The Captains' Coup

Praise

“There are two journalists living today who are rocklike in their integrity and in their courage. And one is Wilfred Burchett, the Australian journalist you might say is a universal journalist. He’s been everywhere, and often every side calls upon him because he is right there with his information that others lack, because the information is from his own experience and being there.”
—Studs Terkel

“Melo and Walker have performed a great service to Portuguese historiography – and the study of revolutionary processes – by resurrecting and carefully editing Wilfred Burchett’s writings writings on the revolutionary period … I can certainly see myself using it with students: it encapsulates brilliantly a certain reading of the ‘Carnation Revolution’ and the interviews are invaluable.”
—Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses, author of Salazar: A Political Biography

“The everyday lived experience of the Portuguese revolution shines through in these pages and in the voices of the key participants. Burchett’s interviews with these victims of the Portuguese dictatorship are the very best and most compelling revelations of the torture, imprisonment and endless harassment and spying to which they were subjected. This is a compelling account, superbly edited by Melo and Walker … a worthy contribution to the fiftieth anniversary of the uprising in Lisbon that ended five centuries of Portuguese colonialism, led to the ending of white rule in Southern Africa, and began a process of democratisation in Spain and Greece, and eventually in Central and Eastern Europe”
—Kenneth Maxwell, author of The Making of Portuguese Democracy

“This carefully edited book offers a vivid portrait of the breakdown of one of the longest right-wing European dictatorships and of its colonial empire”
—António Costa Pinto, author of Latin American Dictatorships in the Era of Fascism

“Walker and Melo have brought to light an invaluable first-hand account by one of the period’s leading engagé reporters. Burchett’s journalistic eye brings to life the hopes and fears of the people he meets – activists, farmers, soldiers and fishermen – and with them the experience of the Revolution itself”
—Pedro Ramos Pinto, author of Lisbon Rising: Urban Social Movements in the Portuguese Revolution, 1974-1975