that profoundly marked it. Contrary to what the political and historiographical right claims - in a curious approximation to the aforementioned point of view - political democracy does not exist in Portugal despite the revolution, but because there was a revolution.

- To be and not to be -

There is therefore a kind of “to be or not to be" about the Portuguese revolution of 1974/75. It was strong enough to overturn the established order and strike at the very foundations of the capitalist system, but it failed to hold on to these gains and even less to deepen them into a lasting socialist order. It was stopped halfway and lost a large part of its most advanced gains in the soft counter-revolution that was ushered in with “democratic normalization". In other words, it was contained by the formidable reactions it aroused both domestically and internationally. This leads us to try to analyse, albeit briefly, some of its main difficulties. I will briefly address three aspects that seem most important to me.

Firstly, there was the rough outline of “dual power" formed by the thousands of bodies of popular will elected in companies, neighbourhoods and the countryside of the South by workers and residents. It is true that they never managed to form a single, coordinated national organization. Much less, in all their diversity, did most of them take on a clear political orientation or pose the question of seizing power themselves. Unlike what happened with the Russian soviets of 1917 or the German council revolution of 1918/19, there was no unified, parallel, “people's power" in the Portuguese revolution, which is why the question of “all power to the organs of the people's will" was never raised in practice. Until July 1975, the PCP and its trade union structure opposed the Workers' Committees (CT) elected in the workplaces. Both before and after that, each political group on the radical left had “its own" CTs and CMs (Residents' Committees elected in the neighbourhoods), and “its own" coordinating structures, which often fought with each other and those that the PCP finally created that summer.13

Secondly, in the Portuguese revolution, the organs of popular power were not armed, again in stark contrast to the aforementioned soviet and councilist experiences. They were supported by an ally outside themselves, a military movement of junior officers (or part of it), or even by some units of that part, as the left wing of the MFA split and split again. There were no workers, peasants or soldiers in arms, as some sectors of the radical left demanded. In fact, the PCP and the radical left-wing organizations maintained organizations in the Armed Forces more to influence the officers of the MFA than to promote insurrection among the soldiers, with the exception of the short-lived and hopelessly late experience of the SUVs (Soldados Unidos Vencerão), which was explicitly opposed by the various currents in the MFA. In this sense, the workers' revolutionary process was supported externally, if at all, by an increasingly divided and weakened officers' movement. The danger was obvious: if and when the reaction to the revolutionary process succeeded in bringing the MFA back into the military chain of command, eliminating it, the mass movement, even if it persisted, would lose its indirect armed and subversive expression, reverting to being something like a protest movement without the capacity to pose the question of power. It would shift onto the defensive. This is precisely what happened.

Thirdly, the political organizations of the revolution were deeply divided politically and ideologically on the nature of the power to be built and how to get there. There was no clearly hegemonic force capable of dragging behind it or marginalizing the others, nor was there the capacity to find a minimum platform for common action. (The FUP itself, the Popular Unity Front, formed on 25 August 1975 between the CP and seven other groups with clearly defensive purposes and without the participation of the Maoists, began to fall apart three days later with the departure of the PCP). The central divergence was between Cunhal's strategy of gradually occupying the civil and military apparatus of the state, the MFA, the union leaderships and the newspapers/radio/RTP, local councils, etc., often without any real democratic scrutiny, from the “top down”, and the orientation shared by the radical left of creating a “people's power” in the class struggle, capable of launching a revolutionary assault on the state, but without any glimmer of consensus or convergence on how to go about it. But even in the subcamp of the far left, the war of sectarian positions around revolutionary “purity" was widespread. And all of this, of course, had a big impact on the cohesion of the left wing of the MFA, which was already breaking with the “group of 9”.

In reality, one of the peculiarities of the Portuguese revolution that the ideological bias of much of the historiography on this period tends to hide, is that the far left, even though fragmented and at war with itself, had enough social and political strength to hinder and challenge the PCP's political-ideological hegemony over the revolutionary process, without, however, managing to impose an alternative path, let alone any kind of common platform. This impasse in the revolutionary camp opened up a war within, where sectarian violence on all sides was often not just verbal, but gave rise to aggression, purges, manipulation and even widespread repression in an attempt to politically eliminate the Maoist camp that was most hostile to the PCP. This violent conflict naturally alienated some less convinced or disillusioned social allies. It showed an impotence in the ability to respond, it expressed disunity and weakness, it left the camp isolated, and it is here that we can find part of the explanation for the inability successfully to resist the counter-offensive in the summer of 1975 and its aftermath.

