Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of a remarkable event. In Portugal a long-standing dictatorship was swept away by a military coup that was welcomed in the streets by jubilant crowds and accompanied by the release of political prisoners and the toppling of the so-called Estado Novo, or New State.  

There was virtually no bloodshed. The few who did die were killed by agents of the hated secret police, the PIDE, sniping from the top floor of their Lisbon headquarters. Flowers in the barrels of rifles became the iconic symbol of what has ever since been known as the carnation revolution.  

The Portuguese dictatorship originated in a military coup by right-wing army officers rebelling against a parliamentary republic.  

In 1933, the year when Hitler came to power in Germany, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar established a fascist-inspired regime in Portugal — authoritarian, traditionalist, corporatist and Catholic — under the slogan Deus, Patria e Familia (God, Fatherland and Family).  

Vehemently opposed not only to communism and socialism but also to liberalism, Salazar maintained an iron rule both in Portugal and in its vast, mostly African, empire.   

During the Spanish civil war Salazar extended significant help to Franco’s fascist forces. Yet he, like Franco, avoided an outright alliance with Hitler’s Third Reich and thus survived into the post-war era.   

As post-war became cold war so Salazar was cast in Washington and other Western capitals as an exemplary cold warrior and Portugal joined Nato as a founding member in 1949.

From the early 1960s onwards the Salazar regime allowed a modernisation of the economy.  

These policies were accelerated after 1968 when Salazar was replaced by Marcello Caetano.  

Yet all was not going well for the regime. Democratic sentiment was very much alive and could not be fobbed off by rigged elections or entirely suppressed by press censorship and the brutalities of the PIDE.

There was active resistance in the industrialised areas, in the southern agricultural lands of the Alentejo and in the universities.   

In 1960 the resistance inflicted a humiliating reverse on the regime when the future secretary-general of the Portuguese Communist Party Alvaro Cunhal escaped together with several comrades from a high-security PIDE prison at Peniche.

Worst of all for the regime was that from 1961 onwards it became embroiled in a series of colonial wars, first in Angola and then in Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique.  

It was compelled to augment its regular forces with an array of conscripts, both soldiers and junior officers.  

The number of casualties mounted, the guerillas grew in strength and it became evident that the wars were unwinnable. 

Caetano felt undermined by the open criticism that he was receiving from a senior officer with African experience and decidedly right-wing views, General Antonio de Spinola.  

But the real threat to the regime came from hundreds of junior officers, most of whom had served in Africa.  

These officers were organised in what on April 25 1974 declared itself as the Movimento das Forcas Armadas (MFA), the Armed Forces Movement.

The instigators of the coup made clear from the very outset where their sympathies lay. The signal was given at 20 minutes past midnight on April 25 by the playing on Radio Renascenca of a popular song that was so subversive that it had been banned by the regime. The song was Grandola, Vila Morena (Grandola, sunburnt town). It was about a town (On each corner a friend/In each face equality) bordering the Alentejo where landless workers were ruthlessly exploited on the big estates, the latifundios.  

April 25 created a crisis for the traditional ruling class, including the big landowners, and opened the way for fundamental reforms and for a wave of occupations in factories and in the countryside.  

In the Alentejo there was the opportunity to end centuries of exploitation and to achieve an agrarian reform — the agraria. The workers’ slogan was “A Terra a quem a trabalha” (the Land for those who work it).  

In the face of the non-payment of wages most of the latifundios had been occupied by their workers from late 1974 onwards.  

In July 1975 a left-leaning provisional government passed a law that retrospectively sanctioned the new co-operatives. There was a great increase both in the numbers working on the land and in the volume of production.  

The landowners, like other members of Portugal’s ruling class, had suffered serious reverses first when Spinola, who for a time had occupied the office of president, failed in two successive coup attempts and fled into exile.  

Yet in the late summer of 1975 the political right was emboldened by the growing success of its campaign of propaganda and intimidation against the left.  Fatally for the revolution, the Socialist Party’s Mario Soares threw his support to the right under the banner of anti-communism.

