Evening of Empire

"Viva Portugal! Viva Salazar!" roared the crowd of 80,000 jamming the dock area in Lisbon. Jet fighters of the Portuguese air force whined overhead, tugboats and pleasure craft blew their whistles as the 20,906-ton liner Santa Maria last week steamed majestically up the Tagus River, back in its home port and in Portuguese control after its twelve-day captivity by rebel Captain Henrique Galvao.

Even aging Dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, 71, who rarely appears in public, was on hand for the gala occasion. Well guarded by police, Salazar boarded the Santa Maria, smiled benignly from the bridge for 30 minutes of vivas by the crowd, then descended to the ship's chapel to pray at the flower-decked casket of the young third pilot, the only fatality in the rebel capture of the Santa Maria. Across the wide Atlantic in Brazil, where he is enjoying asylum, rebel Captain Galvao added his own carnival note to the saga: he announced that he might star in a Mexican movie about the Santa Maria's capture, "as long as it does not injure the dignity of the movement I head."

Portuguese officials insisted that the delirious joy in Portugal at the ship's return--and the failure of the revolt against Salazar--was equaled only by the joy in the "overseas provinces" of the nation's far-flung empire. But then officials were stunned by news of renewed and savage rioting in Portugal's restless African colony of Angola, and began spluttering denials of the reports trickling out through the colonial censorship. From the capital city of Luanda came word that swarms of Africans hurled themselves against a police station and were methodically mowed down by automatic weapons in the hands of paratroops and police. A Luanda cab driver told reporters that he saw five trucks loaded with corpses driven out to a mass burial in the bush. The prison attacked in earlier rioting still "stank like a charnel house" even after being cleared of dead bodies, said one Angolan. While tanks and armored cars patrolled the streets at night and Portuguese gunboats and planes combed the coastline, a doctor said wearily, "I don't know how much more of this I can stand. Every night we deal with men dreadfully wounded and cut up."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.