Ten Years

Yesterday I was stopped in the street by a sympathizer who said if only we had appeared on the scene ten years ago, things might have been different, we might have been able to open peoples' minds and change things for the better. People wouldn't have paid us any attention, I said.

Curiously, it has been ten years since I returned to Madeira and got involved. December 2002. In 2003 My sister and I protested the expropriation of the Hinton factory. My sister lay on the ground in front of the bulldozer. People were shocked, it was not the done thing!

When I returned my family were being treated as real social pariahs. Childhood friends would shy away and pretend not to see me, we were an embarrassment. We had been singled out by Jardim as enemies of the Madeirans who must be hated, ostracized, expropriated and expelled. We were an example of how he could use state power to persecute and destroy people. The Government proposed to pay a pittance in compensation and Jardim began a real hate campaign in state occasions and in the press, even accusing us of using slave labour. The message was not lost on anyone; they feared receiving the same treatment if they were associated with us.

We persisted. The following year, 2004, when the site was inaugurated during the election campaign, we lay on the ground in protest. On Jardim's orders, were hauled away by police in front of the national TV stations, which also broadcast Jardim's hate filled public speech against us. People began to timidly show their support.

Actually, the first protest had already attracted some support. It lead to me meeting the journalist Gil Canha (fired from the Diário for his 'delenda cartago: to unload a ship in Madeira costs six times more than in the Azores, Thank President Jardim').

In January 2004 we launched the first issue of the satirical newspaper 'Garajau'. We denounced what the other papers were afraid to touch, naming names. We expected not to last six months, but it was a success with the public. From the second issue on, the Government began to instal criminal proceedings against our cartoons, humor, opinion pieces, and much later for our investigations.

Humour, protest and making the justice system work were our three lines of action. We began to denounce the negligence and complicity in the Public Prosecutor's Office and in the Justice system. Naming judges and prosecutors who received favors. We started targeting entities to take a stand on the abuses here: Public Prosecutor's Office, National Commission of Elections, Press Entity, President of the Republic, European Commission.

We also launched court proceedings to, among other things, stop illegally approved buildings - something which was already being done by environmental associations and the then socialist, Filipe Sousa, from Gaula. In 2007, I  launched a case against the Funchal Centrum, the biggest building in the centre of Funchal - approved on the basis of an absurd appreciation that since it occupied a whole block it needn't comply with the city plan. Nobody had dared take on Jardim's right hand man, Jaime Ramos before. When the building was embargoed, Jardim had a fit, accusing us of being Ayatollahs and saboteurs and promising retaliation. The embargo was another shake to the system.

In 2007 we entered politics through the Partido da Nova Democracia. Our objective was to use humor, protest and the law to challenge the 30 year old regime. We (Gil, Baltasar, Coelho and myself) protested against Jardim's use of inaugurations for party political campaign. Jardim incited his supporters against us, we were heckled and physically harassed at every step.

Our political TV advert, in which we used the character Bexiga to make fun of the regime however, was a huge success. When we took him to a huge inauguration where a crowd of thousands had gathered and Bexiga began to meet and greet the people, just twenty or so meters behind Jardim, Jardim really blew his top and the situation nearly got out of hand.

We elected one Member of Parliament in 2007. The Public Prosecutor's Office allowed our case against Jardim's election crimes to prescribe.

We have not stopped since. In January 2011, we embarked on a mammoth task of challenging the Jardim's Party and exposing the regime's abuses in Madeira by launching José Manuel Coelho as Presidential candidate. In a society where people were afraid to criticize the regime, we managed to gather more than the 7500 necessary signatures. Coelho won 39% of the votes in Madeira, 5% behind the candidate of the PSD and CDS, Cavaco. A current of change had begun - the regime was shown to be vulnerable - alas, ten years too late!

Why Jardim hates the English

In the early 90's, when Jardim's party was beset with corruption scandals, Jardim began a more belligerent phase of his now 3 decade-long rule. With a tame TV and the Jornal under his control, the only news that bothered him was the Diário, half-owned by the Blandy family. Jardim needed a new fight to take the attention off the corruption and persecution scandals. He blamed the Diário and the English and set out on a hate-speech campaign, saying that the English wanted to return to the days of the dictatorship. He claimed there was no democratic opposition, that the Socialist Party had been infiltrated by the communist Party and wanted to install a totalitarian regime which would then be controlled by the English. He then set out to persecute and destroy the English and Anglo-descendent families by constantly vilifying them, destroying their businesses and expropriating their assets.

