Mário Crespo

Mário Crespo is a Portuguese journalist and reporter. He was born in Coimbra in 1947. His father was an employee of the Portuguese bank Banco Nacional Ultramarino (BNU), and his mother, a professor at the Commercial School. They moved to Portuguese Mozambique capital, Lourenço Marques, with his only baby son. Mário did all the high school in the Mozambican capital, and only when the academic life appeared before him he moved to the metropole (i.e. Mainland Portugal). In Lisbon, he went to the Colégio Universitário Pio XII (a kind of boarding school), while hesitated between medicine and engineering until he was drafted into military service. He transferred to Mozambique and was placed in the press office of Kaúlza de Arriaga, the commander in chief of the Portuguese Armed Forces in Mozambique. With the Carnation Revolution military coup at Lisbon, in April 1974, fresh out of the troop, Crespo found employment in Johannesburg as a trainee radio employee of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC). A couple of years later, television was launched in South Africa and the editorial staff of the radio was called to do odd jobs on the screen. But in 1982, South Africa's apartheid has become claustrophobic for him. There was a vacancy in the Voice of America in Washington for him, but it was considered of little professional interest. Crespo probed Radiotelevisão Portuguesa (RTP) in Lisbon. There were also open vacancies. Throughout two decades working for RTP, Crespo reached notability as a reporter and journalist, and made friendship with other personalities of the Portuguese media such as José Eduardo Moniz, Manuela Moura Guedes, and Miguel Sousa Tavares.