A trip to prison

Of all the European dictators of the first half of the 20th century, only Francisco Franco of Spain held on to absolute power longer (39 years) than Portugal's Antonio Salazar (32 years). Stalin clocks in at 25 years, Mussolini at 21, Hitler a mere 12. 

What strikes me about Salazar's reign isn't its brutality ― that's a job requirement ― or even that it harnessed a vast propaganda machine that wrenched all the levers of society ― in the family, at school, at work and play. It's that he's the only one who did it while wearing a suit and tie.

These are the things one thinks about lying in bed after a visit to the Aljube prison in Lisbon, which opened to the public as a museum in 2015. It was here that thousands were brought to be interrogated and tortured on the suspicion of opposing the big guy, whose bankrupt political philosophy manifested itself by spending 40 percent of the national budget on the armed forces while keeping his subjects poor and illiterate (per capita income in 1967 was $420). 

Made-up "judges" appointed by military courts were empowered to send people to "preventive prisons." If you bought ink or paper, you were put on a watch list and tailed by efficient security police. Mail was intercepted, phones tapped.

If there wasn't room in a Portuguese lockup, you could be exiled, without charge, to prisons in the Azores, Mozambique, Angola, East Timor. 

All of this took place in the context of a government that embraced a crazy theory of "Lusotropicalism," which held that the Portuguese made more humane colonizers because they were used to warm weather and been subject to occupiers themselves.

In 1970, Salazar fell off a chair and suffered a fatal stroke (supposedly in that order). The regime survived until the army, fed up with waging his wars in Africa and elsewhere, launched a relatively bloodless Carnation Revolution in April 1974. These events are dramatized in a good movie called "April Captains," available on YouTube. Normally, military coups are bad medicine. With U.S. support, Pinochet had toppled Allende in Chile just seven months prior. By contrast, Portugal's coup restored a degree of press freedom, returned the political prisoners to their homes, and led to the end of the country's heinous colonial ambitions.

In one room of the museum, Salazar's acolytes, including women and children, salute while he intones in 1936 about the "great certainties of the National Revolution," making clear the totalitarian propensity of his Estado Novo (New State). A few steps away, a pointillistic mural of the men and women who died resisting the madness becomes clear only after walking toward it. The mural remains under construction while research continues into those who perished in Portugal's former colonies. 

Descriptions of the political police's sleep and isolation torture are almost too terrible to mention. On the third floor, a nerve-shattering bell goes off at irregular intervals to simulate what the Aljube prisoners went through. 

I had to get out of there. This was the most disconcerting museum experience I've had since walking through the Terror House in Budapest. Something is wrong with this continent, and it's not the Pakistani immigrants wearing pakol caps in Martim Moniz (a Lisbon neighborhood), which is what passes for a talking point these days.

The Museo do Aljube is open 10-6. Closed Mondays. Three euros. It's just north of the cathedral.