Vera Lagoa

Popular journalist since 1965, due to her social chronicles in the evening newspaper Diário Popular, "Bisbilhotices", signed under the pen name Vera Lagoa. In 1975 she acquires the title of an earlier leftist weekly newspaper, O Diabo, to vent her right-wing views in an otherwise left-dominated press. Temporarily suspended under the prevailing press law, Vera Lagoa continued to write her weekly column in another radical-right newspaper, O Tempo. Crónicas do Tempo (1975), a digest of her newspaper editorials, knew three editions in the year it was published, and was part of the anti-communist resistance. In an important text written in 1977, again in her newspaper O Diabo, she recalls "the good friendship " that once had united her and Manuel Alegre, as well as their common opposition to the Portuguese dictatorship before 1974, and attacks his action as (socialist) secretary of State for the mass media on the occasion of the suspension of another right-wing newspaper. She is puzzled by the difficulty of the new political leaders to deal with the criticisms of the press, and terms it as foolish, calls him a demagogue, and asks for his resignation - with a crying title, "Vai-te embora, Manuel!" (go away). He stayed; one year later, she was condemned in court for different adjectives used in another editorial written against the country's leadership.