Santa Maria affair

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The Santa Maria affair in 1961 was an attempt by Portuguese rebels from the bourgeois democracy movement to trigger a revolution in Portugal and the colony of Angola and to overthrow the totalitarian system of rule of António de Oliveira Salazar .

For this purpose, a mixed Portuguese / Spanish command in the Operação Dulcineia ( Operation Dulcinea ) under the leadership of the reserve captain Henrique Galvão (1895-1970) captured the Portuguese passenger ship Santa Maria in the Caribbean . The hijackers gave up the company after negotiations with the US Navy and handed the ship over to the Brazilian authorities in Recife . They were granted political asylum in Brazil .

Political background to the kidnapping

At the beginning of the 1950s, a bourgeois-liberal resistance formed against Salazar's dictatorship, which had existed since 1926, and the Estado Novo he had created , trying to reform the system in a legitimate way within the constitution . A decisive catalyst for Operation Dulcinea was the presidential election of 1958, in which the liberal opposition candidate, General Humberto Delgado , lost to Salazar's candidate, Rear Admiral Américo Tomás . The elections had been massively manipulated by Salazar.

Delgado, who did not accept his defeat until his murder in 1965 and from then on saw himself as the legitimate president of Portugal, then went into exile in Brazil. Henrique Galvão, a former career officer, parliamentarian, governor in Angola as well as an active writer, historian and captain of the reserve, saw no possibility of eliminating the Salazar system on his own after the election fraud and decided in favor of the armed coup. Sentenced to a 15-year prison term after an attempted coup in 1959, he managed to escape to the Argentine embassy in Lisbon that same year , where he was granted asylum. Via Buenos Aires he went to Caracas / Venezuela , where he hoped to initiate a revolution in both Portugal and Spain in collaboration with exiled Portuguese and Spanish.

The organizational backbone of the rebellion was the Directorio Revolucionario Iberico de Liberación (DRIL = Iberian Revolutionary Directorate of Liberation ) founded by Delgado in 1959 in Brazil ; an organization of which it is still unclear what real political weight it was. Apparently, however, DRIL cells existed in Spain, Portugal and some Latin American countries in the local exile circles. According to a report in the Frankfurter Rundschau on January 30, 1961, it was supposed to have been financed by Fidel Castro , the USSR , Yugoslavia and anarchists , but these details were extremely vague.

In the course of 1960, Galvão set up a 26-strong DRIL commando of Portuguese and Spanish in Caracas, ready to take part in an armed action against the Portuguese government and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco in Spain. Originally it was planned to hijack a Portuguese or Spanish warship in a Venezuelan port, but Galvão finally decided to hijack the Portuguese paquete (package ship) Santa Maria , the largest unit of the Portuguese merchant fleet alongside her sister ship Vera Cruz . Galvão received logistical support from Brazil, where Delgado resided as the leader of the DRIL.

Operation Dulcinea

At the end of 1960, preparations for the kidnapping of the Santa Maria were completed. Galvão had named the company after the literary figure of Dulcinea from Miguel de Cervantes ' Don Quixote . The Santa Maria , a 1951 in Belgium overflowed from the pile in 1953 by the Companhia Colonial de Navegação put into operation in 21.000- t -Liner with homeport Lisbon, ran into this era on cruises every four weeks the Venezuelan port of La Guaira on to then to call at the Dutch island of Curaçao Port Everglades in Florida to finally return to Lisbon.

plan

The real intentions of the kidnappers are still unclear. Galvão claimed in his memoir, which appeared in English in 1961, that the original plan was to use the liner to call at the Spanish island of Fernando Póo , part of Spanish Guinea (now Equatorial Guinea ), and to trigger a revolution there, eventually in the colony of Angola invade and start a revolution in the colony and in Portugal itself. The Delgados biographers declared in 1974, however, that the whole operation had a purely propagandistic character and that the real aim was to gain long-term support for the Portuguese opposition from abroad .

The rebels obtained information about the Santa Maria from advertising brochures of the shipping company, a model of the ship exhibited in a travel agency in Caracas, and visits on board during its lay times in La Guayra, posing as tourists. José Fernando Fernández Vázquez (1904–1986) alias Jorge de Sotomayor was responsible for the navigational side of the operation. Fernández was a former ensign in the Spanish Navy and a former member of the Spanish Communist Party . In the Spanish Civil War he was involved in the sabotage of a German freighter on the Republican side in 1937 and was therefore probably a member of the wool weaver organization . He then fought in the French Maquis and was imprisoned in Auschwitz after his arrest . In 1948 he resigned from the PCE when it officially gave up armed struggle. As far as is known, the other members of the DRIL command had no seamanship training. Galvao justified the action with a reference to the fight between David and Goliath as an act of asymmetrical warfare :

“David, in his deadly fight with Goliath, had a sling. We who live in a time when a modern sling costs a lot of money, haven't even had this. Our decision was clear: Either we would find a tactic that would balance this struggle of souls without material weapons against powerful weapons without souls, or we had to accept the collapse of all our hopes from the start. "

- Galvão : My Crusade for Portugal , p. 86.

