Unpleasant Dreams

Five years ago, when illness forced Dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar to end his 36-year reign, it seemed as though Portugal, like Rip Van Winkle, were awakening after a long sleep. Marcello Caetano, then a 62-year-old law professor, became the new Premier, bringing bright young technocrats into the government, reforming the antiquated educational system, and loosening the government's repressive hand on civil liberties. Last week, however, as Portuguese voters went to the polls to elect a new National Assembly, it was clear that Portugal, unlike Rip Van Winkle, had gone back to sleep once more.

Indeed, the brief flurry of liberalization--the "Caetano spring" as it was called--only heightened the subsequent disillusionment. There was hope then for new democratic standards, but by now almost all of the innovative young Cabinet ministers have long since been sacked and civil liberties remain as minimal and as elusive as ever.

During the election campaign, for example, all of the opposition campaign literature had to be approved by the government. The country's main problem, the fighting in its African colonies, was a forbidden topic, and an opposition campaign meeting was quickly broken up when a candidate dared to mention "this unjust war." Calling the whole process a fraud, the opposition withdrew from the contest five days before the voting and urged its supporters to boycott the polls. However justified, that action assured the Caetano government, whose victory was never in doubt, that there would not be even the smallest voice of dissent in the puppet parliament.

No one outside the ruling clique knows exactly what put the freeze on the Caetano spring, but the chill no doubt set in when liberals began demanding more civil rights and questioning the country's 500-year-old commitment to the African colonies. Portugal clings desperately to overseas territories whose combined area is 23 times its own size. It spends from 35% to 40% of its budget fighting insurgents in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea; through a four-year draft, it sends its most skilled young manpower to the African wars.

Ghost Towns. Partly because of the drain on its resources, partly because of its outmoded economy, Portugal falls further and further behind the rest of Europe. Drawn by higher wages in France and West Germany, 1,600,000 Portuguese workers now live outside their own country, sending their wages home. Since 1960, the population (8,161,000) of the country has actually shown a small decline, and the northern provinces sometimes look as if they had been visited by a plague. Once lively villages are now ghost towns, while others are inhabited only by the old and the young. Recent government restrictions on emigration have scarcely slowed the exodus, and those who want to leave simply slip across the border at night. "We are at the bottom of any economic indicator you want to take," laments Francisco Pinto Balsem`ao, editor of the weekly Expresso. "Our only competitor is Albania. Even the East European countries have passed us."

Salazar believed that economic development would corrupt his country, and, as many tourists have discovered, Portugal retains a sometimes medieval charm. The Caetano government, on the other hand, is firmly committed to industrial expansion, but is, paradoxically, afraid to innovate to bring it about. As the lackluster election campaign demonstrated, Portugal is thus likely to remain asleep for the foreseeable future.

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