Antonio de Oliveira Salazar

Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, an economics professor, was appointed Portugal's finance minister by the military government in 1928 and used sweeping budgetary powers to eliminate the deficit, a reputation for competence that carried him to the office of prime minister in 1932. A 1933 plebiscite approved his corporatist constitution and launched the Estado Novo, the authoritarian state he led until a stroke incapacitated him in 1968; he died in 1970. His secret police, the PIDE, arrested and imprisoned government critics without formal charges and was widely compared to the Gestapo, and thousands of dissidents were jailed under his rule, among them General Humberto Delgado, found murdered in 1965 after challenging Salazar in a rigged 1958 election. Salazar also fought long colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea to hold on to Portugal's African territories rather than grant them independence, wars that outlasted him and helped bring down the Estado Novo itself in 1974.