Allegedly, the DRIL originally planned to use conventional military means to invade a Portuguese African colony and organize the resistance there. These considerations were given up, however, since such actions could easily be put down militarily and, due to the press censorship in Portugal, there would have been no opportunity to make propaganda capital out of the company.

Capture of Santa Maria

On January 20, 1961, the liner started under the command of Captain Mário Simoes Maia La Guayra, where part of the DRIL command was already checking in. Galvão himself flew with the rest of the group to Willemstad / Curaçao and waited there for the ship to arrive. This early should unmasking Galvãos be prevented. Until the arrival of the ship, the second group stayed in the Hotel "Brion". On Saturday, January 21st, its members, also planned as cruise tourists, went on board. The weapons, including two submachine guns and several hand grenades as well as allegedly explosives, were hidden in prepared luggage. After the departure from Curaçao there were around 600 passengers and a good 300 crew members on board. The ship was expected on January 24, 1961 in Port Everglades, Florida.

On Sunday, January 22, 1961, at 1:45 a.m., two groups of the command suddenly occupied the bridge , the wheelhouse, the radio room and the engine room. They were dressed in khaki uniforms and wore armbands in the Portuguese national colors of red and green. Galvão also wore his insignia as a captain ( capitão ) of the reserve. In addition, the ship's officers, whose cabins were on the 2nd deck, were taken prisoner. During the occupation of the bridge, the person on watch, 3rd officer João José do Nascimiento Costa, was probably shot dead by the rebels in a scuffle. The details of the incident are still unclear. Costa remained the only person killed in the kidnapping. Two other crew members were also injured by the rebels in the shooting on the bridge.

The Santa Maria was renamed "Santa Liberdade" by the kidnappers and immediately set on an eastern course towards West Africa. But Galvão's plan to keep the kidnapping a secret for as long as possible in order to cover up the course to Africa failed the next day, January 23, when the ship's doctor, Dr. Campos Leite stated that he was unable to guarantee the lives of the two wounded and one seriously ill on board. Thereupon the victims were taken out of the boat in the company of paramedics in front of St. Lucia . There they informed the police authorities that the liner had been attacked by pirates who had disguised themselves as passengers. This version spread worldwide via radio, telegraph and telephone within hours and generated enormous media coverage. This is also the case in the Federal Republic of Germany , where daily newspapers with headlines like '“Warships chase captured luxury ship. Attack by Portuguese rebels in modern maritime history unprecedented ”or Great pirate piece in front of Martinique headlines.

However, the term pirates disappeared from the reporting after a few days when it became clear that the hijacking of the liner had purely political reasons and that, as British lawyers stated, it was an intra-Portuguese matter. The GDR press, according to New Germany , was extremely cautious in commenting on the events and, for unknown reasons, also refrained from reporting on the end of the kidnapping. On-board operations were restricted as little as possible by the kidnappers, who were consistently described as terrorists by the state-run Portuguese and Spanish press. There were also 37 US citizens among the passengers, as well as four children of the Floyd W. Preston couple, aged two to eleven. Since the air conditioning systems of the lower classes were already defective when they left La Guyara , the members of these classes suffered extremely from the heat due to the tropical temperatures. In addition, the kidnappers did not take into account that the Santa Maria had only stashed provisions and drinking water as far as Florida, so this had to be rationed immediately. As far as is known, the ship's command waived any resistance to the kidnappers out of consideration for the safety of the passengers.

Diplomatic negotiations with the US Navy

From the start, Galvão and Delgado had speculated on the sympathy of the US public and President John F. Kennedys . Delgado had good connections in the United States due to his collaboration with US Navy agencies during World War II and apparently sent a telegram from Brazil to Kennedy as early as January 23, 1961:

“As a exiled president, former NATO representative , ex-military and aviation attaché in Washington and an old friend of the United States, I ask that the American Navy stop observing the 'Santa Maria' because this is the secret movement of the ship prevented. Respectfully, Humberto Delgado. "

- Delgado, de Figueirado : Memórias de Humberto Delgado , p. 180.

