Historians rule out the PCP’s military involvement in the 25th of November

In turn, historian Jaime Nogueira Pinto addressed an analysis by American researcher Crane Brinton, who considers that each revolution is marked by three phases: the time of the moderates, terror and thermidor.

Thermidor “is a moment in which the Revolution does not have the strength to go forward, but the reaction also does not have the strength to go back, that is, to carry out a counter-revolution. And the 25th of November is, in a way, this point”, he said, adding that it was a date that had “external influence”, which also dictated the behavior of some actors, in particular the PCP.

“The Soviet Union was certainly not interested in having a kind of Cuba here that would stop any chance of a transition in Spain and I admit that the leaders, the elites, the senior management of the party, had that vision, but it does not mean that the militants had it too”, he said.

Historian Irene Flunser Pimentel argued that the “25th of November was not a coup d’état by the PCP” and, therefore, it is also not “a counter-coup or a counter-revolution to eliminate the PCP”, highlighting that the date is inseparable from a cleavage that occurred within the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) between the Group of Nine, the COPCON group and the Gonçalves group.

“What happened was that, with the 25th of November, there were MFA structures that disappeared (…) and perhaps one of the objectives of the 25th of November was probably to put an end to these structures, where the Gonçalves would be and so on” , he said.

On November 25, 1975, around a thousand paratroopers from the Tancos School Base occupied the Monsanto Air Region Command and six air bases, an act that the Group of Nine – a group of military personnel from the moderate wing of the Armed Forces Movement – considered the indication that a coup d’état could be in preparation by the so-called military left.

The attempted uprising of those military units, associated with sectors of the extreme left, was stopped by a device based on the Amadora commando regiment, under the direction of the then lieutenant colonel Ramalho Eanes, future President of the Republic.

At the end of the afternoon, the then President of the Republic, Francisco da Costa Gomes, decreed a state of siege in the Lisbon region, and the situation was controlled by the military assigned to the Group of Nine in the MFA.

The events of November 25, 1975 had several versions over the decades and caused divisions over the responsibilities of each actor and who took the first step.