Under the Eucalyptus Trees

Before 1958, Lieut. General Humberto Delgado was an ornament of the regime of Premier Antonio Salazar. He served for five years as a military .attache in Washington, and was Portugal's representative to NATO. But then Delgado made the mistake of campaigning seriously for the presidency in one of Salazar's mock elections. Defeated, Delgado was promptly fired from his job as director of civil aviation, and took refuge in the Brazilian embassy until he got a guarantee of safe conduct to leave the country.

Since then Delgado has lived the shadowy life of a political exile. In 1961, a band of his supporters seized the Portuguese cruise ship Santa Maria and steamed off into the South Atlantic while Lisbon fumed. A year later, Delgado slipped back into Portugal in time for an uprising that collapsed with a halfhearted attack on the army barracks at Beja. When not quarreling with fellow exiles, Delgado spent the following years traveling in North Africa and behind the Iron Curtain trying to drum up support for his Front of National Liberation.

Early this year, Delgado and his attractive Brazilian secretary, Arajarir Campos, vanished from his home in Algiers, reportedly to meet with anti-Salazar conspirators in Spain. Except for a few postcards, the last one mailed from the Spanish town of Badajoz on the Portuguese border, Delgado was not heard from again. Last month, two small boys passing through a eucalyptus grove near Badajoz stumbled upon two shallow graves, one containing the corpse of a man whose face and fingers were disfigured. In the other lay the half-naked body of a woman. Both had been murdered by heavy blows on the skull.

Last week, after long brooding over the evidence, a Spanish tribunal identified the dead man as Humberto Delgado. There was no identification as yet of the woman. Precisely how they had been killed, and by whom, would be a matter of endless speculation.

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