It is unknown whether this telegram had any effect on the actions of the American government. What is certain is that Washington also had no knowledge of the location of the ship in the first two days after the hijacking. Both US military aircraft and US Navy units were used to search for the liner. The British frigate HMS Rothesay , stationed in the Caribbean, was initially involved in the search, but after violent protests by the Labor faction in the British House of Commons, it was allegedly forced to abandon the search for lack of fuel. In fact, the Portuguese government had hoped that the NATO partners Great Britain and the USA would intercept the Santa Maria and their navies and, if necessary, end the kidnapping by force. According to press reports, Portugal had sent the corvette Pedro Escobar and Spain the heavy cruiser Canarias into the Atlantic to intercept the passenger ship, but it is unclear whether these were just rumors.

On January 25, 1961, the liner was sighted by a Danish freighter who immediately relayed the discovery by radio. A few hours later she was sighted by US military planes. At the direction of the Kennedy administration, the commander in chief of the US Navy's Atlantic Fleet , Admiral Robert Dennison, made radio contact with Galvão. The next day, January 26, 1961, Kennedy announced in the first press conference on the affair that the Navy had been instructed not to board the liner even though American passengers were on board. The diplomatic dilemma of the Kennedy government was characterized by a commentator for the Süddeutsche Zeitung :

“If the USA were to follow this request, then they would have to face the charge that they were supporting a dictatorial regime against an attempted coup. If the US ignores Portugal's request and recognizes immunity to Galvao, who pirated the ship using pirate methods, then they anger an ally. The way out is to try to persuade the pirates to call at a neutral port in a peaceful way, where the passengers can go ashore. "

- Süddeutsche Zeitung

After the US Navy located the Santa Maria , it was accompanied by units from the Atlantic Fleet. These included the destroyers USS Robert L. Wilson , USS Demato , USS Gearing , the dock landing ship USS Hermitage, and the nuclear submarine USS Seawolf . On the Demato had Vice Admiral Allan E. Smith embarked who had received an order from Admiral Dennison to negotiate with Galvão. After Smith had arranged a radio meeting with the rebel leader on January 30, 1961, the Demato and the Santa Maria met just outside the Brazilian territorial waters off Recife . On January 31, Smith crossed over with some officers and diplomatic representatives on the liner, which was swarmed by a bunch of boats with journalists. Both sides agreed to await commitments from the Brazilian government.

End in Recife

Although this has not yet been clarified, it must be assumed that Delgado in Brazil had explored a purely political solution for the company weeks before the operation. The new Brazilian President Jânio da Silva Quadros , who took office on February 1, 1961 , played a key role . In contrast to his predecessor Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira , who had renounced a confrontation with the Salazar regime for foreign policy reasons, Quadros was ready to actively support the Portuguese opposition.

On the day he took office, February 1, Quadros sent a telegram to Galvão in which he offered the rebels political asylum. On this day, the Santa Maria anchored just outside the Brazilian territorial waters off Recife. A Brazilian delegation led by Admiral Dias Fernandes appeared on board and arranged the details of the handover. On February 1, three US reporters managed to conduct an interview with Galvão on the Santa Maria , which appeared in TIME magazine on February 10, 1961 . On February 2, the liner entered Recife, where it was manned by Brazilian marines . The passengers were released immediately. According to his own account, Galvão had planned to go out alone with the ship together with Fernández alias Sotomayor and to sink the Santa Maria with himself on board in international waters in a spectacular spectacle, but this statement apparently only served a certain self-stylization as a potential "martyr" . The rebels were given asylum, the Santa Maria was later handed over to the shipping company, which immediately transported the ship to Portugal.

aftermath

The only fatality in Operation Dulcinea , João Costa, was buried in the Alenquer Cemetery on February 17, 1961, the day after the liner arrived in Lisbon. Salazar posthumously awarded the deceased the military order of the tower and sword ( Ordem Militar da Torre e Espada ). Charges were brought against the kidnappers in Portugal, but, as far as is known, no member of the DRIL commando was ever arrested because all the accused were in Brazil and enjoyed asylum.

The modus operandi of the rebels themselves had not been unusual. In East Asian waters, pirates had previously used the method of disguising themselves as passengers in order to take over and loot ships. However, up to the present day, a passenger ship has never been hijacked for the purpose of violent enforcement of domestic political goals; Galvão's company has not found any imitators to this day. In the case of the Achille Lauro in 1985, the terrorists had used the ship as normal passengers; a takeover of the liner was never planned, but was triggered by the accidental discovery of their weapons.

Fictional scenarios were only developed in film and literature, which were probably based on the example of the Santa Maria kidnapping. In 1974, the British director Richard Lester shot the feature film Juggernaut (German dubbing title 18 hours to the ages ), in which a former explosives specialist tries to extort a ransom from the British government with a bomb on board the British liner Britannia . In the same year the British thriller writer Colin Forbes published The year of the golden ape (German edition Tafak 1975). Saudi Prince Tafak planning to blow up an oil tanker by means of a so-called dirty bomb to San Francisco to contaminate. The background is the Middle East conflict and Tafak's actual goal is the destruction of Israel . In 2006 Frederick Forsyth took up the topic again in his novel The Afghan (German edition Der Afghane , 2006), in which al-Qaida assassins plan to use a hijacked freighter to access an international conference of top politicians on Queen Mary 2 on the high seas sink.

