LISBON, Portugal: Portugal paid official homage Tuesday to Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese diplomat who during World War II helped save thousands of people from Nazi persecution, by placing a tomb with his name in the country’s National Pantheon.
Leading Portuguese politicians and public figures attended the formal televised ceremony as the tomb was placed alongside other celebrated figures from Portuguese history at the landmark Lisbon building.
The speaker of the Portuguese Parliament, Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues, said Sousa Mendes’ conduct lent prestige to Portugal.
“People who at the decisive moment put their and their family’s safety at risk for the greater good are rare. Sousa Mendes was one of those people,” Ferro Rodrigues said in a speech.
The ceremony marked the completion of Sousa Mendes’ 80-year journey from ostracized Portuguese civil servant to honored international personage.
Perhaps Portugal’s most famous 20th-century diplomat, Sousa Mendes defied his superiors, including dictator António Salazar, when as consul in Bordeaux, France, in 1940 he handed out visas to many people who feared being hunted down by the Nazis.
The Portuguese visas allowed people, including Jews fleeing the Holocaust, to escape through neutral Portugal by air and sea to the United States and elsewhere.
The Portuguese diplomatic service was supposed to ask for the Lisbon government’s specific consent to grant visas to certain categories of applicants, as the country trod a careful path of neutrality, but Sousa Mendes gave out visas on his own initiative.
Leah Sills, a board director of the Sousa Mendes Foundation in the United States, said she flew in for the ceremony “to be able to honor the man that rescued my father and my grandparents” on May 24, 1940.
“It’s been just a beautiful experience,” she said.
Álvaro Sousa Mendes, a grandson of Aristides Sousa Mendes, said his family had seen an ambition fulfilled.
“This was a ceremony we had been requesting for a long time,” he said. “Finally he was recognized ... with National Pantheon honors.”
Breaking the rules got Sousa Mendes fired from the diplomatic service, with public shame attaching to his family at the time. He died in poverty in 1954.
Decades later, he won recognition for his key role in saving people from the Nazis.
In 1966, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, recognized Sousa Mendes as a “Righteous among the Nations.”
Last year, he drew praise from Pope Francis, and last March the US Senate in a motion saluted “the humanitarian and principled work” of Sousa Mendes.
It wasn’t until the late 1980s that he earned recognition in Portugal, with authorities posthumously granting him accolades.
In 2017, President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa bestowed Portugal’s highest honor, the Grand Cross of the Order of Liberty, on Sousa Mendes.
Last year, the Portuguese parliament voted to honor the former diplomat at the National Pantheon by placing there a plaque and a tomb without his body. Sousa Mendes wanted to be buried at his birthplace near Viseu, in northern Portugal.
Of the 19 historical figures entombed at the National Pantheon, 12 contain the person’s remains.
Portugal honors diplomat who saved thousands from Nazis
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Portugal honors diplomat who saved thousands from Nazis
- The speaker of the Portuguese Parliament, Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues, said Sousa Mendes’ conduct lent prestige to Portugal
- The ceremony marked the completion of Sousa Mendes’ 80-year journey from ostracized Portuguese civil servant to honored international personage
After nearly 7 weeks and many rumors, Bolivia’s ex-leader reappears in his stronghold
- Morales was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile
- He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country
LA PAZ: Bolivia’s long-serving socialist former leader, Evo Morales, reappeared Thursday in his political stronghold of the tropics after almost seven weeks of unexplained absence, endorsing candidates for upcoming regional elections and quieting rumors he had fled the country in the wake of the US seizure of his ally, Venezuela’s ex-President Nicolás Maduro.
The weeks of hand-wringing over Morales’ fate showed how little the Andean country knows about what’s happening in the remote Chapare region, where the former president has spent the past year evading an arrest warrant on human trafficking charges, and how vulnerable it is to fears about US President Donald Trump’s potential future foreign escapades.
The media outlet of Morales’ coca-growing union, Radio Kawsachun Coca, released footage of Morales smiling in dark sunglasses as he arrived via tractor at a stadium in the central Bolivian town of Chimoré to address his supporters.
Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile, explained that he had come down with chikungunya, a mosquito-borne ailment with no treatment that causes fever and severe joint pain, and suffered complications that “caught me by surprise.”
“Take care of yourselves against chikungunya — it is serious,” the 66-year-old Morales said, appearing markedly more frail than in past appearances.
He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country, vowing to remain in Bolivia despite the threat of arrest under conservative President Rodrigo Paz, whose election last October ended nearly two decades of rule by Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism party.
“Some media said, ‘Evo is going to leave, Evo is going to flee.’ I said clearly: I am not going to leave. I will stay with the people to defend the homeland,” he said.
Paz’s revival of diplomatic ties with the US and recent efforts to bring back the Drug Enforcement Administration — some 17 years after Morales expelled American anti-drug agents from the Andean country while cozying up to China, Russia, Cuba and Iran — have rattled the coca-growing region that serves as Morales’ bastion of support.
Paz on Thursday confirmed that he would meet Trump in Miami on March 7 for a summit convening politically aligned Latin American leaders as the Trump administration seeks to counter Chinese influence and assert US dominance in the region.
Before proclaiming the candidates he would endorse in Bolivia’s municipal and regional elections next month, Morales launched into a lengthy speech reminiscent of his once-frequent diatribes against US imperialism.
“This is geopolitical propaganda on an international scale,” he said of Trump’s bid to revive the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 in order to reassert American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. “They want to eliminate every left-wing party in Latin America.”
