As far as I know, over the course of the last year alone, several attacks against innocent people have been carried out by individuals tied to the far right. This is not an unfounded accusation. Most of the attackers wore shirts—or even tattoos—that openly identified them with movements such as 1143, that congregation of armed thugs devoted to the cultivation of nationalist brutality.

One recent example, scarcely covered by the press, took place in Setúbal, where a man with openly declared Salazarist sympathies attacked a theater group performing a public rehearsal of a play about hunger and the victories won by ordinary people against the crushing weight of the invisible dictatorships now being imposed upon us. There were beatings. Complaints were filed with the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and, like so many others before them, they will almost certainly lead nowhere. We should not forget that, in January of this year, thirty-seven individuals with direct ties to 1143 were arrested.

And yet, the earth keeps turning to the sound of dozens of voices and thousands of lines written these days about the supposed specter of the far left. The first and necessary spark for this narrative was the infamous Molotov cocktail incident—an act which, up to this moment, appears to have been isolated and carried out as a provocation by someone sympathetic to the Socialist Party. From there, it took only a short step toward the “fascist-like” discourse heard during the celebrations of April 25, a narrative further strengthened by the provocation staged inside the house of democracy itself against the lawmakers who helped build our Constitution.

Just as happened a century ago—with a short fool sporting a mangled mustache, consumed by insecurity and sustained by a perfectly engineered conspiracy—Ventura is merely the latest version of the same phenomenon. An agent of chaos who thrives within the poisonous grammar of us against them. He marches beside his brownshirts—here rebranded as “Afonsists” and other such absurdities. He parades handcuffs through the streets, promising to imprison his enemies, all while surrounding himself with convicted criminals and losing not a single vote over the hypocrisy of it all.

None of this is accidental. Miguel Carvalho exposed it with devastating clarity in his almost infernal investigation, though it seems to have changed very little. One day, perhaps, it will serve historians as a manual explaining how an entire society whistled and looked away while dignity and democracy were quietly stripped from its hands.

The far left is largely a phantom—an entity that does not truly exist, nor has it ever existed in Portugal in the same form as the far right. Certainly, one may point to episodes of organized violence and even alleged repression carried out by Stalinist-linked forces in the aftermath of the April Revolution. Granting those cases for the sake of argument, the truth remains that what was being pursued, however misguided the methods may at times have been, was a collective improvement of society and community life. The far right, by contrast, is an engine of death, hatred, and chaos for chaos’s sake, with no final purpose other than concentrating power in the hands of the very few while leaving everyone else exactly where they have always been—beneath the master’s boot.

Historically, Hitler eventually disposed of his own attack dogs, and the same fate awaits 1143. They cannot understand this because they are imprisoned within the very brutality that propels them forward. But their day will come.

The left, meanwhile, will continue—as it always has—to fight for more rights, more freedoms, and a broader sharing of collective power, far removed from the terrorist violence already stalking our streets, the violence nobody wishes to discuss openly. And when they come for your sons and daughters, you too will want to speak. On that day, you will realize that you long ago sold your tongue to the devil.

Alexandra Manes is from Flores Island but lives on Terceira Island in the Azores. She is a regular contributor to several Azorean newspapers, a political and cultural activist, and has served in the Azorean Parliament.

NOVIDADES will feature occasional opinion pieces from leading thinkers and writers in the Azores, providing the diaspora and those interested in the current state of the Azores with a sense of the significant perspectives on some of the archipelago’s issues.

Translated to English as a community outreach program from the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI) and the Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures Department (MCLL).