Coups by Night

Two small but bitter political uprisings shook two nations last week. Both were quickly suppressed, but both momentarily illuminated the half-hidden political forces at work in the two countries.

In Portugal, a somewhat amateurish band of conspirators tried to unseat Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. At 2 a.m. New Year's Day, as heavy winds and rain lashed the wheatfields around Beja, 85 miles southeast of Lisbon, a sentry at the 3rd Infantry Regiment barracks was roused by the approach of four automobiles. Recognizing three of his own regimental officers, he waved the cars inside the gate. But the cars also carried a score of workers from Lisbon's suburb of Almada, and such sworn foes of the Salazar regime as ex-Army Captain Joao Varela Gomes and Manuel Serra, former head of the Catholic youth movement.

The insurgents easily rounded up sleeping officers in the regimental headquarters--so easily that they grew careless. Varela Gomes burst into the room of the acting commandant, a major, and ordered him to put up his hands. Instead, the major whipped out a submachine gun, dropped Varela Gomes with five bullets in the stomach, and escaped to give the alarm.

With Varela Gomes badly wounded, his followers seemed at a loss. They exchanged brief fire with soldiers and security police who moved on the barracks, and then fled. The Under Secretary for the Army, Lieut. Colonel da Fonseca. raced down from Lisbon to take charge, but as he approached the barracks on foot he was shot dead, probably by one of his own trigger-happy men. Two insurgents were killed at Beja and 13 captured, including the badly wounded Varela Gomes. Five more were seized at a fishing port, where they had hoped to escape by sea.

In Brazil, long a haven for anti-Salazar exiles, Captain Henrique Galvao called the Beja incident "a great step forward, just because it happened.'' Galvao, who daringly hijacked the Portuguese liner Santa Maria last January, conceded that the operation was badly led and planned, but nevertheless saw it "as a logical de velopment of the revolutionary process that has continued without interruption since the Santa Maria." He prophesied that 1962 "will mark the end of Salazar." The aging (72) dictator himself last week made one of his rare appearances before Parliament to deliver a speech, but an aide had to read it for him; in moments of strain, Salazar is apt to lose his voice, and after 33 years in power, the strain was beginning to tell on the world's senior dictator. *

In Lebanon, the insurrection was more ambitious, recalling for awhile the 1958 civil war in which Christian President Camille Chamoun's government was in conflict with pro-Nasser Moslems until U.S. Marines restored order. When the dust settled, Chamoun stepped down and both Christians and Moslems united behind the presidency of ascetic General Fuad Chehab, a Christian Arab whose policy is pro-Western, yet also friendly to Egypt's Nasser. Last week's revolt against Chehab was led by the Popular Syrian Party, a right-wing Moslem group dedi cated to uniting Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq into a single Arab state.

The revolt began one night in the ancient city of Tyre when an army captain named Fouad Awad loaded 40 soldiers into eight armored cars and set off for Beirut, 45 miles away. Rolling into the capital at 2 a.m., Awad was joined by several hun dred armed civilians. They seized army headquarters and the general post office, laid siege to the Ministry of Defense.

The chief of army intelligence, Colonel Antoine Saad, had been aware that a coup was in the making. Returning from a party, Saad found the Ministry of Defense surrounded by rebels, sent a boy on a bicycle off with a message to a nearby armored unit. The revolt collapsed when three Centurion tanks arrived and opened fire on the besiegers, killing five. Captain Awad and some of his men escaped to the towering Lebanon range behind Beirut in whose craggy villages live an estimated 25,000 members of the Popular Syrian Party. At week's end, Lebanese jet fighters were strafing the insurgent villages, while army units moved up to crush the uprising.

All other parties rallied to the support of Chehab. Although suspected of being mixed up in the coup, ex-President Camille Chamoun pledged loyalty to Chehab. Clearly relieved that there was not to be a repetition of the 1958 fighting, the newspaper L'Orient applauded the new "solidity" of Lebanese institutions, congratulated its country on the swift failure "of this mad enterprise made without any popular support or without any serious support within the army."

* Runners-up: Franco, in power 23 years; Albania's Enver Hoxha, 17 years; Yugoslavia's Tito, 16 years; East Germany's Ulbricht, 13 years; China's Mao Tse-tung, 12 years.

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