Drawing the Battle Lines

It was another week of what passes for normality these days in Portugal--a week of riots, protests, rumors of coups and countercoups, and opaque behind-the-scenes deliberations by the country's confused and divided military rulers. The major problem facing the Armed Forces Movement (M.F.A.) was to set up a new government under leftist Premier General Vasco dos Santos Gonc,alves. The previous Cabinet--the fourth since the April 25, 1974 revolution--collapsed this month when Socialists and other moderates resigned. Reason: they were protesting an M.F.A. plan to set up local revolutionary councils that would bypass the authority of the elected Constituent Assembly (TIME, July 28). At week's end, as the once peaceful revolution became increasingly violent, the M.F.A. opted for another new plan of government that not only enables Gonc,alves to hold on to his office, but also brings Portugal perilously close to a military dictatorship.

The new plan did not emerge until week's end, after a 14-hour speech-filled meeting of the M.F.A.'s 240-man General Assembly. The scheme: to grant virtually unlimited powers to a triumvirate of generals, made up of President Francisco da Costa Gomes, Premier Gonc,alves and Internal Security Forces Chief Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, an ultraradical populist. The 30-man Revolutionary Council, the M.F.A.'s Politburo, presumably will yield almost all of the lawmaking authority it has enjoyed since assuming active rule of the country following the abortive right-wing coup last March. Under the new plan, the Council becomes a consultative body to the triumvirate. To justify the drastic action, Costa Gomes told the Assembly that "the revolution has reached a speed that people do not have the capacity to absorb."

Gonc,alves will now try to assemble a new Cabinet. Although it will contain a handful of civilians, its power will be even more negligible than it was before. Moreover, the Cabinet members would have to serve as individuals and not as representatives of the political party to which they belong--thus conforming to the M.F.A.'s arrogant dictum that it and it alone speaks for the people and the revolution.

The new plan is a clear victory for Gonc,alves, who earlier this month was fighting for his political life when sentiment mounted in the Revolutionary Council to oust him after the collapse of the Cabinet. They were apparently persuaded by President Costa Gomes, the perennial seeker of compromise within the military movement, that it was not the hour for decision. Gonc,alves' survival is also an ominous plus for his ideological mentor, Communist Party Boss Alvaro Cunhal.

Serious Blow. For Socialist Party Leader Mario Scares, Portugal's leading moderate, the creation of the triumvirate is a serious blow. He had insisted all along that the Socialists "have friends in the M.F.A." He told Ron Hayward, the visiting general secretary of Britain's Labor Party, that "a majority in the M.F.A. would like to see a government that includes a number of representative civilian politicians and technocrats." The Socialist leader was not entirely wrong. Although a majority of the M.F.A.'s Assembly obviously opted to stick by Gonc,alves, some key officers apparently protested the decision by boycotting the meeting; among them was Foreign Minister Ernesto Melo Antunes, who has emerged as a key moderate on the Revolutionary Council.

Soares had tried--belatedly, some observers thought--moving directly to confront the Communists and their supporters in the military movement with a weapon they could readily understand: mass protests. He staged rallies at Lisbon and Oporto, Portugal's second largest city, to which tens of thousands of Socialists thronged, despite attempts of Communist vigilantes to block their way. The message issued by these mass gatherings was unequivocal; at a July 19 rally, Lisbon's Dom Afonso Henriques square rang with 50,000 voices crying "Out with Vasco!" At the podium, an animated Scares warned that the Premier's policies were turning Portugal into a vast concentration camp. To an enthusiastic roar of approval, he then vowed that his Socialists would never rejoin any government headed by Gonc,alves. Later Soares added that any Socialist entering a Gonc,alves Cabinet would be immediately expelled from the party. "Never before have the battle lines between moderates and radicals been more clearly drawn," observed a top Western diplomat in Lisbon.

The Communists were quick to respond. New posters were plastered across Lisbon's walls depicting Gonc,alves sandwiched between a soldier with a rifle and a peasant with a pitchfork. They proclaimed: STRENGTH! STRENGTH! COMRADE VASCO. WE WILL BE A WALL OF STEEL. The press, radio and television, all controlled by radical workers, fired off endless salvos supporting Gonc,alves. Photographs of the unsmiling Premier sitting in the back seat of his official black Citroen appeared in nearly every newspaper; radios blared the catchy martial refrain "Onward, Comrade Vasco!"

Fierce Pride. Despite its steady movement leftward, the M.F.A. must still reckon with its country's reservoir of cautious, conservative sentiment. While the Communists have considerable support in the Lisbon area and in the poverty-stricken Alentejo region south of the Tagus River, they have little backing in "the other Portugal"--the rural area north of the Tagus and inland from the Atlantic Ocean that contains 60% of the country's 9 million people. Most of them are devoutly Roman Catholic, politically conservative and hard-working peasants who take fierce pride in the few acres of land they own and till and who are almost fanatic in their antiCommunism. "The Communists made the mistake of thinking that Lisbon is Portugal," said one carpenter in the town of Rio Maior, north of the capital. "They are trying to make us afraid. But we know the Communists."

Since mid-July, reports TIME Correspondent George Taber, who last week visited the northern provinces, mobs of angry shopkeepers, peasants and craftsmen have launched a wave of attacks against about a score of Communist Party headquarters in the north. They are infuriated by the way the Communists have tried to seize national power despite their poor performance in the elections. In Rio Maior, furniture was tossed from the party headquarters' windows, doused with whiskey, and set aflame; at Vale de Cambra, a Molotov cocktail reduced the headquarters to a shambles of broken glass, ashes and charred posters. A Communist Party member in Estarreja who strayed too near a crowd trashing the headquarters was so badly beaten he was hospitalized; at Aveiro, a soldier was killed (accidentally by a fellow soldier) while protecting the headquarters from townspeople who were pelting the building with cobblestones. Angered by onesided reporting in the Communist-controlled press, demonstrators in Rio Maior destroyed a truckload of newspapers and strung a banner across a building in the town's main square proclaiming PEOPLE OF RIO MAIOR COMMAND THE END OF FALSE INFORMATION.

"Everywhere in this region, Communism means nationalization," reported Taber. "People fear they will lose everything. 'All I want is a party that won't take away my car,' a cab driver in Porto told me. Most important, the people fear the Communists will grab their land. Thus it is scarcely surprising that in Rio Maior an artisan insisted that 'It's better to be a homosexual than a Communist.' " Until recently, the north regarded the military as heroes for triggering last year's revolution. Now an increasing number of the area's inhabitants mutter bitterly, as did a mechanic in Benedita, that "the M.F.A. gives every thing to the Communists." The military leaders in Lisbon cannot long ignore such disillusionment. It was, after all, the north's dissatisfaction with the Portuguese Republic that led to the 1926 "March on Lisbon," resulting in Antonio Salazar's takeover two years later.

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