Helena Pato (born 19 April 1939) was a mathematics teacher, a communist opponent of Portugal's Estado Novo regime and a union leader. She was one of the founders of the Women's Democratic Movement in opposition to the Estado Novo and was held as a political prisoner for 6 months. She has authored three books on her experiences at that time and has also written books on education.
Early life
Maria Helena Martins dos Santos Pato Noales Rodrigues was born in 1939 in Mamarrosa, in the municipality of Oliveira do Bairro in the Aveiro District of Portugal, the daughter of a primary school teacher and an agronomist. She grew up in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon with her parents and twin brothers. At school she recalls being taught and influenced by Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo, a future Portuguese prime minister. In 1956, she joined the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Lisbon. With left-wing views obtained from her father, and having experienced poverty at first hand while working with the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul on Sundays, her political activity began at the university when she joined the youth wing of the Movement of Democratic Unity (MUD), a quasi-legal platform of democratic organizations that opposed the Estado Novo. She was also the president of the Students' Association of the Faculty of Sciences in 1960. While at university, she was friendly with Paulo Jorge, a future foreign minister of Angola, with whom she discussed anti-colonialism and played table tennis.
In May 1962 she was briefly arrested following a large student protest. In the same year she followed into exile in Paris her husband, Alfredo Nolaes, a journalist and student leader, who she had married in 1960. Nolaes, who would die of lymphoma in 1965, had been previously arrested in 1958 by the PIDE, the International and State Defence Police, (), which was an agency nominally in charge of immigration and emigration control and internal and external State security, but which over time came to be known for its secret police activities. The PIDE permitted him to return to Portugal only when the doctors who treated him declared in writing that he was only a month from death. In Paris, they had met with other communist exiles, such as Maria Lamas, António José Saraiva and Stella Piteira Santos.
Arrest
Pato had joined the Portuguese Communist Party in 1962, having waited some time to be accepted as a member, because of the need to prove her loyalty to the party. Returning to Portugal after her husband's death, she was part of the early efforts to establish the National Commission for Relief for Political Prisoners (Comissão Nacional de Socorro aos Presos Políticos - CNSPP), together with Maria Eugénia Varela Gomes, Aida Paula and others. They collected money for the prisoners and organised petitions for their release. She, herself, was arrested in June 1967 by the PIDE which had intercepted a phone call from another communist party member asking for her help to dispose of a suitcase full of explosives. She had already been under investigation for her involvement in the creation of the Movimento Democrático de Mulheres (Women's Democratic Movement). Pato was held in isolation at Caxias prison near Lisbon and was subjected to sleep torture. She was released in November of the same year. Eight days after being released, the River Tagus flooded north of Lisbon, killing 700 people. Pato joined the rescue mission.
Following the death of her first husband, she married José Manuel Tengarrinha, a friend from her youth. He was a historian and teacher, but was not permitted to work for the government as a teacher and had a history of arrests. Tengarrinha was leader of the Portuguese Democratic Movement (MDM), which was founded in 1969 as an electoral coalition to run in the undemocratic parliamentary elections. Pato was part of the election campaign in 1969 and was the MDM's director from 1969 to 1971. The couple, who separated in 1983, had two children, João and Rosa.