The 25th of April and the Portuguese Revolutionary Militant Liaison Committee. Contributions to the history of Trotskyism in Portugal

Abstract

At the II Congress of the Socialist Party, in 1976, the only opposition list to the leadership of Mário Soares obtained twenty-five  percent of the delegates’ votes. At the head of the group were Carmelinda Pereira and António Aires Rodrigues – constituent and  first legislature deputies – who, accused of organizing themselves as a trotskyist faction, would be expelled in the following months. This article intends to explain the action of this group in the period opened by the 25th of April 1974, contextualizing its  trajectory in the immediately previous years. Among the sources analyzed are interviews carried out with the protagonists, national  and international newspapers of the time and documentation from the Centro de Documentação 25 de Abril, the Fundação Mário  Soares and the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo.