Raul Alves

He was born in Vialonga, in the municipality of Vila Franca de Xira, on 9 March 1914. A welder and communist activist, he lived on the Companhia Industrial Portuguesa housing estate in Póvoa de Santa Iria. The PIDE arrested him on 16 July 1958, accused of “subversive activities”, after the strike and demonstrations by the company’s workers against the fraud in the presidential election of 8 June, in which Humberto Delgado had stood.¹

He was taken to the Prisoners’ Depot at Caxias and, eleven days later, on 27 July, transferred to Aljube Prison. It was from the Aljube that prisoners were taken to interrogation, and often to torture, on the third floor of the PIDE headquarters, on Rua António Maria Cardoso.¹

On 31 July 1958 he fell from a window on that third floor and died, aged 44. Memória Comum, which includes him among “those who fell along the way”, writes that he was “thrown”.¹² Several people reportedly saw a man hanging outside the window, screaming, before he fell. Among them was the wife of the Brazilian ambassador, Heloísa Ramos Lins, whose residence overlooked the back of the building.¹³ She told what she had seen to the Cardinal Patriarch, Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira, who wrote to the Minister of the Interior asking that the police should not use “methods that humanity and the Gospel condemn”. Two weeks later, the ministry’s reply came: “It is merely an unimportant communist”.¹