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Since mid-July, reports TIME Correspondent George Taber, who last week visited the northern provinces, mobs of angry shopkeepers, peasants and craftsmen have launched a wave of attacks against about a score of Communist Party headquarters in the north. They are infuriated by the way the Communists have tried to seize national power despite their poor performance in the elections. In Rio Maior, furniture was tossed from the party headquarters' windows, doused with whiskey, and set aflame; at Vale de Cambra, a Molotov cocktail reduced the headquarters to a shambles of broken glass, ashes and charred posters. A Communist Party member in Estarreja who strayed too near a crowd trashing the headquarters was so badly beaten he was hospitalized; at Aveiro, a soldier was killed (accidentally by a fellow soldier) while protecting the headquarters from townspeople who were pelting the building with cobblestones. Angered by onesided reporting in the Communist-controlled press, demonstrators in Rio Maior destroyed a truckload of newspapers and strung a banner across a building in the town's main square proclaiming PEOPLE OF RIO MAIOR COMMAND THE END OF FALSE INFORMATION.
"Everywhere in this region, Communism means nationalization," reported Taber. "People fear they will lose everything. 'All I want is a party that won't take away my car,' a cab driver in Porto told me. Most important, the people fear the Communists will grab their land. Thus it is scarcely surprising that in Rio Maior an artisan insisted that 'It's better to be a homosexual than a Communist.' " Until recently, the north regarded the military as heroes for triggering last year's revolution. Now an increasing number of the area's inhabitants mutter bitterly, as did a mechanic in Benedita, that "the M.F.A. gives every thing to the Communists." The military leaders in Lisbon cannot long ignore such disillusionment. It was, after all, the north's dissatisfaction with the Portuguese Republic that led to the 1926 "March on Lisbon," resulting in Antonio Salazar's takeover two years later.