The Left Tightens Up Its Grip

Shortly before noon, two small, slow-moving specks appeared out of blustery skies and wheeled through scudding clouds over Lisbon. The T-6 Harvard trainers, familiar relics of World War II and the oldest and least combat-worthy planes in Portugal's entire air force, made a diving run toward the city's commercial airport. They dropped three small bombs on a nearby barracks housing the 1st Light Artillery Regiment, then swooped in once more for a desultory strafing run on the compound, using 30-cal. machine guns.

On the ground, 50 paratroopers in battle gear, who had been unloaded earlier from eight Alouette helicopters, took up positions around the barracks, at neighboring apartment buildings and along the highway. As two helicopter gunships whirled overhead loosing random bursts of fire, the paratroopers advanced, after a fashion, on the barracks. The Shootout lasted scarcely an hour. One infantryman was killed, and 18 were wounded.

Reactionary Adventures. As soon as the uprising erupted, the government rushed reinforcements into position around the presidential palace at Belem and the headquarters of the rightist Republican National Guard. Less than three hours after the aerial attack, Premier Vasco dos Santos Gongalves announced that the coup had been crushed. That night President Francisco da Costa Gomes denounced it as "a reactionary adventure" designed to disrupt the forthcoming elections and named his old friend, former President Antonio de Spinola, 64, as its leader.

But was it a serious coup attempt? With two antique planes, eight helicopter gunships and half a hundred remarkably restrained paratroopers, it hardly seemed credible. Two theories circulated in Lisbon and elsewhere:

1) It was in fact an attempted coup but one prematurely triggered, either by moderate-to-rightist officers who were growing restive over growing radical power in Portugal, or by radicals who wanted to see it crushed before it could become more dangerous.

2) It was a put-up job by the most extreme leftist members of Portugal's Armed Forces Movement (M.F.A.), who are impatient with the pace of reform since the revolution of April 1974 and fretful that centrist or rightist elements might hold sway. Accordingly, they wanted an excuse to root out their foes on the eve of the scheduled April 12 elections for a constituent assembly.

If it was a conservative attempt, a U.S. official noted in Washington, "it was just so obviously and stupidly counterproductive. It has allowed the radicals to institutionalize their position."

The radicals within the government certainly seized on the affair with alacrity to consolidate their position. In an all-night session, the 200-member M.F.A., which has played a controlling role behind the scenes in the provisional coalition government headed by Costa Gomes, granted itself vast new powers. The leftist-dominated officers voted to "institutionalize" themselves in a Revolutonary Council that will be authorized to override the decisions of any elected civilian assembly--if there is one--and to enact legislation. Then the Revolutionary Council announced that one of its first tasks would be to outlaw fringe parties of the extreme left and right. The most likely candidates: the small, conservative Christian Democratic Party, whose leader was accused of complicity in the coup; and the Maoist-oriented Movement for the Reorganization of the Proletariat Party, composed mostly of Lisbon students, which has frequently disrupted other parties' rallies. Next day the Council announced that it would nationalize banks of Portuguese ownership.

What Spinola's precise role was in the affair is still something of a mystery. Spinola helped to overthrow the regime of Dictator Marcello Caetano last April, then was himself ousted in a power struggle with the younger officers of the M.F. A. last September, primarily because he opposed the rapid decolonization of Portugal's African territories. Since then, the conservative general has remained pretty much in seclusion. Recently, however, various political groups reportedly tried to win his support.

Clampdown. The morning of the attack, Spinola was seen at the Tancos airbase north of the capital, where the rebellion was launched. One of those who saw him there was Captain Salguerio Maia, who became a popular hero after he led a tank column into Lisbon during the April revolution. According to Maia, after the coup failed, Spinola remarked: "So you didn't advance on Lisbon?" Another officer replied: "We are not that crazy." Said Maia later: "General Spinola must have been extraordinarily badly informed because' he said that he guaranteed the entire situation and that all of the forces obeyed him."

Despite an immediate clampdown on private and commercial flights, Spinola, his wife and 18 officers fled in four helicopters to a Spanish military base near Badajoz. Some Portuguese suggested that the government had allowed the once prestigious general to flee so as not to be forced to put him on trial. Spinola himself reportedly said that he feared assassination. At week's end Spinola and the other officers .flew to Brazil to seek asylum.

The day after the abortive coup, at least 100 people were detained on suspicion of helping to organize and finance the plot. Among them were eight top bankers and one of Portugal's richest men, Jorge de Mello, whose family controls the Companhia Uniao Fabril (C.U.F.), the biggest industrial complex on the Iberian peninsula. De Mello was later released. Officers thought to be pro-Spinola were also being rounded up. In the confusion, one man was shot dead and a woman companion wounded. Said a British observer: "The arrests are now spreading from people involved in the coup to conservatively inclined centrists not directly involved."

Persona Grata. As usual, there were suggestions of CIA involvement. General Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, 37, the hot-tempered head of COPCON, the military security command, indirectly implicated American Ambassador Frank Carlucci in the plot and warned him that he "had better leave." Washington denied any involvement, however, and calmer heads in Lisbon declared that Carlucci was still persona grata.

Ever since Carlucci arrived in Portugal two months ago, the far left has been accusing him of having close ties with the CIA. A 15-year Foreign Service veteran, Carlucci, 44, has spent the past five years in Washington, most recently as Under Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. "What we are witnessing in Lisbon," Carlucci told TIME Correspondent Gavin Scott, "is a well-oiled, well-directed smear campaign." As an example, he cited a newspaper story that he had served in Chile and had given Spinola the green light for last week's coup. "Well," said Carlucci, "I have never met Spinola and have never been in Chile."

One thing that emerged clearly from the coup attempt was that political moderates in Portugal have suffered a setback. Whether it will prove fatal remains to be seen. The government announced that next month's elections will be held as scheduled, but they may not mean a great deal if enough fringe parties are banned.

Even before last week's events, campaigning had taken an increasingly ugly turn. Polls showed the moderate Popular Democratic Party and the center Democratic Social Party picking up nearly 60% of the vote between them, with the Communists and radical fringe trailing with a mere 15-17%. The two parties worked closely to prevent Communist maneuvering from disrupting the election process. But they were not always successful, and on a number of occasions leftist thugs broke up their rallies.

In Washington, officials tried to be optimistic about the current negotiations with Lisbon regarding U.S. bases in the Azores. Said one high-ranking State Department man: "Portugal hasn't abandoned the West yet, nor has it turned into what you could call a military dictatorship. None of us can believe that a country that so recently freed itself from one sort of dictatorship would lightly or easily revert to another sort of dictatorship. Let's wait and see what happens in the April elections."

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