The Cascais Document
The course for promotion to senior officer, which Major Melo Antunes was attending at the time, ended with a week of military exercises in the Algarve in mid-February 1974. The officers stayed in a hotel in Monte Gordo, two to a room. Melo Antunes worked very late, and one day, before sunrise, he woke up his roommate to show him the text he had written during the night. It was the first version of the document “The Movement, the Armed Forces and the Nation,” which would be discussed and approved at the meeting in Cascais on March 5, 1974, after a process in which other equally important players took part.
After the Óbidos meeting and the election of the 19-strong Coordinating Committee led by Vasco Lourenço (internal organization and liaison), Vítor Alves (political orientation), and Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, the Captains’ Movement evolved to include other military personnel, not only from the Army, but also from the Navy and Air Force, and to define a political program for the eventuality of a coup d’état that would ensure the democratization of the country.
In this context, on February 5th, 1974, twenty-six army officers gathered in the basement of Colonel Marcelino Marques’ house in Olivais to assess and approve a programmatic text already debated in the Coordinating Committee. Among them were Garcia dos Santos, Costa Braz, and Melo Antunes, who were attending a Movement meeting for the first time. As the programmatic text didn’t point out political principles that would support future military action, it was unanimously rejected, and a working group was set up, made up of Costa Braz, Melo Antunes, José Maria Azevedo, and Sousa e Castro, with the task of drawing up a new programmatic document. After meeting three times, they concluded that defining the topics to be addressed and proposing their writing would be preferable. It was following this decision that Melo Antunes drafted the document he read at half past six in the morning to his roommate in the Monte Gordo hotel, that Costa Braz drafted a second one focused on the prestige of the Armed Forces and the concern that their actions should be identified with the will of the nation, and that Sousa e Castro and officers from the Cascais Anti-Aircraft Artillery Instruction Center (CIAAC) drafted a third one. It was intended to merge these three contributions into a single document in which the Movement’s political objectives were well defined and in counterpoint to the ideals that Spínola expressed in the book published on February 22nd, that a meeting was called for March 3 at the home of aviator pilot Captain Seabra, in Algés.
The March 3rd meeting was attended by members of the three branches of the Armed Forces: the Army’s Costa Braz, Melo Antunes, and José Maria Azevedo; the Navy’s Costa Correia, Almada Contreiras, Vidal de Pinho, and Pedro Lauret; the Air Force’s host and Captain Balacó. It was a long and tiring meeting in which, apart from the fact that some participants didn’t know each other, it was necessary to find a sufficiently robust consensus on political objectives on which they sometimes had antagonistic positions. On the side of the Navy participants, Almada Contreiras and Pedro Lauret, who had already had a previous conversation with Melo Antunes and agreed with the essence of his document, tried to make it clear that they would only be bound by a progressive political program; Costa Correia sought, above all, to enshrine the principle of solving the problems of the institutions within the framework of a political democracy. For their part, the Air Force officers expressed reservations about a political solution to the overseas question that included accepting the will of the African peoples to govern themselves, and doubts about their intentions grew when, at a certain point, paratrooper Captain Silva Pinto, whom one of those present knew as the leader of the Portuguese Youth at the Liceu de Camões, came in and left. But whether it was due to consensus or tiredness, the important thing is that the meeting produced what can be considered the first political manifesto of the “Movement of Armed Forces Officers”, the future “Movement of the Armed Forces” (MFA): the document “The Movement, the Armed Forces, and the Nation,” which was submitted for the appreciation and approval of the plenary meeting of almost two hundred Army officers, attended by around two dozen from the other two branches, called for March 5, 1974, in Cascais.
It clearly states that “conscientious military personnel know (…) that the solution to the overseas problem is political and not military” and “that such a solution will never be accepted by the powers that be, who arrogate to themselves the exclusive right to patriotism and claim to be supported by the nation.” And even more importantly, it is emphasized: “It is therefore first and foremost a question of obtaining in the short term a solution to the problems of the institutions within the framework of a political democracy.” If there were any doubts, any reader, even inattentive, would realize that the document’s approval at the Cascais meeting would likely end the dictatorship.
