#127162 CEBRASPE (CESPE) - 2007 - Diplomata (Terceiro Secretário)

Text for question

Unlike Pombal, who had used the power of the state to ruthlessly force through a crash program of modernization, Salazar froze Portugal’s economic and social patterns. “We are antiparliamentarians, antidemocrats, antiliberals”, Salazar said in 1936. “We are opposed to all forms of internationalism, communism, socialism, syndicalism.” To govern, he said, without apology, “is to protect the people from themselves”.

Yet Salazar enjoyed sizable support. He had rooted his regime sufficiently in Portuguese social realities to garner for it a small measure of popular approbation. The church and the small landholders of the heavily Catholic north backed him. So did the latifundiários, the owners of big farming estates in the central and southern regions who feared a loss of their holdings if the left took power. The outlawed Portuguese Communist Party, formed in 1921, was especially strong in the south.

But Salazar could not freeze the world. In 1961, India seized Goa from a 3,500-man Portuguese garrison that had been ordered to “conquer or die”. In Africa, as the French and British were freeing their colonies, African nationalist guerrillas rose up against the Portuguese in Angola (1961), Guinea (1962), and Mozambique (1964).

Portugal was the last European power in Africa to cling tenaciously to the panoply of formal domination. This was no accident. For a long time Portugal very successfully disguised the nature of her presence ____ a skilful amalgam of historical mythmaking, claims ____ multiracialism, and good public relations.

Adapted from Kenneth Maxwell. The making of portuguese democracy. CUP, 1997, p.18-9.

In accordance with the previous text, judge — right (C) or wrong (E) — the item below.

Salazar’s support in the south of Portugal derived from the fact that landowners believed that if communists came to power they would confiscate their land.