Portugal: Cp Signs

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*Sentence first • verdict afterwards! was the order of the day from Portugal's military regime as the run-up to the elections entered its final phase. The sentence was pronounced by Admiral Rosa Coutinho. leading member of the Armed Forces Movement's *Supreme Revolutionary Coun cil, on April 11th, as the main political parties signed a 'pact giving the AFM overall political power for five years. named *The Red Admiral", and Coutinho - ludicrously nickuntil recently High Commissioner of Angola - has been since January one of the most open propagandists of a 'continuing political role for the officers even after the elections, scheduled for April 25th, to the Constituent Assembley.

The 'pact' of April 11th - which the Portuguese Communist Party was the first to agree to - spelled out exactly where the parliamentary road to socialism leads: to the rule of the bourgeoisie. The agreement gives the AFM power of veto over all important political decisions including the choice of presidential candidates.

The irony is that the 'pact' has been signed by the Stalinists and reformists as a condition of elections to a Constituent Assembly : The Assembly, therefore, whose theoretical task is to decide a constitution for a parlamentary system, was placed in a straightjacket while it was still in the womb. It can have no other purpose than to rubber stamp a constitution whose essential features are already laid down.

This constitution, moreover, not only reduces any eventual parliamen to a naked talking shop. but makes it one in which the military junta - which has already banned two Lett-wing parties and arrested their leading members - will reserve the power dictate what may and may not be said.

ground for opean Communist Parties than Portugal. At each turn in the situation Stalinist leader Cunhal's polies declare themselves impotent to defend the working lass, and reactionary.

Yet not even the most swift and cringing obedience to the military government will necessarily secure the place of the Stalinist chiefs in the regime. On the same day that Cunhal was busy signing away the sovereignty of any future narliament, Minister of Information Captain Jorge Jesuino declared that amiral the AFM thought in retrospect, maybe it was an error to allow the formation of political parties in Though he had kinder words for the Communist Party, whi itself to the effective, asks falling to it was and was devoring Jesuino went on to say that the "partisan quarrels' of the political parties were. "shocking', and that We like to el we are supported by the whole population, except by a few elements on the far left, which are especially agressite towards the AFM. Sometimes we feel it would be very desirable to have a political party of the AFM!

Behind the remnants of parlia mentary *democracy' therelore. stands the scarcely-velled threat of a one-party state. There are not many steps between popular frontISm and a radicall Portuguese version of Franco's Falange. And for such threats the policies of the Stalinists - who have unscrupulously backed the military in banning 1). embraces Brigadier irvalha. | Maoist organisations • responsibility There is, a division of labour in disarming working class after the rout of Spinola's attempted coup of March 11th. While the Stalinists and reformists busily direct political energy and attention away from the workers and soldiers committees and the real power which they possess, and towards hope in the parliamentary elections, the officers simultaneous. ly emasculate the parliament before it has even been planned, never mini elected.

The line of the Portuguese CP - who put socialists behind bars while leaving Portugal in NATO and the standing army ready and reorganised to intervene against the workers movement - fully accords with the counter-revolutionary international policies of the bureauстасу in the Soviet Union. These were snelled out in an off the record interview by a high Soviet official with the Paris paper Le Mor 1* nu April 5th The Kremlin

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