Santa Comba Dão
António de Oliveira Salazar, who was the Prime Minister of Portugal from 1932 to 1968 and leader of the "Estado Novo", was born in Vimieiro, Santa Comba Dão on 28 April 1889.
António de Oliveira Salazar
In October 1945, Salazar announced a liberalisation program designed to restore civil rights that had been suppressed during the Spanish Civil War and World War II in hopes of improving the image of his regime in Western circles. The measures included parliamentary elections, a general political amnesty, restoration of freedom of the press, curtailment of legal repression and a commitment to introduce the right of "habeas corpus". The regime started to organise itself around a broad coalition, the Movement of Democratic Unity (MUD), which ranged from ultra-Catholics and fringe elements of the extreme right to the Portuguese Communist Party. Initially, the MUD was controlled by the moderate opposition, but it soon became strongly influenced by the Communist Party, which controlled its youth wing. In the leadership were several communists, among them Octávio Pato, Salgado Zenha, Mário Soares, Júlio Pomar and Mário Sacramento. This influence led the MUD to be outlawed by the government in 1948 after several waves of suppression. Restrictions that had been temporarily lifted were then gradually reinstated.
As the Cold War started, Salazar's "Estado Novo" remained unmistakably authoritarian. Salazar had been able to hold onto power by virtue of the public's recollection of the chaos that had characterised Portuguese life before 1926. However, by the 1950s, a new generation emerged that had no collective memory of the previous state. The clearest sign of this came in the Portuguese presidential election of 1958. Most neutral observers believed that the candidate of the democratic opposition, Humberto Delgado, would have defeated the candidate of the Salazar regime, Américo Tomás, had the election been conducted fairly. Well aware that the president's power to sack the prime minister was theoretically the only check on Salazar's power, Delgado stated that one of his first acts would be to dismiss Salazar if he were elected. Delgado was able to rally support from a wide range of opposition viewpoints. Among his supporters were some controversial figures, namely the press campaign manager Francisco Rolão Preto, a former Nazi sympathiser and former leader of the Blue Shirts, who had been exiled by Salazar in the 1930s. An official announcement in 1958 stated that Delgado received one-fourth of the votes, in total approximately a million. The following year, the 70-year-old Salazar, alarmed by the episode, changed the selection of the president to a vote by the two parliamentary bodies, both under his control. Delgado was expelled from the Portuguese military and took refuge in the Brazilian embassy before going into exile. Much of his banishment was spent in Brazil and later in Algeria, as a guest of Ahmed Ben Bella. Later, in 1965, he was lured into an ambush by the "PIDE" (the regime's secret police) near the border town of Olivenza. Delgado and his Brazilian secretary Arajaryr Moreira de Campos were killed while trying to enter Portugal clandestinely. An official statement claimed that Delgado was shot and killed in self-defence, despite Delgado being unarmed; his secretary was strangled.