Army officer restored democracy to Portugal but was jailed for terror attacks

OAt 25 minutes past midnight, a radio station played the stirring folk song Oh Fair Town of Grandola, a signal for the coup to begin.

telo Saraiva de Carvalho, who has died aged 84, was a 37-year-old leftist Portuguese army captain when he led the ‘‘Carnation Revolution’’ on April 25, 1974 – in reality an almost bloodless military coup that restored democracy to Portugal after almost half a century of rightwing dictatorship.

It was so called because ecstatic people in the streets placed red carnations in the rifle barrels of equally jubilant soldiers. The uprising effectively ended Portugal’s colonial rule over the African nations of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, all of which became independent within a year.

Four decades later, an NBC News report from Portugal described the revolution as ‘‘the world’s coolest coup’’.

Otelo, as he was widely known, was offered the rank of four-star general after the revolution but turned it down and retired as a lieutenant colonel. Despite being considered a hero to many Portuguese and Africans, that did not translate to political power; he twice ran unsuccessfully for president in the years after the revolution.

He also drew the ire of those who believed he tried to take the revolution too far and had become a radical leftist, even a terrorist. He was accused by some in the right-wing media of trying to turn Portugal into what they feared would be ‘‘a European Cuba’’ under the influence of his friend Fidel Castro.

In 1987, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for being the ‘‘intellectual author’’ of crimes committed by the shadowy left-wing terrorist group called the Popular Forces of April 25, known as FP-25, which carried out about 20 bomb attacks that killed a dozen people in Portugal between 1980 and 1986.

During his 19-month trial, Saraiva de Carvalho had said ‘‘history will absolve me’’, a phrase famously used by Castro. He always said he had ‘‘zero involvement’’ with FP-25, only with the legal leftist political party the Popular Unity Force. Two members of FP-25 testified against him in return for immunity, witness protection and plastic surgery. More than 50 others were jailed for their alleged involvement with FP-25.

Saraiva de Carvalho was freed after five years and eventually pardoned by parliament in 1996.

Otelo Nuno Roma˜ o Saraiva de Carvalho was born in Lourenc¸ o Marques, now Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. His father was an official in the colonial postal and telecommunications service CTT. His mother, from what was the Portuguese colony of Goa in western India, was a railway clerk and theatre-lover who named the child after the Shakespearean character Othello.

He enrolled in the Military Academy in Lisbon in 1955, at the age of 19, and was later assigned to Angola. In 1960, he married Dina Maria Afonso Alambre, also born in Lourenc¸ o Marques.

After teaching cadets at a training school in Portugal, from 1964 to 1968, he returned to Africa to fight independence insurgents in Portuguese Guinea (now Guinea-Bissau), and found himself increasingly identifying with Africans’ struggle for independence.

That thought was very much with him when he returned to Portugal in 1973, and sought out like-minded junior officers and began plotting to oust the right-wing dictatorship he said was oppressing not only its own people but the people of Portugal’s African colonies.

His home in Lisbon became the centre for secret meetings of what became known as the Armed Forces Movement (MFA to the Portuguese), which elected him as head of its executive committee. He rightly assessed most Portuguese would back a ‘‘friendly’’ coup to oust right-wing Prime Minister Marcello Caetano, who had taken over the country’s leadership in 1968 after 42 years under dictator Anto´ nio de Oliveira Salazar.

At 25 minutes past midnight on April 25, 1974, on Saraiva de Carvalho’s instructions, a radio station played the stirring folk song Oh

Fair Town of Grandola, a signal for the coup to begin. Four civilian demonstrators were shot in Lisbon, but it was otherwise, it was a bloodless coup, and people took to the streets in joy, embracing young soldiers and sticking red carnations in their rifles.

Saraiva de Carvalho’s wife died in December 2020. He is survived by his son and a daughter. Another daughter died aged 9, of malaria, in Portuguese Guinea while her father was based there.

In a 2009 interview with Spain’s El Pais newspaper, Saraiva de Carvalho said the true objectives of the Carnation Revolution had not been achieved. ‘‘I thought that decolonisation would allow for the rapid economic, cultural and social development of the least fortunate,’’ he said. ‘‘And this, we haven’t totally achieved. There is still a lot of lag.’’ –