6 NOVEMBER 1976, Page 19

'Quixotic' Salazar

Sit: John Biggs-Davison, in an interesting article on post-colonial Portugal (23 October), makes several favourable allusions to the dictatorship of Dr Salazar (1930-1968) Which he believes 'was not fascist'. He is ht off course—but only up to a point. his professorial premier was able to stay in

CDower for a stupendous thirty-eight years he carried out policies which ran counter to those of Hitler and Mussolini; "ne of the grandiose schemes at home and abroad which, in the end, led to the undoing Of the Duce and the Rihrer. Salazar, in contrast, ran a tight little ship, pursuing relatively modest and unambitious goals. , This was the way of the regime until the 196% when Salazar suddenly took a gamble Worthy of his ill-fated confederates in the 930s. Namely to hold on to the Portuguese eMPire in Africa at a time when every other ation was divesting itself of its imperial role Irt that area But it led to the destabilisation of a Previously entrenched regime and the onset of the economic troubles which the Soares government is today endeavouring to cope

with.

It is no use Mr Biggs-Davison blaming these on the attempted left-wing revolution of 1974-75; in doing so, he is emulating his party colleagues at Westminster who assail the two-year-old Labour government for this country's assorted economic ills. In both instances, such wanton hyperbole and double-think sheds more light on the politicians concerned than on the matters at hand. Let me say to Mr BiggsDavison that when Salazar died in 1970, his quixotic colonial crusade had already done fundamental injury to the Portuguese economy : most of the annual gross domestic product was by then being gobbled up by the African wars; foreign interests were coming to dominate the industrial sector; Portugal, an agricultural nation, was having to import annually 100 million of essential foodstuffs, in terms of population the country was bled white: obsessed with holding on to an empire, Salazar failed to notice that 10 per cent of adult Portuguese left his Lusitanian redoubt between 1960 and 1970. The whirlwind is 'presently being reaped by Mario Soares and his colleagues. Let there be no mistake about who sowed the wind in the first place.

Tom Gallagher 23 Windsor Road, Levenshulme, Manchester 19