Antônio Cotrim / LUSA
Andre Ventura
Debate really happened. Understandings… there were almost none. Between “justifying the dictatorship” and “everything was fine afterwards”.
Andre Ventura he left some during the solemn session commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Constitution; José Pacheco Pereira accused the deputy of lying and suggested there was one between the two.
The debate would have three conditions: it would last at least an hour, each statement would have to be documented and it would take place without personal attacks.
The debate actually took place last night. In fact it lasted (much) more than an hour, there was a lot of documentation on the table – but personal attacks also appeared.
“That’s not true”, repeated André Ventura, or “Don’t keep diverting the conversation”, said Pacheco Pereira.
The historian accused the leader of Chega of “justify dictatorship” and to lead a cruel party and “anti-Christian”; the current deputy accused the former PSD deputy of having “eye patches” and associated the opponent with the extreme left.
At one point, Pacheco Pereira even said that, when he was in far left, learned something: “When there is a duty to fight, and people take risks in that fight (regardless of the ideas they have), these people are fulfilling their duty”.
In the debate at , the disagreement continued. Each one reinforced their position, especially on the number of political prisoners and about the crimes before and after April 25th.
“The day before the revolution, there were fewer political prisoners than what happened a few months later. Let’s put an end to that narrative that everything was bad before and everything was good afterwards!”, repeated Ventura.
The president of Chega rejects the idea that all people detained in the former colonies were political prisoners. Pacheco Pereira, continued Ventura, was only outraged “by the violence of the right”, while the “violence of the left seems to be okay and acceptable to him”.
“Let’s assume that there was violence on one side and the other. There was torture on both sides. There were mistakes on both sides. There were arrests on both sides. There was terrorism on both sides!”, said André Ventura.
Pacheco Pereira reinforced that it is “absurd” to compare what happened in New State with what happened in the Ongoing Revolutionary Process (PREC): “There are comparisons that are themselves lies, and one of these comparisons is to talk about what happened in the period in 1974, 1975 and 1976 and compare, which is what André Ventura does, with what happened in the previous 48 years”.
“The Portuguese transition was relatively peaceful. This is not a debate about right and left, it is a debate about history. What happened afterwards, happened. But it is not possible to compare what happened in the first years after the 25th of April with what happened in the 48 years of humiliation of ordinary people”, said the historian.
Before, the president of Chega assured that it is “historically fair” compare violence institutional regime of the Estado Novo with the violence of the FP-25 or the MDLP because, he claimed, “we created a ruling political class in Portugal that could only see advantages in what happened”. And he repeated the expression “pales in the eyes”.
Following this, the historian accused the leader of Chega of “justifying the dictatorship” and “saying that what happened after was similar to what happened before” 1974: “And this comparison puts him on the side of before the 25th of April. Do you know why? Because What you are doing is saying that democracy is the same as dictatorship“.
Right at the beginning of the conversation, Pacheco Pereira asked André Ventura if he prefers dictatorship or democracy; Ventura responded that he preferred a “full democracy”, this after a “miserable revolution”, with “communists assaulting power, expropriating, killing and imprisoning”.
Pacheco Pereira recalled that the 25th of April brought freedom and “democracy so Ventura could be in Parliament”, and accused the Chega leader of showing “ignorance and demagoguery”.
André Ventura says that decolonization was “a tragedy”, in which the State “abandoned” families who returned from Africa and former combatants. Pacheco Pereira looks at Salazar and Marcelo Caetano as those responsible for what happened in Africa and the post-25th of April turmoil.
