50 years of the Carnation Revolution to be celebrated in New Bedford with special program

NEW BEDFORD – Infamously known as PIDE, the International and State Defense Police that existed during Portugal’s Estado Novo regime of António de Oliveira Salazar has traditionally been associated with repression and violence, but some argue there are important lessons to be learned from the more interactive, multifaceted relation between Portuguese society and the security agency.

On April 25, the day that marks the 50th anniversary of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, which put an end to the longest-running dictatorship in Europe, the Portuguese & Lusophone-World Lecture Series at New Bedford Whaling Museum will take a look at ‘Portuguese Society and Salazar’s Political Police (PIDE) Before and After the Revolution of 25 April 1974.”

“As far-right parties gain ground throughout the world, including Portugal, it’s important for Portuguese and non-Portuguese people alike to get a clear picture of what life can be like in an otherwise westernized country when authoritarians take control,” said Gilbert Perry, who serves on the Whaling Museum’s Board of Trustees and co-chairs the Portuguese Advisory Committee.

The lecture will be delivered by Dr. Duncan Simpson, a FLAD Visiting Professor in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University. A research fellow at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, Dr. Simpson has dedicated his research to Salazar’s dictatorship.

“Since freedom was a great conquest of the April 25th Revolution, I thought it would be fitting to invite him to speak in our lecture series,” said Brown University Professor Onésimo Almeida, co-chair of the museum’s Portuguese Advisory Committee. “It is important to remember what life was like in Portugal before the revolution. The new generation has not experienced it, and that is why it is important to remind them of it.”

With the passing of those who lived in Estado Novo, people are losing a connection with that time and scholarly studies dedicated exclusively to the PIDE are rare.

“While members of the Portuguese diaspora who grew up during the Salazar regime may be fully aware of PIDE and its pervasiveness, I doubt that most first or second generation Portuguese-Americans have much sense of PIDE’s power and ruthlessness,” Perry said. “A viewing of the Netflix series Glória, for example, can drive home that message clearly. I’m sure that Duncan Simpson’s presentation will be eye opening for many of us.”

Remembering PIDE reminds us of the dangers of authoritarian regimes

Born in France to British parents, Dr. Simpson focused his doctoral thesis at King’s College London on the relations between the Catholic Church and the Salazar dictatorship and has been living in Portugal for about 20 years.

“My passion for Portugal first started as a tourist, when I visited it for the first time in my teenage years,” Dr. Simpson said. “I became very interested in the language, then in the literature and in Portuguese culture more generally. As I studied contemporary history at Kings College, I became interested in the figure of Salazar and Estado Novo, which left a very strong imprint on Portuguese society, even to this day.”

As a Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon from 2019 to 2021, he completed a history of the Salazarist political police “from below,” combining the methodologies of oral history, opinion surveying, and archival research.

“I think remembering the PIDE is very important on the 50-year anniversary of the 25th of April Revolution precisely to remind us of the dangers, the dark sides of dictatorship, and also of the bravery and courage displayed by those who chose to oppose the regime and suffered because of that,” he said.

‘Ambiguous’ relation between Salazar’s PIDE and society

Dr. Simpson noted that although PIDE probably did not generate as many victims as more infamous political polices like the Gestapo in Germany or the NKVD in Soviet Russia, it was capable of resorting to unlimited violence.

“Since we are commemorating the 50 years of the revolution of 25th of April, it’s important to remember in a kind of civic minded way the memory of the people who suffered due to the violent action of the PIDE… through the use of torture, whether psychological or physical,” he said. “It meant arbitrary arrests, which could be prolonged almost indefinitely. It meant as well that several dozens of people from the opposition to the regime - mostly communists - were either assassinated or killed as a result of the lack of conditions in these prisons and in the particularly infamous Tarrafal concentration camp in Cape Verde.”

While noting that historiography of the PIDE remains characterized by a markedly top-down, victim-centered approach, Dr. Simpson pointed out that many individual citizens sought to instrumentalize the PIDE “from below,” often to attain personal objectives and meet necessities through a patron-to-client relationship.

“A lot of these people had a relation with the PIDE that was much more ambiguous than has been acknowledged until now,” he said.

