be too has made his line quite clear. In a broadcast speech on 12 October, Azevedo declared that people must talk about revolution less and produce more'. He threatened open military dictatorship, declaring that his administration was as 'the last hope of a government within the present constitutional structures'. He also sponsored the demonstration in favour of the right-wing Amadora commando regiment. In front of the guns of the most rightwing unit still available in Lisbon, the shouts of Admiral Azevedo for 'discipline' had only one meaning.
The whole Costa Gomes-Veloso-Antunes-Azredo section of the army - that is, the overwhelming bulk of the MFA - is a veritable ants hest of potential butchers of the working class. They are held back purely because they fear they would lose a civil war at present PRESIDENT COSTA GOMES tion.
as possible to Azevedo.
and "condemned anarchy".
Confronted with the increasingly open right-wing course of the MFA, and the mounting resistance of the soldiers and workers to it, the leadership of the Communist Party has been increasingly considering howit can make the maximum mileage out of the new situaIts initial reaction flowed from its early Azevedo. position of attempting to cuddle up as closely . When the troops were sent in to close the radio stations on 29 September, the CP merely "regretted' that it had not been consulted in advance. It in no way condemned the action, issued a call for calm', Furthermore on 2 October, in one of the most disgusting pronouncements to come even from the Portuguese Conmunist Party, clearly referring to Spanish exiles from Franco's dictatorship, the CP stated in a front page editortal in its paper Avante: It is necessary to impose severe controls on the lives and activities The FUR reacted immediately on the morning of 29 September when the military occupation of the radio was announced. tion doomed in advance to failure. The leaflet distributed by the FUR described the situation in terms of imminent counter-revolution, of a virtual coup d'etat: "Alert! To the working class, to the toilers, the soldiers and sailors! Let us mobilise to crush the counter-revolution! The counter-revolution shall not pass!' In the same leaflet it was announced that 'this aggression by reactionary sectors was led by the paratroopers, the CIAAC troops, and the RIOQ! The population exhibited quite understandable hesitation, justified by subsequent events, when they were asked to believe that such groups were willing to become the spearhead of counter-revolutionThe alarmism of the FUR led to a demonstration of about a thousand people on the Rossio at 1 pm in the afternoon of 29 September. It was this group of 1,000 people, according to the FUR, that was supposed to 'crush the counter-revolution'.
This alarmism was topped off by a total absence of any appeal or initiative towards the SP and CP, whose working class forces are far from useless in defeating counter-revolutionary aggression. This is an illustration of the dominant conception of the FUR, which is that the unity of the revolutionary organisations not only amounts to the unity of the broad workers vanguard, but is itself a sufficient factor to draw in the heavy battalions of the working class - over the heads of the SP and the CP (that goes without saying).
MASS DESIRE Nevertheless, there was a mass desire to mobilise alongside the soldiers to transform the Government-ordered occupation into its opposite. But the leaflet of the FUR did not even allude to this necessary link-up of the workers and soldiers around this precise ob(his very words).
Furthermore, the 29 September assembly in front of the Ministry of Social Communications expressed the determination of thousands of among them the workers of the major factories of the Lisbon industrial zone. who came in contingents — to make the Government yield and to actively participate in a fists. different sort of occupation of the radio and television stations, the sort of occupation that the ADFA (Association of Wounded of foreigners residing on our national territory and to expel from Portugal those who take part in any way in disturbances of democratic order.' It accused irresponsible provocateurs of creating a climate of anarchy and, worst of all, supported the call for a new military intervention force of the type established by CP LOSING MEMBERS Despite this initial reaction, however, the CP has also openly admitted recently that it is losing members to the revolutionary left. It has also been losing out inside the MFA to the Socialist Party. The CP saw the mass upsurge as a way of redressing this situation.
Carvalho therefore switched his line to attempt to use the demonstrations to support the CP's position.
By 8 October, when it was clear that huge resistance was developing within the army, the Unfortunately, it adopted an alarmist posi Armed Forces Veterans) had carried out dur ing its struggle. In any case, there was a real possibility of acting in an exemplary manner to hand the radio stations over to the workers instead of over to the Minister of Social Conmunications.
A FARCE Once again the FUR failed. The 29 Sep tember press conference given by the Minister, A. Santos, and General Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho (held in the Ministry of Social Communications) turned into a real farce. A delegation from the demonstration - composed of workers from Lisnave, Setnave, and ENI -burst into the conference hall. The minister paled; Carvalho began stammering; the dem onstrators broke up the chairs and broke down the doors of the library.
The leadership of the FUR did not take this opportunity to make Carvalho go out onto the balcony of the Ministry and force him to respond quickly and openly, before everybody, to the one important question: if we occupy the radio and television stations will you give the order to fire on us? Instead they gave Carvalho the floor to make a demagogic public confession about the contradictory spiritual state of the revolutionary' Cop con command, which respected the orders of the fresident of the Republic, and about his own "lack of book-learning' which prevents him "from being the Fidel Castro of Europe After a few minutes, the demonstrators started expressing their disdain for Otelo; on the other hand, they greeted the soldiers from the military police regiment with cries of 'SUV has won, SUV will win!" Carried away in triumph, the soldiers responded with raised At that very moment, the leadership of the FUR was sitting in the salon of the Ministry endated in an interminable diseussion with