Visiting Portugal in late September 1975 I went to the Alentejo and ran straight into a scene of intense class conflict.   

The story was that workers from the occupied estate at Cujancas had been set upon when they tried to sell some of the cattle from a prize herd of cows in a nearby market.  

The very next day a convoy of 200 supporters of the Rebelda landowning family arrived on the Cujancas estate and under threat of a lynching intimidated the workers into revealing the whereabouts of the herd.  

The cows were loaded onto lorries and driven to the small town of Gaviao where the landowner gifted the cows to the smallholders.   

In Portalegre last September a leader of the Union of Sindicates of Portalegre (CGTP), Diogo Julio Serra, explained that Senhora Rebelda had been no ordinary landowner but a member of a family that had been a pillar of the Salazar-Caetano regime and was able to draw upon cross-border support from other landowners in a still fascist Spain (Franco did not die until November 20 that year).   

Having even a little land of their own, the Gaviao smallholders were open to Senhora Rebelda’s colossal bribe.  

As I discovered in September 1975, the tactic had worked. Arriving at the crossroads down the hill from Gaviao, I found perhaps 1,000 workers from the occupied estates blocking the road.

Going up the hill and meeting some of the townspeople I found them combative, promising to “smash the communists.” The landowner had succeeded in her aim. She now had her local crowd of supporters.

The impasse was broken by the arrival of a military convoy from the garrison at Portalegre.

Parleying briefly with the workers at the crossroads, the soldiers drove on to Gaviao.

In the small hours I was awakened from uncomfortable sleep by the sound and smell of the cows as the soldiers brought them back down the hill.

Yet this was still no victory for the Cujancas workers since, acting on the orders of the garrison commander, the soldiers loaded the cows on to lorries and drove away to Portalegre.

The next day I was in Portalegre. Outside the Communist Party office a crowd of the landowners’ people shouted threats and hurled abuse but never quite got it together to launch an attack.  

They did not have among them the kind of agents provocateurs I had seen a few weeks earlier, working a crowd in the northern town of Braga as they tried to burn down the local Communist Party office.  

But in Portalegre that day it was the landowners who lost and their supporters who scattered as the workers from the occupied estates arrived in force and took control of the streets.  

The very next day the civil and military authorities agreed to return the cows to Cujancas. The workers had won.

The struggle over the cows of Cujancas had been a late victory for the workers in the revolutionary period that effectively ended only a few weeks later with a counter-coup on November 25 1975 that was soon followed by the dissolution of the MFA.  

The counter-coup was not followed by a bloodbath and — crucially — independence had already been ceded to the African colonies.  

Portugal became a parliamentary and electoral democracy but the new forms of direct democracy and of workers’ control of production were ended and nowhere more brutally and with more devastating effect than in the Alentejo.   

Visiting the Alentejo last September the long-term consequences of the ascendancy of the political right were plain to see.  

The region, like the rest of Portugal, is in the grip of the austerity programme accepted by the right and imposed by the “troika” (the European Union, European Central Bank and IMF).  But my concern was with the agraria.

Joao Fernando, leader of the PCP in Portalegre, told me that the real blow came in the summer of 1977 when a new law (the Lei Barreto) took away the legal protection from the co-operatives.  

Even bringing cases before the courts proved fruitless as teams from the Ministry of Agriculture and the police, frequently accompanied by the landowner, toured the Alentejo evicting the workers.  

Since then the Alentejo has suffered a catastrophic population decline with much of the land going out of cultivation.  Paulo Cardoso, co-ordinator of the Left Block in Portalegre, spoke about the “desertification” of the land and the drastic decline in those who obtain their living from the land.

Yet, as Jose Amante who had worked in the agraria explained, there are still a very few co-operatives that somehow held on and there is still a movement that demands a new agrarian reform. The example of this movement of landless workers remains an inspiring one.