Secret agreement confirms collaboration between Estado Novo and apartheid in the colonial war

A secret agreement, until now never confirmed, validated the formal collaboration between the Estado Novo and the segregationist regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia in 1970, according to the historian Vicente de Paiva Brandão.

“Alcora” is the name of the secret military alliance between Portugal, South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), to fight the independence movements in Southern Africa. “The weakening of the liberation movements that were fighting Portuguese forces in Angola and Mozambique was clearly of interest to South Africa,” said the historian, recalling that Pretoria was also facing similar resistance in Namibia.

“Lisbon and Pretoria were organized at the time to prevent Africa from being a space disputed by the two superpowers, who had anti-colonial speeches, as long as the outcome of the fights favored them,” explained the assistant professor at the University of Cape Verde and who dedicated himself to study these agreements.

Portugal and South Africa looked at the colonial war as a way of maintaining “civilizational and pro-Western values ​​on the African continent”, he stressed.

With the independence of the Belgian Congo, today the Democratic Republic of Congo, training camps are created for guerrillas who fought apartheid and Salazarist regimes.

The South Africans viewed Angola and Mozambique as “the vanguard of defending their own country and the regime”, so they promoted “information sharing and military support”, which even resulted in the provision of equipment.

“This is all very camouflaged and there is always an attempt that will never be known to the general public. Portugal did not want to be associated with a state where ‘apartheid’ was in force and, at the same time, South Africa did not intend to be associated with a state considered colonialist. “, summed up Paiva Brandão.

Paiva Brandão discovered this agreement after an “investigation in Oxford from the Rhodesian connections, namely from the moment when there is a rupture of relations between Ian Smith (Prime Minister) and Great Britain”. The agreement was signed on October 14, 1970, but the official name was “exercise”, to camouflage the diplomatic scope of the document.

The objective of the agreement was “to investigate the processes and means of achieving a coordinated tripartite effort between Portugal, the Republic of South Africa and Rhodesia, with a view to facing the mutual threat against their territories in Southern Africa”, reads in the book, published by Casa das Letras.

After 1975, Pretoria “resented immensely the independence processes” of Angola and Mozambique, which became stages for the formation of cadres that would later destabilize segregationist regimes in the 1970s and 1980s, culminating in the rise of Robert Mugabe in Rhodesia, independence from Namibia and democratization of South Africa.

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