José Mouta Liz: The Banker Who Believed in the Barricade

In the quiet offices of the Banco de Portugal, José Mouta Liz handled money. As treasurer of the nation's central bank, he understood cash flows, economic signals, and the delicate mechanics of national finance. But under his crisp shirts and bureaucratic demeanor, Liz carried something else: a secret conviction that the revolution had failed—and that only sabotage, armed struggle, and clandestine cells could reignite its fire.

Liz, who died on June 20 at the age of 86, was not a hot-headed anarchist or a radicalized youth. He was a polished functionary, part of Portugal’s institutional elite. Yet he would go on to co-found FP‑25 de Abril, the most infamous domestic terrorist group in the country’s post-dictatorship history. He helped plan robberies, facilitated bombings, and justified executions—all in the name of reclaiming the revolution of April 1974 from what he saw as its betrayal by moderates and social democrats.

It’s a jarring contradiction: a central banker turned insurgent. But it’s also a pattern.

When the Revolution Stalls

Portugal’s Revolução dos Cravos—the Carnation Revolution—was bloodless in execution but not in ambition. It promised to sweep away fascism and colonialism, and to remake Portuguese society into a more just, more equitable system. For many, those promises were slowly compromised through European integration, economic liberalism, and the return of political centrism.

To the FP‑25, this was not evolution; it was capitulation. The group imagined an alternative Portugal: council-based, non-aligned, anti-NATO, post-capitalist. They adopted the iconography and language of the revolution while turning to methods it had explicitly rejected—bombings, assassinations, urban guerrilla tactics. Their political wing, the Força de Unidade Popular, wrapped itself in red banners and nostalgia, but its actions tore apart the very society it claimed to defend.

Mouta Liz was the money man. He helped fund the group’s operations, allegedly organized the 1984 cash van heist that netted over 100 million escudos, and remained a pivotal logistical figure during their most violent period. That he did so from within the corridors of Portuguese economic power underscores the paradox of elite radicalism.

Terrorism in a Three-Piece Suit

Like Italy’s Brigate Rosse or Germany’s Rote Armee Fraktion, FP‑25 was not a gang of disaffected youth from the margins. It was made up of lawyers, army captains, professors, and civil servants. These were people who had touched power and rejected it—not because they lacked access, but because they found it too compromised.

Liz’s story forces us to confront a disturbing truth: terrorism is not always born of poverty, exclusion, or desperation. Sometimes it emerges from intellectual frustration and revolutionary nostalgia. From a belief that the people are asleep and must be awakened—violently, if necessary.

FP‑25 left a legacy of trauma. Between 1980 and 1987, they killed 14 civilians, injured dozens more, and terrorized a fragile democracy still finding its footing. They were eventually dismantled by Operation Orion in 1984, and many, including Liz, were sentenced. But in 1996, Portugal’s Parliament approved a controversial amnesty for political crimes—signed by President Mário Soares—that spared them further prison time. For victims’ families, the amnesty was salt on wounds. For the former militants, it was vindication.

Liz never expressed remorse. He acknowledged political responsibility, but denied active involvement in the group’s killings. Like many of his generation, he saw the state as the bigger criminal—for abandoning the revolution, for yielding to Europe, for becoming a machine of quiet conformity.

From One Extreme to Another

What do we make of José Mouta Liz today? A tragic figure? A terrorist in disguise? A man of principle, corrupted by methods? Or merely a mirror for the contradictions of post-revolutionary Portugal?

There is no easy answer. But his story, emerging from within the heart of institutional Portugal and ending in the shadow of armed militancy, challenges the sanitized version of the country’s recent history. The 25th of April may be celebrated with carnations, but it also gave birth to a darker strain of ideological absolutism—one that preferred bullets to ballots, and secrecy to consensus.

And now, nearly half a century after the fall of fascism, Portugal finds itself grappling not with Marxist underground cells, but with the open rise of right-wing extremism. A party once considered fringe now seats MPs in the national assembly. Immigrants, minorities, and the poor are again scapegoated. Hate crimes are on the rise. The language of exclusion has returned, not whispered from basements, but shouted from parliamentary pulpits.

What a ride.

From dictatorship to revolution, from underground leftist terror to the mainstreaming of the far right. Portugal, it seems, is still searching for its democratic equilibrium—still haunted by ghosts it never fully confronted, and dangers it never imagined would come dressed in suits rather than ski masks.