Historica Wiki
Advertisement
Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho

Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho (31 August 1936-25 July 2021) was a Portuguese left-wing military officer who led the 1974 Carnation Revolution and was later arrested for leading the communist FP-25 revolutionary group.

Biography[]

Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho was born in Lourenco Marques, Portuguese Mozambique (now Maputo, Mozambique) on 31 August 1936 to a family of mixed Portuguese and Goan Indian descent. He entered the Military Academy in Lisbon in 1955 at the age of 19 and served in the Portuguese Colonial War in Africa, during which he was stationed in both Angola and Guinea-Bissau. In 1974, he joined the Movement of Armed Forces and became the chief strategist of the 1974 Carnation Revolution, which brought an end to the fascist Estado Novo regime. Otelo then participated in the provisional governments which governed post-revolutionary Portugal, and he developed close ties to the Cuban government and was imprisoned for three months after leading an abortive leftist coup in 1975. in 1976, he ran for President with the support of the far-left, placing in second with 16.5% of the vote to the independent socialist Antonio Ramalho Eanes' 61.6%. In 1980, he again ran for President as the candidate of his far-left Popular Unity Force (FUP), but he finished in third with just 1.4% of the vote. In 1982, he was recalled to the military after it was revealed that his earlier discharge had been politically motivated, but, in 1984, he was arrested and then convicted a year later for his role in leading the FP-25 revolutionary organization. In 1989, he was amnestied, and he retired from the military and from public life in 1989. He remained an FUP political activist, and, in 2011, he stated that - in the wake of the Great Recession - he wouldn't have led the Carnation Revolution if he knew what would come after it, and he expressed his belief that Portugal needed a strongman to lead it. He died of heart failure in 2021 at the age of 84.

Advertisement