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A secret agreement, hitherto never confirmed, validated the formal collaboration between the Estado Novo and the segregationist regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia, in 1970, according to historian Vicente de Paiva Brandão.
“Alcora” is the name of the secret military alliance between Portugal, South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), to fight against the independence movements in South Africa. “The weakening of the liberation movements fighting against the Portuguese forces in Angola and Mozambique was clearly of interest to South Africa,” the historian said, recalling that Pretoria also faced 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, provided that the outcome of the struggles favored them,” explained the assistant professor at the University of Cape Verde and that he devoted himself to study these agreements.
Portugal and South Africa saw the colonial war as a way of maintaining “civilizing and pro-Western values on the African continent,” he stressed.
With the independence of the Belgian Congo, today the Democratic Republic of the Congo, training camps were created for guerrillas who fought against apartheid and the Salazarist regimes.
The South Africans saw Angola and Mozambique as “the vanguard of the defense of their own country and of the regime”, thus promoting “the exchange of information and military support”, which even resulted in the provision of equipment.
“All of this is very camouflaged and there is always an intent 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 associate. with a state considered colonialist. “, summarized Paiva Brandão.
Paiva Brandão discovered this arrangement after an “investigation at Oxford into the Rhodesian connections, that is, from the moment a breakdown of relations between Ian Smith (Prime Minister) and Great Britain occurs”. 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 to achieve 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 the book, published by Casa das Letras.
After 1975, Pretoria “suffered greatly from the independence processes” of Angola and Mozambique, which became stages for the training of personnel that would later destabilize segregationist regimes in the 1970s and 1980s, culminating in the rise of Robert Mugabe in Rhodesia, independence of Namibia and democratization of South Africa.
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