MORE STUDENTS ARRESTED IN LISBON from a Portuguese reader
In connection with the detention of a student involved in an explosion that occurred in Liston during October, 29 university students were recently arrested by the Portuguese political police, An official account of the detention appeared in the evening papers of the 4th of December, This stated that among those arrested were a group of 18 students and others who are members of the Front for Popular Action, describing them as a branch of the Communist Party. "During other investigations concerning subversive activities of the so-called 'Portuguese Commumist Party!", the report goes on, “a house was found where secret meetings took place and many members of the party were detained including eleven university students." In more recent official information to the press the political police claimed the arrest of the ex-university student Nuno A. Pereira whom they consider the Communist Party member in charge of subversive agitation in academic circles. He was arrested while meeting another student of the Faculty of Science, by the name of Antonio Jose Borrani Crisostomo Teixeira,
From all these facts it is apparent that a new wave of political activity is occurring in the Portuguese universities. The young people in Portugal are becoming more and more aware of the hopeless political future of their country if the present state of affairs - colonial wars in Angola, Guinea and Mozambique and a politically -nd economically retarded police state at home - continues, On the other hand no constitutional solution is possible and the opposition parties - mainly the Movement for Revolutionary Action and FAP - have realised this for a long time. The ‘unity fronts! of the opposition parties do not offer - this is the FAP position - the means of puttins an end to Dr. Salazar's regime, Being as they are an ideologically "mixed bag" of communists, socialists and democratic liberals they are in fact guided and controlled by the more moderate groups and therefore completely paralysed as far as practical strategic measures are concerned, This is in name of a cherished unity which has, however, no political meaning.
Against this FAP, a revolutionary communist organisation (it is labelled 'Chinese! in the rather poor jargon of the experts) intends to carry out a political attack on totally different lines - a revolutionary strategy designed to bring the working people into active and organised struggle, the only one capable of achieving in the foreseeable future the radical changes this poor and under-developed country so badly needs, The era of petitions for the dismissal of Dr. Salazar, and of disguising one's political analyses and programmes in diffusely democratic compromises with other so-called opposition forces is over, Time now - so the FAP thinks is for action.