More than a century of life it was “all or almost everything”, leaving “100 years of service to Portugal”; a “fundamental personality of the 20th and early 21st centuries”; “one of the foremost political thinkers of contemporary Portugal”, leaving behind a “legacy of genuine public service”; a “witness to life hardly equal”.
Adriano Moreira died yesterday morning, just over a month after turning 100. A unique figure in Portuguese public life, both for his long life and for the unique political path that took him from the minister of Salazar to a senator of the democratic regime, an academic pioneer in the valorization of political science and military studies in the higher education, the former leader of the CDS received tributes from various quarters yesterday.
In a statement at the Palácio de Belém, the President of the Republic emphasized the “100 years of life, 100 years of work, 100 years of service in Portugal” by Adriano Moreira, a man “who was everything or almost everything” – “academic, master of civilians and military, fighter for freedom and democracy, later impossible reformer in dictatorship, still repealing the Indigenous Statute. Exiled, returned, chairman of a political party, vice-chairman of the Assembly of the Republic, advisor to the state”. “Adriano Moreira has left us. In peace, serene, in history, but above history, as he has always lived,” said Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.
Adriano Moreira, member of the CDS since the late 1970s and former leader, was also remembered by current and former centrist presidents as an important figure in the party – and in Portuguese society. A “fundamental personality of the 20th century and the early 21st century,” said Nuno Melo, also speaking of an “important CDS reference”, an “example” that follows. Paulo Portas, in a note to the Lusa agency, lamented the loss of one of Portugal’s “greatest sages” and “best statesmen”, defining Adriano Moreira as “a prince of politics” and a “thinker of diplomacy”. Assunção Cristas, for his part, emphasized the “tremendous consistency” and “great fidelity to the principles in which he believed”. One of the most prominent was Christian Democracy. Yesterday, the Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon, Manuel Clemente, also left a “grateful tribute”: “It is a life always very true to itself, to its feelings and thoughts.”
For the President of the Assembly of the Republic, Augusto Santos Silva, Adriano Moreira will “remain as a great figure of Portuguese democracy, who managed to recognize and integrate him”. “It was democracy that made him deputy and party leader, and master of several generations. In turn, he helped to situate democracy in the historical continuity of Portugal,” he wrote on social networks. The government has already issued a note early in the evening pointing out the “lawyer, academic, politician, thinker who pays attention to Portugal’s place in the world, to security and defense issues and to international reality”. who stood out “for his political and social intervention” and “with whom democracy could reconcile”.
Former President of the Republic Cavaco Silva also came to summon the “illustrious Portuguese” and the “proud Trás-os-Montes”, “one of the most important political thinkers of contemporary Portugal”: “As I said in 2009, Adriano Moreira “belonged to the line of those who remain true to his word and to his path” – and in a time as fleeting as the one in which we had to live, that alone is a cause of admiration and praise.”
PSD chairman Luís Montenegro wrote on Twitter that the former state councilor leaves “a very rich legacy of thinking about social values and principles”. Former Social Democratic leader Rui Rio also publicly commented on the politician and academic’s death: “My tribute to Adriano Moreira, whose integrity, knowledge and intellectual worth have always impressed me.” PS chairman Carlos César in the spotlight “a personality who, after an influential collaboration with the previous regime, met democratic Portugal, in which he participated actively and constructively”.
Isabel Moreira, member of the PS and daughter of Adriano Moreira, also left a testimonial on social media, with a heartfelt message addressed to her father: “This love has always made today the day I dreaded the most in my life”. “The fullness of having said, the fullness of having felt, of everything in us that has meaning, Father, my love, love of my life, thank you,” she wrote.
From Aljube Prison…
Adriano José Alves Moreira was born in Grijó, Macedo de Cavaleiros (Bragança district), on September 6, 1922. He was not yet two years old when his parents moved to Lisbon, to the Campolide district, a change that would not sever the deep bond with the roots of Trás-os-Montes, which he maintained throughout his life.. In his memoirs, Adriano Moreira recalls the long vacations he spent in his native village as a time of absolute freedom, emphasizing the protective figure of his maternal grandfather. “An extraordinary man, sensible, very bright and very intelligent,” he said in an interview with News diaryin 2016, stating that these experiences made him “much more like Trás-os-Montes than Lisbon”.
