Marcelo Caetano
Marcelo Caetano inherited a dictatorship and six years to reform it, and spent them fighting three colonial wars instead. He was a professor of law and a lifelong servant of the regime - colonial minister, rector of the University of Lisbon, and the author of much of its administrative theory - and he took over in 1968 when his predecessor fell out of a deckchair and was left incapacitated, in a transfer of power so awkward that the old man was kept in office in his own mind for two years while a new government ran the country. The first period was genuinely liberalising and is remembered by its own name, a spring. The secret police were renamed, exiles were allowed home, censorship was relaxed, the social security system was extended and a handful of liberal deputies were permitted into the assembly. It stopped when the regime's own constituency objected, and the liberal deputies resigned in 1973 having achieved nothing. What consumed everything was Africa. Portugal had been fighting in Angola since 1961, in Guinea since 1963 and in Mozambique since 1964, and by the 1970s the wars took nearly half the national budget and conscripted a generation for four-year tours; a hundred thousand young men emigrated illegally rather than serve. Caetano would not negotiate independence because the constituency that had made him would not permit it, and the army that had to fight the wars concluded that the political settlement was the problem. On 25 April 1974 a captains' movement took Lisbon in a night, with a radio signal and almost no shooting, and the population came into the streets with carnations. Caetano surrendered on condition that power pass to a general rather than to a crowd, and lived out his life in Brazil.
- Lived: 1906 CE – 1980 CE
- Nationality: Portuguese
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
