Writing Letters to the State: The Normalization of Salazar's Political Police

Abstract

Duncan Simpson discusses a letter of denunciation written to the political police during Salazar’s dictatorship in Portugal. Simpson shows how the letter—written by a woman entreating the police to investigate the morality and the politics of her husband-to-be—demonstrates the complexity of the relationships between individuals and the dictatorial state, something that a more top-down, zoomed-out analytical lens may fail to reveal.