The Brigades: Voices of Chaos

To some Lisbon radicals, even the Communist Party is a moderate force. Currently, the main cause of trouble in Portugal is the extreme left, which consists of eight small, zealous, fragmented parties and other organizations, each of which has its cohort of workers, soldiers and neighborhood committees. The groups range from the Portuguese Democratic Movement, which is generally regarded as a front for the Communists (the M.D.P. denies it) to the Maoist Movement for the Reorganization of the Proletariat, a noisy, university-based party, hundreds of whose members were jailed during the Communist-influenced regime of ousted Premier Vasco dos Santos Gonc,alves. Hydraheaded, the extreme left is united in at least one goal: to overthrow the present moderate government.

The leftist organization that probably has the greatest potential for destruction is the Revolutionary Party of the Proletariat, popularly known as the Revolutionary Brigades. Headed by Isabel do Carmo --the Rosa Luxemburg* of the Portuguese revolution--the Brigades believe that armed action is justified to overthrow the government. They have many of the estimated 30,000 weapons stolen from the army, and the allegiance of thousands of low-ranking soldiers and sailors. "The movement must be accompanied by force," Carmo recently told TIME'S Martha de la Cal. "There must be an armed insurrection." She added: "I think we have sufficient arms. We are well organized in the barracks and in the armed forces."

Carmo's soft voice belies her harsh words, but there is good reason to take her Revolutionary Brigades seriously; they have been violently assaulting Portugal's governments for the past four years. In November 1971, shortly after they defected from the Communist Party because they regarded it as too bourgeois, they blew up the NATO base at Fonte da Telha. In 1972 they stole hundreds of pounds of explosives from the army and blew up 15 army trucks; that same year they also severed the ocean cables linking Portugal to Africa and America. They bombed two army installations in Lisbon and one base in Oporto in 1973.

According to the Brigades' most recent handbook, violence is the only means by which the proletariat can take power away from the bourgeoisie. Once that transfer of power is made, the centralized government will be abolished and control will go to small local assemblies. "There can be no halfway solutions, no half measures," asserts Carmo. "That won't work. We must have either pure socialism or we will go back to fascism. The workers in Portugal have shown that they do not want central power or a central authority."

The Brigades' members make no secret of their contempt for Communists --or anyone else who advocates other solutions--though they have been pragmatic enough to join the other radical groups in a united front against the government. Premier Pinheiro de Azevedo's government is let off rather lightly as being hopelessly ineffectual. "It has all of the intentions to be repressive, but it is not able to be," Carmo says genially.

Short and plump with long dark hair, Isabel do Carmo, 35, is the daughter of an office worker in the factory town of Barreiro, an industrial suburb of Lisbon. She became a Communist at 15 and kept up with the party through years of medical school (an endocrinologist, she still sees patients twice a week). She broke with the Communists eight years ago to form the Brigades with her husband, Carlos Antunes (no kin to moderate Foreign Minister Ernesto de Melo Antunes). She clearly is the organization's boss. "In our party," says Carmo, "being a woman is no problem. After all, it is a revolutionary party."

* Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish-born Marxist revolutionary who led the German workers' uprisings that followed World War I. She died in 1919, following a beating by soldiers in Berlin.

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