It is still unclear today whether an uprising in Angola, which began in early February 1961 and was suppressed by the police and the military within a few days, was directly related to the kidnapping of Santa Maria . Galvão stopped his revolutionary activities after the end of the operation and died on February 25, 1970 in São Paulo . Delgado continued to collude with groups in exile and was ambushed by the Portuguese secret police Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (PIDE) near Badajoz on February 13, 1965 and, when he defended himself during his planned kidnapping to Portugal, by the PIDE -Agent Casimiro Monteiro shot dead.

Movies

  • During the kidnapping, Constantin Film from Munich was planning a feature film with the working title The Pirates of Santa Maria , in which Harald Reinl was to direct and Klausjürgen Wussow to play the role of Galvãos. Allegedly the first test recordings had already been made in Portugal. Presumably for political reasons, the project was discontinued shortly after the abduction ended.
  • In 2004 the Spanish documentary filmmaker Margarita Ledo Andión produced the documentary Santa liberdade .
  • In 2010 the Portuguese director Francisco Manso made the feature film Assalto ao Santa Maria ( Assault on Santa Maria ) with Carlos Paulo in the role of Galvãos and André Gomes in the role of Delgados.

literature

  • Walther L. Bernecker , Horst Pietschmann : History of Portugal . Munich 2001.
  • Pedro Jorge Castro: O Inimigo nº 1 de Salazar. Esfera do Caos, Lisbon 2010, ISBN 978-989-626-260-0 .
  • Iva Delgado, Antonio de Figueirado: Memórias de Humberto Delgado . Publ. Don Quixote, Lisbon 1991.
  • Henrique Galvão: Santa Maria. My Crusade for Portugal . London / New York 1961.
  • Hans Leip : Ships and fates. Adventure, hero journeys and disasters on the high seas. A selection of the most exciting experiences by courageous men and pirates on the seven seas . o. O., o. J. [1962]
  • Xavier Montanyà: Pirates de la llibertat . Empúries, Barcelona 2004, ISBN 84-9787-065-4
  • Mathias Münchau: Terrorism at sea from an international law perspective . Frankfurt a. M. 1994.
  • Mariano Robles, José Antonio Novais: Asesinato de un heroe. General Humberto Delgado . Madrid 1974.
  • Jorge Soutomaior [d. i. José Fernando Fernández Vázquez]: Eu roubei o Santa Maria. Relato de uma aventura real . Galaxia, Vigo 1999, ISBN 84-8288-271-6
  • Gerhard Wiechmann: "Operation Dulcinea". An example of “asymmetrical warfare” at sea? In: Schiff & Zeit / Panorama maritim , 74, autumn 2011, pp. 2–13.
  • Henry A. Zeiger: The seizing of the Santa Maria . Popular Library, New York 1961.

Newspaper articles:

  • Warships chase captured luxury ship. Invasion by Portuguese rebels unprecedented in modern maritime history . In: Nordwest-Zeitung. Oldenburger Nachrichten , January 25, 1961, p. 1.
  • Bold deed by Portuguese patriots. 20,000-tonne “Santa Maria” kidnapped from the NATO regime in Salazar . In: Neues Deutschland , January 25, 1961, p. 7.
  • Galvao is negotiating because of the passengers. Meeting of the rebel leader with the American Admiral Smith at sea / The "Santa Maria" off the Brazilian coast . In: FAZ , January 30, 1961, p. 5.
  • Tanks bring peace to Luanda. Bloody fighting and wild panic in the cemetery - eyewitness reports from Angola . In: Die Welt , February 8, 1961, p. 3.
  • Delgado cables to Kennedy . In: Die Welt , January 28, 1961, p. 1.
  • Santa Maria. Ship breakage . In: Der Spiegel . No. 8 , 1961, pp. 80 ( online ).
  • Salazar. Life sentence . In: Der Spiegel . No. 7 , 1961, pp. 36–44 ( online - with a sketch of the itinerary of Santa Maria ).
  • Portugal: 29 Men & a Boat , in: TIME MAGAZINE of February 10, 1961

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Portugal's democrats are horrified. "Santa Maria" rebels in league with the "Iberian Liberation Directory" Fidel Castro . In: Frankfurter Rundschau , January 30, 1961, p. 3.
  2. ↑ Nordwest-Zeitung , January 25, 1961, p. 1
  3. ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung , January 25, 1961, p. 1
  4. ↑ Santa Maria disappeared again . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , 28./29. January 1961, p. 2.