JOSE MEDEIROS FERREIRA / MARIA I REZOLA TRADUTOR DAVID HARDISTY
"On 25 April 1974, a group of Portuguese soldiers overthrew one of the last Western European dictatorships of the 20th century, and presented a political programme to the country based on three pillars: Democratise, Decolonise and Develop. What came to be known as the Carnation Revolution started the ôthird wave of democratisationö (Samuel P. Huntington), which then reached Spain, Greece and dozens of other countries in Latin America, Asia and the Pacific, Africa and Eastern Europe. A year earlier, in April 1973, an essay that José Medeiros Ferreira had sent from exile in Switzerland had been presented to the 3rd Congress of the Democratic Opposition in Aveiro. In this essay, which was received with suspicion by various sectors of the Opposition, but which turned out to be prescient, the author stressed the need for the Armed Forces to be involved, firstly to put an end to the dictatorship and the war in the African colonies, and then to support the implementation of a national action plan that would lead to decolonisation, democratisation and
