For nearly 40 years, António de Oliveira Salazar has been the unusual dictator of an unfortunate land. An austere, almost monastic man who once taught economics, he has shunned publicity and raised few monuments to himself. Yet he built a tightly run, corporate state modeled closely on Mussolini's Italy, and his secret police have harshly repressed most discussion and all dissent. He has ruled longer than any other European political leader in this century. Early this month, after injuring his head in a fall from a deck chair, Salazar, 79, underwent surgery for removal of a blood clot on his brain. Last week he lay near death after a massive stroke that left him in a coma and partly paralyzed. After decades of his monolithic rule, the Portuguese seemed in paralysis as well.
Portugal is Western Europe's poorest nation. Its population numbers under 9,000,000, and its natural resources are scant. Before Salazar came to power, the land was in chronic economic chaos and political disarray: in 161 years it had had 45 governments, some lasting only days. As Premier after 1932, Salazar squashed partisan quarreling with dictatorial measures and brought order to the economy by applying conservative, pre-Keynesian fiscal policies. By the late 1930s, he was flirting openly with fascism. He backed Franco against the Spanish Republicans. While Portugal remained neutral in World War II, Salazar at first sympathized with the Axis; when it became clear that that was the losing side, he granted bases in the strategically located Azores Islands to the U.S. and Britain.
Unlikely Role. Though Salazar has accumulated an impressive $1.2 billion in gold and foreign-exchange reserves, the cost has been excessive. The annual rate of economic growth is only 3%, industry is stagnant and the country's infrastructure is outdated. Per capita income is $400 a year, the illiteracy rate 40%. Though the economy is underdeveloped, Salazar has clung grimly to an increasingly costly empire; its colonies extend as far as Macao on the Chinese coast and Portuguese Timor in the East Indies. Tiny Portugal is cast in the unlikely role of Africa's last major colonial power. With 125,000 troops fighting three little-publicized wars in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea, the country spends 40% of its budget on defense.
More dismal still, civil liberties are nearly unknown in Portugal. Press censorship has been in force almost continually since 1926. The secret police, P.I.D.E., have banned books by such seemingly noncontroversial writers as Will Durant and Paul Claudel. Political opponents of the regime are regularly put into preventive detention for up to six months. The P.I.D.E. jailed Mario Scares, a lawyer and leading critic of the Salazar regime, a total of 13 times before exiling him without trial last March to the tiny island of Sao Tome in the Gulf of Guinea. The number of legal emigrants and clandestinos voting against Salazar with their feet rose dramatically from 34,000 in 1961 to some 150,000 in 1966.