The machinery of repression

From 1928, the Aljube was a political prison — for men only. It was the prison for those on remand: here they waited for the investigation of their case, for trial or for deportation, and from here they were taken for interrogation at police headquarters.²

From 1943, on the second floor, thirteen isolation cells about a metre wide — the “curros” (pens) — held prisoners in half-darkness, with no paper, no books, no watch, during the first months of incommunicado detention.³ Women arrested by the political police went to the Mónicas Prison, in Graça, and later to Caxias. Since 25 April 2015, the building has been the Aljube Museum – Resistance and Freedom.⁴

Political prisoners were tried in the Plenary Court, presided over by an appeal court judge appointed by the Minister of Justice; in Lisbon, it sat here.¹⁵ It was here, in 1960, that the communist activist Maria Alda Nogueira heard herself sentenced to eight years’ major imprisonment.⁶ Isabel Aboim Inglez was arrested in the courtroom itself, while giving evidence as a defence witness.⁷

In the same building, in an ordinary court, the three authors of Novas Cartas Portuguesas (New Portuguese Letters) were tried behind closed doors for offending public morals. The verdict, set for 18 April 1974, was not read until 7 May — in freedom by then, and to acquit them.⁸

Before the political police headquarters was fully up and running, in 1938, it was the PSP police stations that held prisoners kept incommunicado — “the real logistics of repression”, in the words of the Memória Comum project. The 1st Station was here, in the Lisbon Civil Government building. Its cells took in prisoners on the eve of their trials before the Special Military Court, which were often held in the building itself.⁹

At No. 22 on this street stood the headquarters of the PVDE, later the PIDE and finally the DGS: the files, the informers, the interrogations.¹⁰ Interrogations took place on the third floor — beatings, sleep deprivation and the “estátua” (statue) torture, with squads of agents working in relays; against women, stripping and offences of a sexual nature were added.¹¹

The factory worker Conceição Matos was brought here in April 1965, beaten for days and stripped in the interrogation room. “Anyone who looks at that case file knows I never talked to the police,” she said years later.¹²

From 22 September 1969, press censorship worked from the first floor of No. 125 Rua da Misericórdia — the seventh address of a service that had been born in 1926 in the Carmo Barracks and never strayed far from the newsrooms. Newspapers sent in their page proofs and got them back stamped, cut with the “blue pencil”.¹³

Many texts by women did not get past this sieve: Diana Andringa had an article on the war in Angola cut, and Novas Cartas Portuguesas was withdrawn from circulation shortly after it came out.¹⁴ Almost opposite, at No. 116, was the newspaper República. On the morning of 25 April 1974 its editor, Raul Rego, refused to send the proofs to the “Prior Examination”, and the paper came out with a line at the foot of the front page: “This newspaper has not been vetted by any Censorship Commission” (Este jornal não foi visado por qualquer Comissão de Censura).¹⁵

In 1933 the regime created the National Propaganda Secretariat, headed by the journalist António Ferro;¹⁶¹⁷ in 1940 the State bought this palace to serve as its headquarters.¹⁸ Censorship passed through here too: between 1947/48 and 1961 it worked in the building, with its entrance on Calçada da Glória.¹³

And it was right next door, by the Elevador da Glória, that PIDE agents killed the worker David Almeida Reis, during the May Day demonstration on 1 May 1964.¹⁹