Gomes da Costa
Gomes da Costa was the general who began the rising at Braga on 28 May 1926 that ended the Portuguese First Republic, marched on Lisbon at the head of the northern garrisons while the government resigned rather than fight, was president of the republic and head of the military dictatorship for three weeks, and on 9 July was arrested by the colleagues he had brought to power and shipped to the Azores. The dictatorship he began lasted, under Carmona and then Salazar, until 1974. He was a colonial soldier, thirty years in India, Mozambique and Angola, who had commanded the Portuguese expeditionary corps in Flanders in 1918, where it was destroyed at the Lys in April, and had come home a popular general with no politics beyond a soldier's contempt for the republic's forty-five governments in sixteen years. The conspirators of 1926, monarchists, integralists and republican officers alike, needed a name the army would follow, and he was the one they could agree on. He rode into Braga on the morning of the 28th, read a manifesto to the troops calling for a government of national salvation, and the garrisons of Oporto and the north declared for him one after another. The prime minister Antonio Maria da Silva resigned on the 30th, the president Bernardino Machado handed his powers to a commander the rebels rejected and then left, and Gomes da Costa entered Lisbon on 6 June at the head of fifteen thousand men with the crowds cheering. He had no programme. The junta of three dissolved into a quarrel within days between him and the naval officer Mendes Cabecadas, whom he removed on 17 June, and then with General Carmona, his foreign minister, who found him erratic, dictatorial and ready to bring back the monarchy, and who had him arrested at the ministry on 9 July and deported to the Azores as the government's guest. Carmona made him a marshal in 1927 as a consolation and let him come home to die, which he did in Lisbon in December 1929. The regime he had started put his name on the avenues and kept him out of its history.
- Lived: 1863 CE – 1929 CE
- Nationality: Portuguese
- Roles: general, president, head of state
