Maria Arlete Vieira da Silva

Maria Arlete Vieira da Silva (born 1940, date of death unknown) was a Portuguese political figure who emerged briefly in 1976 as a proposed far-left presidential candidate. Backed by two Trotskyist organisations: the Internationalist Communist League (LCI) and the Workers' Revolutionary Party (PRT), she was presented as a former political prisoner and anti-fascist activist. Her candidacy collapsed shortly before formal registration when an internal investigation found no evidence to support key claims in her biography.

Background

The biographical material distributed during Vieira da Silva's candidacy stated that she was born in Lisbon in 1940 and graduated at the age of 22 from the School of Philosophical and Historical Sciences. She was described as having been an activist in the University of Coimbra student strikes of 1961 and as having joined the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) at the age of 18, beginning her political work on the 1958 presidential campaign of Humberto Delgado. Campaign materials also claimed she had participated in legislative election campaigns in 1965, 1969, and 1973, served on Support Committees for the Aveiro Democratic Congresses in 1969 and 1973, and contributed to the publications República and Seara Nova. The announcement was reported in Jornal Novo, one of the largest Lisbon dailies. Under the electoral law, Vieira da Silva had until 28 May to gather a minimum of 7,500 signatures and submit them to the Supreme Court of Justice.

At a press conference, the presiding committee, which included Ferreira Fernandes and Cabral Fernandes of the LCI and Sá Leal of the PRT, presented Vieira da Silva as a woman, a worker, and a revolutionist. The speakers attacked the pact between the military and the established political parties, characterising it as the product of class collaborationism, and rejected the emerging consensus in favour of supporting General Eanes. They argued instead for a candidacy that could guarantee the political independence of the working class. In press interviews, Vieira da Silva criticised the electoral process as failing to respond to the needs of the Portuguese people and framed her candidacy as part of a broader revolutionary struggle rather than a conventional electoral campaign. Although backed by the two Trotskyist parties, she indicated that she intended to stand as an independent candidate.

Controversy and withdrawal

Shortly after the announcement, doubts were raised in the press about the accuracy of Vieira da Silva's biography. O Diário, a newspaper aligned with the PCP, was among the first to challenge her claims publicly, noting that there was no record of her passage through PIDE prisons and suggesting that any imprisonment had been for unrelated and less creditable reasons.

When the parties requested Vieira da Silva's criminal record, it showed a 1969 imprisonment that she attributed to an altercation with a Polícia Judiciária agent during that year's election campaign. Further inquiries with the courts, however, revealed that the actual case involved the non-payment for and misappropriation of household appliances.

The episode has been cited as illustrative of the volatility and fragmentation of the Portuguese far left during the post-revolutionary period.

Aftermath

The LCI and PRT initially merged under a hyphenated name before reorganising as the Partido Socialista Revolucionário (PSR). A leading figure in the successor party was Francisco Louçã, a young LCI activist who later became the founder and first leader of the Left Bloc.