Rosas, Fernando

(1946- )

   Portuguese academic, writer, and politician. A student at Lisbon's Pedro Nunes High School, Rosas joined the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) through an organization at that school in 1961. He entered Lisbon University's Law School and, as a militant leftist student, was arrested and imprisoned by the political police, PIDE, on several occasions in 1965, 1971, and 1973. He went underground to escape further arrest and prison until the Revolution of 25 April 1974. After he had broken with the PCP following the Paris student riots of May 1968 and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Rosas joined a Maoist organization and directed a radical newspaper, Luta Popular (People's Struggle).

   Rosas returned to university study in 1981, producing a great deal of journalism oriented to historical studies in major Lisbon newspapers such as Diário de Notícias and Público. In 1986, he received a master's degree in contemporary history and joined the human and social sciences faculty at the New University of Lisbon. In 1990, he completed his Ph.D. in history and became president of the Instituto de Historia Contemporanea, a consultant for the Mário Soares Foundation, and editor of História magazine. In 1999, he reentered politics and helped establish a party coalition, Left Bloc or Bloco de Esquerda (BE); in the 2001 presidential elections he ran as a candidate for the BE, garnering only 2.9 percent of the vote.

   In 2006, he was decorated by the president of the republic with a medal, as Commander of the Great Cross, Order of Liberty. An authority on the subject of 20th-century political and economic history, especially on the period of the Estado Novo, he is the author, coauthor, or editor of more than a dozen books and many scores of articles and chapters in newspapers and scholarly and popular journals and magazines, and he has been active in organizing international scholarly conferences.