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At the time of the coup, some foreign observers were astonished that young officers had led the revolt, since the military was widely regarded as a key prop of the Salazar and Caetano regimes. In retrospect, there should have been no surprise. Many of those officers had come from poor families that could not afford to send them to the universities. For them, therefore, entering a military academy and receiving a regular officer's commission were the only means of obtaining an education and advancing in social status. Gradually, they saw their positions and careers threatened when in 1973 the government began granting regular commissions to conscript officers, who previously had received merely militia commissions. Groups of disgruntled regulars—captains and majors—thus began meeting in secret sessions to vent their frustrations. Eventually, these discussions broadened to include political and social topics. By December 1973, a nucleus of junior officers was already thinking of ways to overthrow the Caetano regime.
What catalyzed these officers and politicized their anger was opposition to the seemingly endless, futile wars Lisbon had been waging since 1961 against liberation movements in Portugal's African territories. Many of them had spent almost all of their military careers in Africa. Not only did they bear the brunt of the fighting and physical hardship, but they were appalled by the wars' drain on their country—an estimated 300 killed annually and a continuing expenditure equivalent to 40% of Portugal's national budget. "The officers of the M.F.A. came to realize that they were sitting in Africa, living out their lives for the profit of the Estoril crowd back in Portugal," says Commander Jesuino. "I felt guilty about the role I was playing. We read the literature of the liberation groups we were fighting. We talked with prisoners. We read the doctrines of Che Guevara and Mao and so on—and we thought for ourselves."
These thoughts were idealistic but politically naive. Limited both in knowledge and experience, they lacked the perspective to weigh the radical theories they absorbed. "The men of the M.F.A. view the world through a narrow spectrum of revolutionary struggle," notes a veteran Western diplomat in Lisbon. "Many of them are very emotional. It is not uncommon to see tears form as they talk about excesses of the great landholding families."
Easy Coup. Almost inevitably, many of the young officers came to regard the repressive Caetano government and the oligarchic capitalists who supported it as their real enemy rather than the African revolutionaries. Toppling the old regime, the military found, was surprisingly easy—the coup was almost bloodless, and it was accomplished in 17 hours. Ambitiously dubbing itself the Junta of National Salvation, the new regime chose as its head António de Spinola, the popular general who had publicly criticized the Caetano regime for continuing the war against the rebel movements in Portugal's African territories. Spinola and the M.F.A. pledged that within a year elections would be held for a Constituent Assembly empowered to draft a democratic constitution.