Adriano Moreira, former foreign minister during the dictatorship and chairman of the CDS, turns 100 this Tuesday and becomes the longest-lived politician in democratic history. The DN will mark the date tomorrow with the publication of a removable in the paper edition.
The detachable will contain a great essay by Viriato Soromenho-Marques, who like Adriano Moreira is a columnist for the DN, old photos belonging to the historical archive of the DN and some opinion articles by the former president of the CDS, including a more published in DN more than half a century ago. In addition, in the online edition you can also see an interview, divided into four episodes, conducted by Viriato Soromenho-Marques.
Adriano José Alves Moreira was born in Grijó, Macedo de Cavaleiros, in the district of Bragança, on September 6, 1922, the son of António José Moreira, who was deputy head of the Public Security Police (PSP) in the port of Lisbon, and Leopoldina do Heaven Alves.
In Lisbon he lived in Campolide, studied at Liceu Passos Manuel and graduated in 1944 in Historical and Legal Sciences from the Faculty of Law of Lisbon. Recently graduated, he started practicing as a lawyer and his involvement in a case against the then minister of war, Fernando dos Santos Costa, earned him an arrest.
His dissertation “O Problema Prisional do Ultramar”, published in 1954, was awarded by the Lisbon Academy of Sciences. Between 1957 and 1959, Adriano Moreira was part of the Portuguese delegation to the United Nations: “There I could hear, for the first time in freedom, the voices of people who were treated as mute or expendable. They taught completely”.
António de Oliveira Salazar then called him to the government, first as Secretary of State for Overseas Government, in 1960, and then as Minister of Overseas, in 1961. The first revolts broke out in Angola against Portuguese colonization.
According to Adriano Moreira himself, Salazar invited him to carry out a series of reforms that he talked about in his classes, but later asked him to change his policy and his answer was: “Your Excellency has just changed ministers”.
“I was the minister of Salazar, but I was the minister that I was: I repealed the Statute of the Indigenato and abolished the obligatory cultures in the colonies,” he told Expresso in 1983.
Leaving the government in 1963, he returned to education and married Mónica Isabel Lima Mayer in 1968, with whom he had six children, António, Mónica, Nuno, Isabel, João and Teresa. He was president of the Geographical Society.
After April 25, 1974, he was relieved of official duties and exiled to Brazil, where he was a professor at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.
In 1980, he returned to active politics, as a candidate for deputy on the Democratic Alliance (AD) lists. He joined the CDS, which he would eventually lead, between 1986 and 1988, remaining a deputy until 1995.
In 2014, Adriano Moreira was one of the 70 personalities who defended the restructuring of the national debt as the only way out of the crisis.
Source: DN
