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Marshal Francisco da Costa Gomes died last Monday, July 31, 2001, at the military hospital in Lisbon. He was 87 years of age. Costa Gomes was one of the most enigmatic leaders of the coup d'etat of April 25, 1974 that overthrew Europe's oldest right-wing authoritarian regime, quickly terminated Portugal's half millennial presence in Africa, and set in motion a remarkable social upheaval that lasted over 18 turbulent months. By the "Hot Summer" of 1975, Portugal was temporarily propelled to the center of Cold War international machinations and the revolutionary fervor in the Portuguese countryside and towns presented a spectacle that had not been seen in Western Europe since the popular uprisings of 1840.
Through all this, General Costa Gomes remained a central figure, the "cork" as he was described at the time, the man who succeeded in floating despite the multiple turning of the tides. General António de Spínola, the first provisional president after the coup, was less charitable about his former colleague and co-conspirator after Costa Gomes replaced him as head of state in September of 1974. Spínola, embittered by his rejection and the way he was outmaneuvered by the communists and the military radicals during his months in office, called his successor "the congenital traitor," which is probably how most Portuguese continue to regard him in the midst of the self imposed amnesia that still affects most interpretations of the revolutionary period.
This characterization is unfortunate since Portugal owes General Costa Gomes two very important and lasting debts: decolonization in Africa and the avoidance of civil war in Portugal itself.
First, General Costa Gomes was entirely convinced in 1974 that Portugal's time in Africa was over. He believed that the sooner and more quickly Portuguese military forces were withdrawn, the sooner the Portuguese government could demobilize its bloated, demoralized, and defeated military establishment, and thereby remove the major source of domestic instability and radicalization restoring to the Portuguese armed forces the minimum of cohesion and discipline.
Secondly, Costa Gomes played a fundamental stabilizing role during the months between March of 1974 and November of 1975 when discipline broke down within the armed forces and the state bureaucracy. As president he was confronted with a dangerous polarization which could at several points have escalated into violence, based on the emergence of powerful, antagonistic, and regionally rooted grassroots movements. These were leftist, radical, landless and communist in complexion in the south and center of the country, but in the north were conservative, Catholic and small holding. Costa Gomes's powers as a president in these circumstances rested only in his ability for Machiavellian maneuver and quiet persuasion, and he remained utterly committed to the central principal that Portugal must be saved at whatever cost and whatever compromise from the catastrophe of degenerating into civil war.
In the end he succeed in both of these objectives. He did so by anticipating, like an eighteenth-century military tactician which in many ways he was, the precise moment when the balance of forces had decisively shifted from one side to the other, and the tide of opinion had moved sufficiently that he did not run the risk of contradicting it. Thus, unlike the abrasive Spínola on the right and the hard line communist leader Alvaro Cunhal on the left, Costa Gomes had the unerring ability to keep standing not only through the last months of the dictatorship, but through the coup d'etat, through the shift to the left, and through the move back to the center. Despite the provocations and dangerous eddies, he was still there in 1976 to hand over power constitutionally to Portugal's first democratically elected president and government. But none of the beneficiaries of this quiet persistence and political resilience trusted him or thanked him for these backroom skills. And when pressed to explain them, he had a propensity to cite obscure passages from the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu's classic book The Art of War.
Perhaps this deliberate obfuscation was the product of living for most of his life under the obscurantist regime of António Salazar; it was not an uncommon characteristic of discourse among Portuguese of his generation. Perhaps this enigmatic approach to politics emerged when he commanded the Portuguese garrison in Macao in the 1940s when the communists took over mainland China, but Macao remained untouched in its odd role as cultural broker and a place where multiple highly shadowed linkages joined the Portuguese and Chinese in obscure and mutually advantageous backroom deals. Maybe it grew out of his academic training as a mathematician, or lay in his roots in the poor northern province of Trás-os-Montes. Perhaps it had been learnt over a long military career. Early on Costa Gomes had opposed Portuguese military escalation in Africa and had been implicated in a 1961 plot to replace the dictator António Salazar, with strong indications of American involvement. Yet this subversion, from Salazar's point of view, did not see Costa Gomes expelled from the army. In fact by 1964 he was promoted to the general officer corps, and eventually became commander in chief of the war against the nationalist guerrillas both in Mozambique and Angola. He was a man who was seen both as a creature of the United States, and later as a creature of the Moscow and the old line Portuguese communists.
After he left office as president of the Portuguese Republic, he rarely spoke about his own past, or of his motivations during the turbulent months of the Portuguese revolution. He seemed largely indifferent to how history would treat him. He remained as obtuse and colorless as he had always been while playing a critical role at the center of Portuguese military and domestic politics for over 40 years. If he ever kept a diary, its discovery would undoubtedly be a major contribution to contemporary Portuguese history. But I doubt that he did. Costa Gomes is one of those curious Portuguese enigmas, and despite the best effort of future historians he is likely to remain so..
Or in the end is it all much simpler than this if we judge Costa Gomes by results. Unlike Latin America, which in the 1970s fell almost everywhere into the dark pit of military repression, Portugal by 1976 reemerged under a military president as a full-fledged European democracy. In this Costa Gomes was a most unusual general. He was not a man of the right, nor was he an authoritarian, nor was he interested in vainglorious evocations of an imperial past. Perhaps all along he was just a democrat, a precious unexpected and worthy title for a Marshal of Portugal.