In conclusion, it is safe to say that the Portuguese revolution was not brought to an end by the events of November 1975. The telluric force that exploded on that “first full and perfect day” was not enough to win. However, it did strongly influence and condition what followed. In essence, and certainly in a different way today, it is still around the defence, consolidation and expansion of this heritage, or its opposite, that the political struggle in Portugal is defined.

Translated by fourth.international. The original article was published in 2014 and is available here. It is republished in an expanded form in the book Ensaios de Abril, Tinta da China, October 2023.

• 1To meet the needs of the colonial war, the military dictatorship had to recruit militiamen, non-permanent members of the armed forces trained in two semesters, unlike career officers trained over four years.
• 2This was the name given to the entourage of the then President of the Council of the Dictatorship, Marcelo Caetano, and in particular to the meeting organized on 14 March 1974 by the majority of general officers from the three armies to swear obedience to him.(translator's note)
• 3António de Spinola (1910-1996), general, military governor of Guinea-Bissau in 1968 and again in 1972, appointed vice-chief of staff of the armed forces on 17 January 1974, then dismissed in March for not having taken part in the meeting of officers in support of Caetano. On 25 April 1974, he received the government's surrender; he was President of the National Salvation Junta (25 April-16 May 1974), then President of the Republic (15 May-30 September 1974). Opposed to the orientation of the MFA and to the immediate independence of the colonies, he attempted a failed coup d'état on 28 September 1974, resigned from the presidency, then fled to Spain and Brazil following the failure of a right-wing coup attempt in March 1975. He was rehabilitated by Socialist President Mario Soares in 1987.
• 4On the morning of 25 April 1974, in the Rue de l'Arsenal in Lisbon, tanks from the Santarém Cavalry School, which had joined the military movement, clashed with those of the 7th Cavalry, commanded by Brigadier Junqueira dos Reis, who was loyal to the regime. After several attempts at negotiation, the brigadier gave the order to shoot Captain Salgueiro Maia, who commanded the Santarém cavalry force. The ensign in charge of the tank garrison refused to obey and was arrested. The corporal ordered to do the same also disobeyed. Part of the force went over to the insurgents and the others turned back. A similar situation had occurred on the avenue of Ribeira das Naus, parallel to the Rua do Arsenal. It then became clear that the regime had no military force to defend it.
• 5See Álvaro Cunhal, {A Verdade e a Mentira na Revolução de Abril (a contra-revolução confessa-se}), ed Avante, Lx, 1999, p. 101 ff.
• 6The Renascença radio station, owned by the Catholic Church, was occupied by workers in the 1975 struggle. On 7 November 1975, to prevent the continuation of broadcasts under workers' control, a bomb destroyed the broadcasting centre. The radio station was returned to the control of the Catholic hierarchy in December of the same year.
• 7Nine moderate officers supporting the PS, who published a manifesto entitled "People-MFA Alliance, for the construction of a socialist society in Portugal".
• 8Vasco dos Santos Gonçalvez (1921-2005), general and Prime Minister of four of the six provisional governments (from July 1974 to September 1975), was close to the PCP.
• 9Raquel Varela, História do Povo na Revolução Portuguesa (1974-1975), Lisboa, Bertrand editora, 2014, pp. 421 ff and 496-498.
• 10Eurico Corvacho, commander of the Porto region and a loyal supporter of Vasco Gonçalvez, who in March 1975 had denounced the formation of extreme right-wing groups in his region, was replaced in August “on a temporary basis” by General Ferreira.
• 11Information Detection and Control Service. Cf. Armando Cerqueira, Revolução e Contra-Revolução em Portugal (2015), p. 544ff.
• 12Varela, ibidem, p.482 ff
• 13Miguel Pérez Suárez, "A autogestão operária no processo revolucionário português de 1974-75", in Jorge Fontes, António Simões do Paço, João Carlos Louçã, Miguel Pérez, Entre Outubro e Abril, Estudos sobre trabalho, revoluções e movimentos sociais no século XX, Húmus, Vila Nova de Famalicão 2018, p. 169 ff.