Avenida Barbosa du Bocage, no. 96 (Josué Trocado’s private chapel)

On Sundays, Salazar went to Mass in the private chapel of his friend Josué Trocado’s house, at no. 96 on this avenue, in the block between Avenida da República and Avenida 5 de Outubro.² On the morning of 4 July 1937, as the dictator was getting out of his car, a dynamite bomb went off, planted in a sewer. An error of a few centimetres made it explode in the wrong direction: it opened a huge crater, destroyed the sewers around it, shattered the windows and sent the paving stones flying. Salazar was unhurt and went on to Mass.¹ If the next day’s newspapers are to be believed, he brushed the earth off his suit and said to his chief of staff: “Let us go and hear Mass.”²

The attack, prepared in the climate of the Spanish Civil War, is usually attributed to anarchists such as Emídio Santana, who are thought to have acted in liaison with other elements of the Popular Front, notably of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP).¹ The regime capitalised on the shock: thanksgiving Masses were said everywhere, and Salazar’s providential image came out strengthened.³

The investigation was another form of violence. The very next day, the police began arresting communist activists who had nothing to do with the attack — among them a woman from the PCP’s Women’s Section, Deolinda da Conceição Barreiros — and the violence of the interrogations wrung long statements about the life of the party out of them.² Two of the prisoners, José Lopes da Silva and Jacinto Estêvão de Carvalho, and perhaps a third, Augusto Martins, died as a result of the torture.¹ The leadership of the PVDE itself eventually admitted that it had persecuted, arrested and convicted people who had had nothing to do with the case, and that the attack had been planned and carried out by Emídio Santana, Jaime Duarte, António Granja, Francisco Damião, Raul Pimenta and Vaz Rodrigues.²