Back in Portugal, Marcelo Caetano’s limited reforms fail to quell the growing unrest among the population. The resistance to the regime and the war hits a new tenor when several of the radical left organisations that sprang up in the late ’60s and early ’70s begin to put their ideas of violent resistance into practice. The country is rocked by bombings of ships bound for Africa, airbases and bureaucratic institutions, organised by the Revolutionary Brigades and the PCP-aligned Armed Revolutionary Action (Acção Revolucionária Armada, ARA). Among the plethora of new organisations undertaking direct action against the regime is the Unity and Revolutionary Action League (Liga de União e Acção Revolucionária, LUAR), a group formed by many of the perpetrators of the hijacking of TAP 114 and led by Hermínio da Palma Inácio himself. LUAR makes a grand entrance on the scene by robbing the Bank of Portugal in the town of Figueira da Foz, proclaiming in printed missives that it intends to use the captured funds ‘For the liberation of the people’ and sparking a continent-wide chase led by PIDE/ DGS and Interpol. The various attacks add another dent to the already stretched infrastructure of the colonial war–but it’s not all explosions and bank robberies. In July of 1972, following another of the regime’s sham elections in which Admiral Américo Tomás is elected president for the third time (and unopposed for the second), the Revolutionary Brigades dress two pigs in admirals’ uniforms and release them in Lisbon, one in Rossio and the other in Alcântara. The pigs are oiled and the police, unable to hold on to the slippery swine, resort to gunning them down in the street. BR follow the stunt by setting off petards loaded with pamphlets decrying the elections in Portugal as a ‘mockery’: ‘Besides that, Tomás’s election is filth. Hence the pigs, symbols of Tomás and the pigs who elected him.’
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