Bento António Gonçalves

Bento António Gonçalves.

Bento António Gonçalves (born March 2, 1902 in Fiães do Rio , Montalegre , † September 2, 1942 in Tarrafal , Cape Verde ) was a Portuguese communist politician. He was General Secretary of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) from 1929 until his death in 1942 .

Not much is known about his youth. From 1924 to 1926 he lived in Luanda in what was then the Portuguese colony of Angola , where he worked for a railway company and was a member of a union . After returning to Portugal, he became a member of the naval workers' union and in 1927 traveled to Moscow as part of the Portuguese delegation to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution . In 1928 he joined the Portuguese Communist Party, in 1929 he was elected to the Central Committee and its General Secretary.

A coup in 1926 had already eliminated the first Portuguese republic . It was replaced by a military dictatorship , which increasingly developed into an authoritarian - fascist corporate state, the Estado Novo under the leadership of Salazar . The Estado Novo allowed only one unity party , all political directions that did not agree with Salazar were pursued by the state and its secret police .

The Communist Party was particularly exposed to severe persecution. In 1930 Gonçalves was arrested for the first time and exiled to the Azores and later to Cape Verde . He returned to Portugal in 1933 and went underground. In the same year he traveled to Madrid, where he made contacts with the Communist Party of Spain and the Communist International (Comintern) . In 1935 he traveled to the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in Moscow. On his return he was arrested again and sent to the internment camp in Tarrafal on Cape Verde, then also a Portuguese colony, where he succumbed to torture in 1942.

Web links

• Entry: Гонсалвиш, Гонсалвес (Gonsalves) Бенту Антониу . In: Большая советская энциклопедия . Third edition. Издательство "Советская энциклопедия", Moscow 1969–1978 (Russian).