António Guterres (Lisbon, 74 years old) is a man of causes, Bill Clinton knows that only too well. In the midst of the conflict in East Timor, occupied by Indonesia, one of those allies to which the United States allowed undemocratic whims, the then Portuguese prime minister called the American president to tell him in a gentle voice two strong things. That Clinton chose not between Indonesia and Timor, but between Indonesia and Portugal, the founder of NATO. And if the United States did not support sending an international force to Timor, Portugal would withdraw its soldiers from Kosovo. He prevailed and Bill Clinton eventually attended the small Asian country’s independence ceremony in 2002.
In a way, this episode can be taken into account, recounted in the biography O Mundo Não Tem de Ser Assim (The World Doesn’t Have to Be Like This), published in Portugal in 2021 and written by Pedro Latoeiro and Filipe Domingues. The first mission was that Guterres worked for the UN, although it was still three decades before his election as Secretary-General in 2017. Now, after six years in office, the Portuguese politician probably shares the vision of the Norwegian Labor Party. Trygve Halvdan Lie was appointed the organization’s first general secretary in 1946. “The most difficult job in the world,” said the Nordic man as he handed over the extensive folder with the territorial problems to his successor.
Israel was not yet a state when the Norwegians created the United Nations, but it was already a problem that the world needed to fix after discovering the industrial annihilation suffered by the Jews at the hands of the Nazi apparatus during World War II had. 75 years have passed since Israel’s declaration of independence and the portfolio of international resolutions on this part of the Middle East is full of wars, intifadas, terrorist attacks, illegal colonies and walls. For decades it has been the world’s big pending issue and the big black hole of UN leaders.
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Following the October attacks by the Islamist group Hamas that killed 1,400 people and the kidnapping of more than 240 people in Israel, António Guterres intervened in the Security Council. He condemned what happened and remembered the story. He said: “The Hamas attacks did not come out of nowhere. “Palestinians have lived under oppressive occupation for 56 years, their land has been gradually swallowed up by settlements and their hopes for a political solution have faded, but their demands cannot justify Hamas’ attacks or the collective punishment of the population. Palestine”. His words angered Israel so much that it called for his resignation and said it would deny visas to the organization’s employees in retaliation. Guterres continued to call for a ceasefire in tweets and condemned both Hamas’s “terror” and Israeli attacks against civilians detained in Gaza.
Say strong things in a gentle voice
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Saying strong things in a soft voice is becoming a specialty of the Portuguese, who every year are moving further away from the figure of the secretary general, paralyzed by the politics brewing behind the scenes. His role was crucial in reaching an agreement with Russia, Ukraine and Turkey to allow grain exports despite the war. His interventions on climate risks bring him closer to the apocalyptic speeches of activists than to the diplomatic containment of the UN. “Humanity has opened the doors to hell,” he warned last September. Nor does he avoid direct attacks on major corporations, which he accuses of using money and influence to “delay, distract and deceive” the transition to decarbonization.
“He is, along with Francisco, one of the few moral voices heard in the world. He says what many citizens think,” says Pilar del Río, journalist and president of the José Saramago Foundation. In 1998, after announcing his Nobel Prize in Literature, the first for literature in Portuguese, Guterres, then prime minister, went to Lisbon airport to receive the writer. Del Río believes it fits with the reflection Saramago once made about himself: “The older, the wiser; the wiser, the more radical.” “I would apply it in the sense that it is freer. “You know the misery and pain of refugees, unless you are a cynic, you cannot remain the same after going through that,” he recalls, alluding to Guterres’ decade as United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2005-2015). .
Timor and Palestine are not the same causes, but they permeate the emotional epidermis of Portugal in similar ways. Following António Guterres, the former director of the newspaper Público, Bárbara Reis, notes “a long tradition in Portuguese politics: “All for Palestine, nothing against Israel”. “In these 50 years [de democracia] There have been 29 governments, further left, further center and further right, supported by communists, blocists or centrists, but Portugal’s position remained unchanged. Essentially, it is about defending the right of the Palestinian people to a state and considering it legitimate, condemning Israel’s occupation of the Arab territories and defending the existence of the State of Israel.
António Guterres doesn’t just explain his country’s political tradition. He has been a man of causes since his youth. Although he only entered politics after the fall of the dictatorship in 1975, as a student he participated in Catholic groups with social causes and was involved in volunteer activities in slum areas. The first known cause that mobilized him was the floods that destroyed 20,000 houses and claimed almost 700 lives in the Lisbon region in 1967, which the Salazar regime tried to hide. During his time as prime minister, education and the moralization of public life were his main concerns. “No jobs for the boys,” his biographers remember him saying to socialist militants seeking office.
He was the most brilliant student of electrical engineering when, together with the most brilliant law student, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, he founded the Group of Light, which brought together Christians blinded by the breach of the Second Vatican Council. They held the Eucharist at home, they wanted to change society and politics within the regime. On April 25, 1974, Marcelo, son of a minister in the dictatorship government, informed his friend about the captains’ coup. A few days later they met for lunch. Marcelo goes to this meeting with the intention of convincing him to join Francisco Sá Carneiro’s center-right party. António Guterres informs him that he plans to join the Socialist Party, founded in exile in 1973 by Mário Soares and a hundred members.
Both friends would go far. One in the Social Democratic Party (PSD, center-right) and one in the PS. When António Guterres was Prime Minister of Portugal between 1995 and 2002, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa was his main opponent as opposition leader. At this point there were differences of opinion, but they also resorted to their old friendship to make common cause against abortion and to blow up the law passed by the Assembly of the Republic. The Prime Minister called a referendum in 1998, in which the no votes outnumbered the yes votes (51% versus 49%).
“The best of all of us”
From this rejection of abortion caused by his Catholicism, he has developed into more tolerant positions. At the head of the United Nations, she defended women’s sexual and reproductive rights despite the setbacks experienced by countries like the United States under Donald Trump. The old friends met again last May when António Guterres received the Carlos V European Prize in Yuste (Cáceres) and Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa came to honor him as President of the Republic of Portugal: “He was the best of all of us. ”
At the same time that Guterres joined the PS in Lisbon, João Soares, former mayor of Lisbon and son of party founders Mário Soares and Maria Barroso, also joined. João Soares campaigned for Guterres when he challenged Jorge Sampaio for the leadership of the party, who then headed the Lisbon City Chamber with Soares as number two. “I met with Sampaio and explained why I would support Guterres. He had fantastic qualities, knew the whole country and got along well with everyone. He is a classic social democrat, cultured, intelligent, with brilliant and decent oratory. “He never got into the business like others,” he says on the phone.
João Soares rejected the offer to join António Guterres’ team when he won the 1995 elections. Saying no is a practice also practiced by Guterres himself, who refused to join the government of Mário Soares in 1976 and to take over the presidency of the European Commission some time later. . Despite the admiration he feels for him, João Soares believes his words about Israel are wrong. “After the Hamas attacks, there can be no other,” he says, recalling that it was the Secretary General of the United Nations who recommended him to visit Masada, the archaeological site where the Jews decided to collectively committing suicide before surrendering to Hamas forces. Rome.
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