Dr. Simpson emphasized that PIDE provided one of the few professional pathways available in a society largely devoid of opportunities for the impoverished, uneducated populace.

“PIDE received thousands of letters of ordinary Portuguese citizens who wanted to integrate the PIDE, probably not because they were great supporters of the Estado Novo, but simply because they saw it as a type of a professional career that could enable some kind of future for them,” he said. “There were many other functions in the PIDE, like controlling passports at the airport, etc. So, a lot of people saw the PIDE more as a profit, professional opportunity than as a potential danger to them.”

A history of the PIDE ‘from below’

In 2022, Dr. Simpson was awarded an Individual Research Grant by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia - Portugal’s national academic funding agency. He is currently working on public letter-writing in Salazar’s Portugal between 1933 and 1974, focusing on the operation of dictatorial power at the micro level and the processes of clientelism.

“The PIDE service received a lot of letters about petitions by people who knew that the PIDE was an influential institution within the Estado Novo and who for that reason could write to agents of the PIDE or could talk to agents of the PIDE to see if they could help them by providing them with some kind of a favor,” Dr. Simpson said.

Through his research, for example, he found out the residents of A-da-Beja, a small community north of Lisbon, where a PIDE agent had a summer home, organized, and sought his help to get electricity installed in the village.

“They understood that through his power in the regime he could get their plea further up the hierarchy,” Dr. Simpson said. “Going through a powerful figure like this was a way of overcoming bureaucratic obstacles. In this case, it worked perfectly. The case even reached Salazar, who gave the order to start as quickly as possible electrifying the village.”

For Dr. Simpson, one must combine all the very different perspectives of PIDE to get a complete idea of how the regime lasted so long.

“It was not only through repression for 50 years; that’s not possible,” he said. “I think it’s because a lot of people normalized the presence of the PIDE. They knew they had very little danger to themselves because they were not interested in politics. They actually started using the PIDE for their own personal interest as much as possible.”

Dr. Simpson is in the process of analyzing more than 600 letters written by ordinary citizens to Salazar in 1964 and 1965. He hopes to publish a book and show how Salazar and his regime managed social control at the micro level.

“I think these letters are very interesting in analyzing the exercise of power under the Salazar regime, which was very insidious basically, and successful in keeping a large part of the population in a relation of dependence in relation to the State and to the regime itself,” he said. “And dependence means, of course, a form of acceptance and a form of submission ultimately.”

Given the recent global wave of far-right authoritarianism, and the rise of the Chega conservative, right-wing populist political party in Portugal, Dr. Simpson said it’s absolutely fundamental to preserve in the collective memory what happened during the Estado Novo.

“It is even more important to bear in mind and not repeat maybe some of the errors that were committed in the late 20s and in the 30s, when the idea of a stronger state of an authoritarian regime was seen by many as a positive solution for the problems of the country,” he said.

Contrary to popular belief, the Carnation Revolution was not 100 percent peaceful

While the most famous images from the Carnation Revolution are of bright red carnations placed in the barrels of soldiers’ guns and it is often said that it was bloodless, Dr. Simpson said he will remind those at the lecture that several people were fatally shot by the PIDE outside of its Lisbon headquarters as they were seeking to get the agents out of the building.

“I think this is an important point to bear in mind: the only people who died during the revolution itself on the 25th of April were actually shot by the political police service,” he said. “So, this violence continued until the final day of the revolution.”

Dr. Simpson said his goal is to make the lecture as interactive as possible.

“I would like members of the audience to feel completely free to make their own contributions and talk about if they’ve had experience with the Estado Novo themselves or the political police, and how the Portuguese society functioned at the time or if they have any questions that they want to ask,” he said.

How to register for the lecture?

The lecture will start at 6 p.m. in the Cook Memorial Theater. Doors open at 5:30 p.m.

A lite cocktail reception will follow from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. in the Jacobs Family Gallery.

The event is co-sponsored by the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies of Brown University with support from FLAD - Luso-American Foundation of Lisbon.

General admission tickets are $5 for museum members or $10 for non-members.

To register, visit https://www.whalingmuseum.org/program/50thanniversary-of-the-carnation-revolution

This article originally appeared on The Herald News: 50 years of the Carnation Revolution to be celebrated in New Bedford