António de Oliveira Salazar

António de Oliveira Salazar Full Name: António de Oliveira Salazar Origin: Vimieiro, Santa Comba Dão, Portugal Occupation: Prime Minister of Portugal (1932 - 1968) Goals: Maintain the rule of the dictatorship (successful) Supress Communism in Portugal (successful until 1968) Crimes: Censorship Oppression Authoritarianism Genocide Misogyny Xenophobia Propaganda Mass murder Anti-Semitism Islamophobia Torture Type of Villain: Tyrannical Dictator

“	All for the nation, nothing against the nation.	„
	~ António de Oliveira Salazar

António de Oliveira Salazar (28 April 1889 – 27 July 1970) was a Portuguese statesman who served as Prime Minister of Portugal from 1932 to 1968. He was responsible for the Estado Novo ("New State"), the corporatist authoritarian government that ruled Portugal until 1974.

Biography

Salazar was born in Vimieiro, near Santa Comba Dão (Viseu District), to a family of modest income on 28 April 1889. His father, a small landowner, had started as an agricultural labourer and became the manager for the Perestrelos, a family of rural landowners of the region of Santa Comba Dão who possessed lands and other assets scattered between Viseu and Coimbra.

He was the only male child of two fifth cousins, António de Oliveira (1839–1932) and his wife Maria do Resgate Salazar (1845–1926).His four older sisters were Maria do Resgate Salazar de Oliveira, an elementary school teacher; Elisa Salazar de Oliveira; Maria Leopoldina Salazar de Oliveira; and Laura Salazar de Oliveira, who in 1887 married Abel Pais de Sousa, brother of Mário Pais de Sousa, who served as Salazar's Interior Minister.

Salazar, the son of an estate manager at Santa Comba Dão, was educated at the seminary at Viseu and at the University of Coimbra. He graduated from there in law in 1914 and became a professor specializing in economics at Coimbra. He helped form the Catholic Centre Party in 1921 and was elected to the Cortes (parliament), but he resigned after one session and returned to the university.

In May 1926, after the army had overthrown Portugal’s parliamentary government, Salazar was offered the cabinet post of minister of finance, but he could not obtain his own conditions. In 1928 General António Oscar de Fragoso Carmona, as president, offered him the finance ministry with complete control over the government’s income and expenditures, and this time Salazar accepted. As finance minister, he reversed the century-old tradition of deficits and made budgetary surpluses the hallmark of his regime. The surpluses were invested in a series of development plans.

A trained economist, Salazar entered public life with the support of President Óscar Carmona after the Portuguese coup d'état of 28 May 1926, initially as finance minister and later as prime minister. Opposed to democracy, communism, socialism, anarchism and liberalism, Salazar's rule was conservative and nationalist in nature. Salazar distanced himself from fascism and Nazism, which he criticized as a "pagan Caesarism" that recognised neither legal nor moral limits. Salazar promoted Catholicism, but argued that the role of the Church was social, not political, and negotiated the Concordat of 1940. One of the mottos of the Salazar regime was "Deus, Pátria e Família" (meaning "God, Fatherland, and Family").

With the Estado Novo enabling him to exercise vast political powers, Salazar used censorship and a secret police to quell opposition, especially any that related to the Communist movement. He supported Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War and played a key role in keeping Portugal and Spain neutral during World War II while still providing aid and assistance to the Allies. Despite not being a democracy, Portugal under his rule took part in the founding of important international organizations. Portugal was one of the 12 founding members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in 1949, joined the European Payments Union in 1950, and was one of the founding members of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) in 1960, and a founding member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 1961. Under his rule Portugal also joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1962, and began the Portuguese Colonial War. The doctrine of Pluricontinentalism was the basis of his territorial policy, a conception of the Portuguese Empire as a unified state that spanned multiple continents.

The Estado Novo collapsed during the Carnation Revolution of 1974, four years after Salazar's death. Evaluations of his regime have varied, with supporters praising its outcomes and critics denouncing its methods. However, there is a general consensus that Salazar was one of the most influential figures in Portuguese history. In recent decades, "new sources and methods are being employed by Portuguese historians in an attempt to come to grips with the dictatorship which lasted 48 years.