Othello Saraiva de Carvalho /
He was considered the designer and leader in the shadow of the military coup that in 1974 restored democracy after half a century of dictatorship.
We owe the image of the Carnation Revolution to Celeste Caeiro, the employee in a cafeteria who gave a flower to a military man who had asked her for a cigarette and placed it in the barrel of her rifle. It took place on the morning of April 25, 1974, when Portugal closed a chapter in its history with the military uprising that without bloodshed ended the dictatorship started by António Oliveira Salazar and continued by Marcelo Caetano.
It was a simple gesture that has gone down in history, as will also Captain Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, the main strategist of the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) who returned democracy to the Lusitanians, who died at 85 years of age. Known as the Captain of April, his house in Lisbon became a center for meetings and encounters that forged the coup that began the previous midnight after the radio broadcast of ‘Grândola vila morena’, a prohibited song, as the agreed signal.
Saraiva de Carvalho since childhood wanted to be an actor and always confessed that his was the theater, not politics. It was demonstrated when he ran twice to the presidential elections without success despite the sympathy of public opinion.
He was also a committed figure who was linked to the far-left terrorist organization Forças Populares (FP-25), responsible for a dozen deaths. Although he always denied it – he dismissed the accusations of maneuvers by the Communist Party – he ended up sentenced to five years in prison. He was finally amnestied in 1996 by the Assembly of the Republic in an initiative that had come from the then President of the Republic, Mario Soares.
A figure who aroused both passions and “disappointments in Portuguese society, he was an international benchmark for alternative popular struggle and leaves a legacy that the memory of his compatriots will not forget.” Always attached to the controversy. He also caused a great scandal when it was known that he was a bigamist. He had married very young, without ever being separated. And then later in the 80s when he was in prison, he had a second wife. “From Monday to Thursday he lives in a house; Friday, Saturday and Sunday he spends them in the other one », reveals one of his biographies.
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source https://pledgetimes.com/saraiva-de-carvalho-strategist-of-the-carnation-revolution-in-portugal-dies/
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