Casimiro Monteiro

Casimiro Emérito Rosa Teles Jordão Monteiro (Goa, 28 December 1920 - Richards Bay, 25 January 1993), also known as Agente Monteiro, was a notorious Goan Portuguese covert operations military officer, terrorist, intelligence officer and law enforcement officer in Portugal during the authoritarian Estado Novo regime performing state-sanctioned subversive and terroristic attacks against enemies of the state. As an agent of the regime he carried out attacks and assassinations in Portugal, Mozambique and in Portuguese Goa; his attacks were mostly focused on members of independence movements that existed in these Portuguese colonies.

As a PIDE agent (the secret police of the Portuguese dictatorship), Monteiro carried out the high-profile assassinations of Humberto Delgado, who was a political opposition leader to Salazar's Estado Novo; and Eduardo Mondlane, leader of FRELIMO; in addition to this he also brutally tortured an uncertain number of Goans who advocated for the union of Goa with India, something which did happen on mid-1954 with the Indian annexation of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and on December 1961 with the Indian annexation of Goa.

After the fall of the Portuguese dictatorship, Monteiro lost his job and protection he enjoyed from the government and he quickly disappeared, forced to abandon his wife and son and taking refuge in South Africa during the racist Apartheid regime which offered him asylum; however, he was not supported economically or offered a job and he eventually died there in poverty and separated from his family.

Early life

Monteiro was born in Portuguese Goa to a white Portuguese father and a native Goan mother, an aguadeira from the city of Ponda. He lived in Portugal for sometime before joining General Franco's army in the Spanish Civil War.

After the war, Monteiro moved to the United Kingdom, where he worked for a butcher whose daughter he married and had a son; although he abandoned them after the Carnation Revolution when he lost the protection of the now-toppled Salazar dictatorship and was forced to go on the run to avoid prosecution and extradition to India.

Goa-Portuguese Colonial Era

In the 1950s, Monteiro joined the Portuguese Colonial Police in Goa, where he interrogated Goan liberation movement activists. Much of the brutal torture during interrogations took place at Valpoi Police Station and, eventually, Monteiro became infamous and feared throughout Portuguese India; by the closing years of Portuguese rule in India there were even several local theatre songs of the feared Agent Monteiro.

PIDE agent

After Goa's annexation by the Indian Army in 1961, Monteiro was recruited by the Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (PIDE), the dreaded Portuguese Secret Service. Initially, he participated in a campaign to organise an anti-Indian resistance among Goans code named Plan Gralha. PIDE agents used the Emissona Nacional, radio station which continued to broadcast after 1961, to broadcast stories of Goan non-cooperation with Indian authorities. Plans were made to sabotage port facilities at Mormugao and Bombay. In 1962, a bomb was planted at Vasco Municipal School in March 1962, and another at a different location in October. Casimiro was implicated in bomb blasts on June 20, 1964. The Portuguese government, in an official statement to the UN, later claimed that the attacks were acts of revolt against Indian rule.

In 1965, he assassinated General Humberto Delgado in Spain. General Delgado was the Opposition Leader against the Salazar government. Monteiro, who had shot Delgado and strangled his secretary, was found guilty by the Spanish courts and was sentenced to 19 years in absentia.

In the late 1960s, Monteiro went to Portuguese Mozambique (as a PIDE agent) to fight FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique), a movement fighting for independence against the internationally recognized Portuguese Government. Most of the Frelimo fighters were based in Tanzania. Monteiro crossed into Tanzania, and using a parcel bomb assassinated Eduardo Mondlane, the founder Leader of FRELIMO.

Later life

He returned to Portugal, but after the 1974 Carnation Revolution, which overthrew the Estado Novo, Monteiro took refuge in the South African Embassy. He later moved to South Africa, where he spent the remainder of his life under the alias 'José Fernandez'. Almost blind and destitute (helped by the South African police) he died in 1993, at Richards Bay, South Africa.