But it was in Lisbon that he grew up, first at the Liceu Passos Manuel, then at the Lisbon Faculty of Law, where he graduated in 1944 in historical-legal sciences. While still an intern at a law firm, he signed the lists of the Movimento de Unidade Democrática (MUD) to call for elections and later became involved in the trial conducted by the family of General Marques Godinho – who was in prison died after participating in a failed coup d’état against the regime – against the then Minister of War, Fernando dos Santos Costa. Adriano Moreira will end up in Aljube prison after invoking “professional secrecy” when PIDE asks who talked to him about the trial. He spent about two months in prison, where he began an unlikely friendship that lasted a lifetime: “I had in my ward Hegel’s History of Philosophy and The Prince [de Maquiavel]. He comes to me, says his name is Mário Soares and says “you are reading a reactionary literature”. And me: “I study for Miguelista.” And we’ve remained friends until today,” he told DN.
… the minister of Salazar
Between 1957 and 1959, Adriano Moreira was part of the Portuguese delegation to the UN, an experience that would touch him deeply. His views on Africa, defending the tenets of Lusotropicalism, caught the attention of António de Oliveira Salazar, who invited him to the government.
Adriano Moreira would be Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1960 to 1961 and then Minister of Foreign Affairs until 1963. which coincided with the outbreak of armed conflict in Angola. A mandate marked by the adoption of legislation that ended the Statute of the Indigenato, which denied citizenship to the natives of the colonies, the Rural Labor Code or the establishment of higher education in Angola and Mozambique, but also the opening of de Campo de Trabalho de Chão Well, on the Cape Verde island of Santiago, where the Campo Penal do Tarrafal operated (1936-1956) and where in later years many of those who fought for independence would be arrested.
Adriano Moreira’s tenure in the Overseas Ministry lasted two years, until Salazar asked him to change policy for Africa. “Your Excellency has just lost a minister”was the answer, which he himself tells in A Time foam. Remembering the time of vespers.
Thus, Adriano Moreira returns to academic life and assumes the presidency of the Geographical Society. In 1968 he married Isabel Mónica Lima Mayer – a marriage that turned 54 last August – in Sintra, with whom he had six children.
From exile in Brazil to state councilor
A year after April 25, during a visit to Brazil, he learned from Admiral Pinheiro de Azevedo about the arrest warrant awaiting him in the hot summer of Lisbon. Exiled, he returned to Portugal in 1977, with Ramalho Eanes having him retroactively reinstated at the University of Lisbon and the now-extinct Instituto Superior Naval de Guerra. At the invitation of figures such as Diogo Freitas do Amaral, Adelino Amaro da Costa and his great friend Narana Coissoró, he later joined the Democratic and Social Center (CDS), which he would lead between 1986 and 1988.. Between 1980 and 1995 he was a Member of Parliament and Vice-President of the Assembly of the Republic. Appointed by the CDS in 2015, he took on the role of State Councilor, which he held until 2019, already with the current president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.
If the political career was a “civic duty”, as he said, the vocation Adriano Moreira always took was academic life, with a focus on political science and international relations and studies on security and defense. Associated for many decades with what is now the Institute of Social and Political Science of the University of Lisbon (ISCSP), which he headed, he also played an important role in military studies – not coincidentally, among the many honorary awards that he received his major from the navy, army and air force. Awarded in 2017 with the Grand Cross of the Order of Infante D. Henrique – to correct “a small historical omission”, the President of the Republic declared at the time – he received this year, also from the hands of Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, the Grand Cross in the Order of Camoes. In July of this year he became the first honorary doctor of the Instituto Universitário Militar, in recognition of the affirmation of military science in academia.
The wake of Adriano Moreira is scheduled for this Monday, at the Jerónimos Monastery, in Lisbon, from 8 p.m. A mass is planned for tomorrow, at noon, according to an official CDS source at the Lusa Bureau, followed by the funeral, which will be reserved for the family.
Source: DN
