The 25 April 1974 MFA coup that ended the Estado Novo with carnations in rifle barrels -- a junta against a dictatorship, not a manual. In the early hours of 25 April 1974 the Portuguese Armed Forces Movement (MFA) overthrew Marcelo Caetano's Estado Novo, the dictatorship Salazar had built. A banned song, "Grandola, Vila Morena," played on the radio as a signal. Troops secured Lisbon with almost no fighting.
Four people died when regime police fired on a crowd. Caetano surrendered at the Carmo barracks to General Spinola. The colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau -- the officers' wound -- ended in a rush of independences (1974-75) and in chaotic, sometimes violent decolonisations, especially Angola.
Check each criteria to confirm findings against the atlas verdict.
The 25 April 1974 MFA coup that ended the Estado Novo with carnations in rifle barrels -- a junta against a dictatorship, not a manual. In the early hours of 25 April 1974 the Portuguese Armed Forces Movement (MFA) overthrew Marcelo Caetano's Estado Novo, the dictatorship Salazar had built. A banned song, "Grandola, Vila Morena," played on the radio as a signal. Troops secured Lisbon with almost no fighting.
Four people died when regime police fired on a crowd. Caetano surrendered at the Carmo barracks to General Spinola. The colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau -- the officers' wound -- ended in a rush of independences (1974-75) and in chaotic, sometimes violent decolonisations, especially Angola.
Intensity in this atlas is near the floor: a coup that refused a bloodbath at home. Political impact was real: democracy in Portugal, an end to Europe's last large colonial war, and a PREC (ongoing revolutionary process) that frightened NATO allies until the 1976 constitution. English memory is a pretty flower and a Eurovision-adjacent folk song. This page keeps the wars in Africa in the paragraph.
A decade of African wars, a closed political system, and junior officers who could not see a military victory produced the MFA. Spinola's book Portugal and the Future (1974) cracked public speech. Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho's operations plan moved units into Lisbon. The Carmo surrender was televised. Carnations were a civilian improvisation on a nearly bloodless seizure.
This explains a campaign, battle, or weapon in context. It is not a league of nations. It does not replace the full topic page.
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