João Abel Manta, who was one of the greatest Portuguese cartoonists of the 1960s and 70s, and who throughout his career published notable illustrations for some of the most important sections of the Portuguese press, such as Diário de Lisboa, where he started out as a contributor to the Mesa Redonda supplement, and later to A Mosca, was himself a victim of the censorship that reigned prior to the revolution of 25 April 1974. The system controlled not only the information that was published in the press and other branches of the media, curtailing the freedom to develop opinions, but also all forms of artistic expression, with the aim of safeguarding the established order and propping up the authoritarian regime.

It is the creation of this apparatus of censorship during the Estado Novo that Abel Manta depicts in this composition, in an ironic illustration of the operation and institutionalisation of censorship implemented by Salazar. In Dinossauro Excelentíssimo (Most Excellent Dinosaur) (Lisbon: Arcádia, 1972), the work to which this illustration belongs, Cardoso Pires describes the dictator’s motivation as the desire to ‘free himself from words that troubled him’, putting into practice the ‘plan to set the Realm talking in a clear and austere language in which everyone understood one another’ (p. 32).

Sandra Vieira Jürgens

May 2015