PVDE / PIDE / DGS headquarters

No. 22 Rua António Maria Cardoso, in the Chiado, was a building belonging to the House of Bragança. This was the headquarters of the political police — the PVDE, then the PIDE, finally the DGS: the administrative services, the archives and card indexes, the Information Services, which dealt with the informers, and the Investigation Services, which interrogated the prisoners.¹ According to the Memória Comum project, the headquarters only became fully operational in 1938; until then, many prisoners were held incommunicado in PSP police stations.³

Interrogations took place on the third floor. Memória Comum describes the methods: beatings, sleep torture and the “statue” torture — the prisoner kept standing for days on end — applied by squads of agents who took turns every four hours; electric shocks, threats to the family, the lie that comrades had already talked. Women were also subjected to stripping, touching and offences of a sexual nature.⁵⁶

The factory worker Conceição Matos was brought here on 21 April 1965: beaten for days, stripped, forced to soil herself in the interrogation room and to clean the floor with her own clothes. “Anyone who looks at that case file knows I never talked to the police,” she said years later.⁸ In 2005, at the door of the building, Maria José Morgado — arrested in October 1973 — recalled the slaps and the humiliations on the interrogation floor.⁹

People died here too. The worker Raul Alves fell from the third floor in 1958, in full view of several witnesses — among them the wife of the Brazilian ambassador, whose residence overlooked the back of the building.⁷ In 1964, the Interior Minister himself thought it better to move the interrogations to the South Redoubt of Caxias, partly because of the bad impression made by prisoners being shuttled back and forth through the streets of the city centre.¹

On 25 April 1974, taking the headquarters was not part of the Armed Forces Movement’s plan, and throughout the day the crowd gathered at the door, demanding that the police surrender. Early in the evening, after Marcelo Caetano had already surrendered at the Carmo, DGS agents fired from the windows: Fernando Carvalho Giesteira, aged 18, José James Harteley Barneto, 38, João Guilherme Rego Arruda, 20, and Fernando Luís Barreiros dos Reis, 23, were killed. Dozens were wounded. It was never established who fired.²⁵²

Surrounded by cavalry and, before dawn, by marines, the DGS surrendered on the morning of 26 April. Its director, Silva Pais, declared his allegiance to the Movement — and took down from the wall, with his own hands, one of the portraits of the regime’s leaders.²⁰

The building was sold and turned into a luxury apartment complex, whose advertising left out what had happened there.¹⁰ It was against this erasure that the Não Apaguem a Memória (Do Not Erase Memory) movement was born, in 2005.