The “sad grandmother”, the “simple but honest Portuguese” and the “good son of the Fatherland”: letters of denunciation in the final decade of the Salazar regime

Abstract

Under the Salazar regime many Portuguese citizens wrote spontaneous letters of denunciation to the authorities. The phenomenon has been overlooked by historians of the Estado Novo. This article discusses a particular set of denunciation letters written during the final decade of the regime, held in a single file at the PIDE Archives (ANTT). It establishes a typology of denunciations and evaluates the role of social self-policing in the Estado Novo. It argues that society’s relationship with the secret police was multi-faceted and not reducible to the status of “passive victim” commonly ascribed to it.