In addition to the issue of freedom and the democratic nature of political life, the document took up, particularly in the last few paragraphs, the issue of the prestige of the Armed Forces and the unity between the People and the Army, considering the latter as the “people in arms,” in the exact terms that Costa Braz used in his document. The aim, according to Costa Braz himself, was to bring together the military, notably the Army, around the theme of the “growing discredit of the Armed Forces with the temporal and territorial extension of a war in which there was a clear lack of resources, and the outright refusal to be the ‘scapegoat’ for political conduct such as that which led to the fall of India, with the proclaimed and amplified humiliation of the military, once again and particularly the Army.“
The Coordinating Committee knew that the March 5th meeting would most likely reveal the division in the Army between the “spinolistas” – those for whom “Portugal and the Future” was the banner against the war and who considered any other political program unnecessary – and those who understood that the general was not advocating a change of regime in the direction of effective democratization, but was at most proposing a certain liberalization, and advocating the federation of Portuguese space as a way of preserving colonial rule. In this context, the document that emerged from the March 3 meeting and was presented two days later to the delegates at the Cascais mini-plenary was very effective.
Presented by Vítor Alves and read out and explained by Melo Antunes, the document “O Movimento, as Forças Armadas e a Nação” (The Movement, the Armed Forces and the Nation), with the themes dear to the most conservative military highlighted in capital letters, was approved after several tribulations by the majority of the delegates and signed by more than a hundred army officers (111), including a minority but cohesive group associated with the “spinolista” line. Although some tried at the meeting to turn the Movement into a support structure for Spínola, their plan was thwarted. The general himself later complained about an alleged “political involvement maneuver carried out at the Cascais meeting,” which he considered “the first major mistake – the beginning of the betrayal of the spirit of the ‘Captains’ Movement.’“(#1)
The Cascais meeting was attended by 194 officers representing 602 (#2), 170 from the Army and 24 from the Air Force) and three officers from the Navy (#3) as observers. It showed the retreat of the Air Force’s position, fundamentally because of the overseas issue. The political content of the document “O Movimento, as Forças Armadas e a Nação” (The Movement, the Armed Forces, and the Nation) was not accepted by a significant group in the Air Force, and those who attended the Cascais meeting remember the moment when Captain Seabra, the host of the meeting where the document was drawn up two days earlier, said that he believed the Air Force would not take part in the uprising. Many years later, the then Major Costa Neves, who attended the Cascais meeting and led the Commandos Group No. 10, which occupied the Portuguese Radio Club and broadcast the first communiqués of the Armed Forces Movement on April 25, 1974, with seven officers (six from the Air Force and one from the Army), declared in an interview (#4): “My opinion, my conviction, this I can’t prove, obviously, because I’m not inside people’s heads, but all the behavior, during that period, you could see that there was a strong dislike of a faction there, a strong dislike of the ideals that later became the ideals of April 25th .“
And many didn’t know that another programmatic document of a more markedly political nature was already being drawn up: the Program of the Armed Forces Movement. In this more complex and prolonged process, in addition to the officers involved in drafting the document approved in Cascais, others who were also politically aware took part. For them, the only possible way out of the country’s situation was to overthrow the regime through a military operation and replace it with a democratic system that respected the fundamental rights of the Portuguese and recognized the right to self-determination and independence of the peoples of the African territories.
But that’s a subject for a chronicle dedicated exclusively to the Program of the Armed Forces Movement.
Jorge Martins Bettencourt (Retired Commander from the Portuguese Navy and an “April Captain.”
(Translated by Diniz Borges)
1 SPÍNOLA, António de, 1978, País sem rumo – Contributo para a história de uma revolução, Lisbon, SCIRE, p. 94
2 CARVALHO, Otelo Saraiva de, 1984, Alvorada em Abril, ed. Ulmeiro, Lisbon, pp. 228-229
3 The then Lieutenant Commanders Costa Correia and Almada Contreiras and Lieutenant Vidal de Pinho
4 Interview of general Costa Neves by João Almeida, Antena 2, Quinta Essência
Filamentos (artes e letras) 