The campaign against the Diário then also began in earnest. He threatened those who put publicity in the Diário and ostracised all those who had any connection to the English. On many occasions over the last decades, he has threatened to expropriate the Diário itself and to find other means to run the 'foreigners' off the island. The English were the perfect scapegoats for all that went wrong. Like the Jews in Nazi Germany, they were portrayed as evil, shady characters, who were only interested in exploiting the Madeiran people. Like the Jews in Nazi Germany, Jardim used the law and state power to expropriate their assets, offering a symbolic compensation for them. The 'church' newspaper, the jardim-controlled Jornal, was one of the main vehicles for propagating this message. And 'cartoons' such as the one above showing the british flag and attacking the English have appeared on an almost weekly basis over the years

Unpaid expropriations in Ribeira Brava

Rafael Sousa, CDS-PP city councillor in Ribeira Brava challenged President Jardim to tell the population when he will pay for the expropriations of the land used for the new bridge at Ribeira da Fajã. Many owners have not been compensated for the land the government has expropriated and the councillor urged Jardim to make use of the inauguration ceremony to enlighten the owners.

Expropriation protest in Cabo Girão

Severino Aguiar parked his car to block access to expropriated land, dissatified with the prices the Government is paying for it. Bruno Aguiar accused the Government of abuse of power and presecution. 'What the Government is doing to us is not an expropriation, but an exploitation, a theft, and a hijacking of our rights.' 'I ask all Madeirans to be alert for situations like ours, to struggle and not give up, because this is the only way we can change things on our island, this island which belongs to all of us and not just to a handfull.'
Source: DN 19.4.1012

Situations like this are a dime a dozen on Madeira. I think many such cases are a deliberate way for the Government to 1) persecute people 2) use the example to intimidate others 3) fatten up government chrony lawyers who spend years raking it in by continually contesting those expropriated.

How else can you explain it when the Government offers one set of people a sixth of the market value for their land, while others get paid the market value or more.

1988 Expopriation case decided

The Supreme Court has judged that the Regional Government has 30 days to pay 1.8 million Euros compensation to the former owners. The land was expropriated in 1988 by the Regional Government to build the União Club sports complex in Camacha.

The União club was headed for many years by Jaime Ramos, the PSD-Madeira general secretary and PSD-M parliamentary leader - President Jardim's right hand man. The lawyer for the Government is Guilherme Silva, currently Vice President of the Portuguese Parliament for the PSD, and long-term intimate friend of President Jardim.

There are many similar cases dragging on in the courts for decades. The lawyer representing the state is in most cases Guilherme Silva. President Jardim has advocated using expropriation cases to make people lose money in Court. Oppostion parties have accused him of carrying out 'political expropriations'.

Who is Guilherme Silva?

Apart from being Vice President of the Portuguese Parliament, Guilherme Silva is also the lawyer who represents the Regional Government in most cases of political expropriations. i.e. expropriations which are carried out as a deliberate form of economic persecution.

Such political expropriations are common in Madeira and are assumed openly by Jardim, who states that those who get in his way should be expropriated in such a way that they are made to lose time and money through the courts. The procedure is simple: the Government decides to expropriate land for some public use and offers to pay a sixth or a seventh of the market value. The owners then have to resort to Portugal's notoriously slow justice system...

Enter Guilherme Silva. As the lawyer representing the Government in such cases, he is known to drag cases out over several decades with delay tactics - constant appeals and requests for clarification etc.
In short, he is not a pleasant piece of work and he does very nicely indeed out of this little business. While Jardim's victims are dispossessed and have to wait decades to see justice, a Court Auditor's report revealed Silva earned a half a million Euro yearly retainer from the Regional Government alone - he also represents the municipalities, football clubs and public companies.

Indeed Silva represents the public bus company, Horários do Funchal, which the Government has announced it is to privatize, in the case of the land the company expropriated in the 1980s to build its headquarters and never paid for.

The Jornal vs the Diário

The regional  parliament’s  commission of enquiry on the press, instituted by the local PSD and comprised of PSD MPs came to the conclusion that the Diário wants to close the Jornal da Madeira. What a joke!

For many years President Jardim has ranted and raged against the Diário saying it is the main opposition on the island and that without the Diário no opposition would exist.

For over a decade, he has been promising and threatening to expropriate the Diário and to do so in such a way as to cause the greatest financial damage to its owners. He also threatened that the scope of Government measures taken to harm the interests of the DN owners would reach beyond the Diário newspaper itself and affect other areas.

In his official speeches, in the fashion of a true dictator, President Jardim has repeatedly urged businessmen to boycott advertising in the Diário. He once even burned a copy of the Diário in public.

Eventually, seeing that expropriating the Diário newspaper, the only real rival of the Jornal, would cause too great a scandal, Jardim announced that he would adopt more refined methods and that there was going to be a ‘cleansing’ among the ranks of the Diário newspapers.

His solution was to pump enormous sums into the Jornal, turn it into a freebie newspaper and undercut the advertising market by price dumping, all in order to cut the Diário’s source of revenue, force job cuts among the journalists and eventually bankrupt the newspaper.

Not unexpectedly, the national parliament’s commission of enquiry, whose report records all these facts, concluded the opposite to the regional parliamentary commission. i.e. The Regional Government is trying and succeeding to scupper the independent press in Madeira.

Jardim and the PSD labeled the conclusion a 'colonial' interference in Madeira’s internal affairs.