Letters of denunciation in the final decade of the Salazar regime

UID/HIS/04209/2013Under 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.publishersversionpublishe