Armed Forces Movement Command Post Here: The Radio-Voice of Freedom

Abstract

On the 50th anniversary of the April 25 1974 Revolution in Portugal, radio recovered the first sounds of freedom. The choice of radio as the broadcasting vehicle was no coincidence, and there are several reasons for this choice. In the Portuguese information landscape of that decade, radio was a privileged medium, given the high rate of adult illiteracy. Radio was ubiquitous, and its popularity is evidenced by its penetration rate of approximately 88%, with over a million more radio receivers than television sets in 1974 (Cristo, 2005; Ferreira, 2013). For their part, the military relied on the cooperation of journalists, technicians, and broadcasters to transmit the passwords that initiated the military movement that overthrew the Estado Novo. Through the radio microphones, they communicated the revolution to the population and announced the surrender of Marcelo Caetano’s Government. Transformed into a command post, it was responsible for selecting some of the sound symbols that identify April 25. This theme seeks to reconstruct the key events that marked the dawn of the revolution and the subsequent moments. The methodology adopted combines scattered information published and broadcast over the last 50 years with an analysis of radio reports from that period.