Gonçalves, Bento António

Bento António Gonsalvish ( port. Bento António Gonçalves ; March 2, 1902, Montalegre village, freesia Fieñas do Rio - September 11, 1942, Tarrafal concentration camp, Cape Verde) is a Portuguese politician, activist of the workers and the communists, and the workers in the communist movement. Portugal from 1929 to 1942.

Bento António Gonçalves
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In 1915 he graduated from elementary school, after which he began working as a turner in Lisbon . Two years later, in 1917, he became an apprentice of the lathe operator, in 1919, he started working as a lathe operator on a naval shipyard . In 1922 he entered the service in the Navy and a year later went there the initial course of navigation. In 1924 he was sent to Portuguese Angola , where he worked as a lathe operator in a railway company in Luanda .

From a young age he participated in the workers' revolutionary movement, led intensive activities as a trade union activist, during his stay in Angola tried to organize a “trade union of Luanda workers”. Returning to Lisbon in 1926, he joined the ranks of the trade union of naval workers, a year later he visited Moscow for the first time as part of a Portuguese delegation, which arrived in the USSR on the occasion of the decade of the October revolution . In September 1928, he joined the Communist Party of Portugal, actively participated in its reorganization in 1929, and in the same year he was elected first to the preliminary composition of its central committee, then its general secretary.

In 1930, he was arrested by the PIDE political police and deported to the Azores , then, a year later, to Cape Verde ; while in detention, continued to illegally lead the party.

In 1933 he was released, after which he returned to Portugal, went underground and again began to work as general secretary of the party. In the same year he traveled to Madrid , where he established contacts with the Comintern and the Communist Party of Spain . In 1935 he led the Portuguese delegation at the VII Congress of the Communist International in Moscow. Shortly after his return, at the end of 1935, he was arrested along with two other members of the Secretariat of the Communist Party - José de Souza and Julio Fogache . He was taken to jail in the Azores and brought to a military court there for his communist activities.

At the very end of 1935 or early 1936, Gonçalves was transferred to the Tarrafal concentration camp in Cape Verde, where, in 1942, he, according to various sources, either died from an illness or died under the torture of guards.