Bento António Gonçalves

Bento António Gonçalves, better known as Bento Gonçalves (Fiães do Rio, Montalegre, March 2, 1902 - Tarrafal, Cape Verde, September 11, 1942) was a Portuguese politician, general secretary of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) between 1929 and 1942.

Born in Fiães do Rio, in the north of Portugal, in March 1902. He traveled to Lisbon and in 1915, at the age of 13, he began working as a mechanical turner. In 1919 he began to carry out this work at the Portuguese Navy arsenal in Alfeite, enlisting in 1922 as a sailor and beginning a pilot course. In 1924 he was sent to Luanda, capital of the then Portuguese colony of Angola, to work for the railway company and there he began to act as a trade unionist, trying to organize the Luanda Workers' Union.

In 1926 he returned to Lisbon and joined the Union of Navy Workers, traveling the following year to Moscow, as part of the Portuguese delegation to the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. In September 1928 he joined the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) as a member of the Alfeite arsenal cell. In 1929 he participated in the reorganization conference of the PCP and was elected a member of its provisional Central Committee. A little later he would be elected general secretary.

In 1930 he was arrested by the PIDE (the political police of the fascist dictatorship) and deported to the Azores. The following year he was sent to Cape Verde, but in 1933 he managed to return to Portugal and resume clandestine work. In November of that year he traveled to Madrid and made contact with the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) and the Communist International.

In 1935 he participated in the VII Congress of the Communist International in the USSR, but upon his return to Portugal he was arrested again by the PIDE, tried by a military court and transferred to the Tarrafal concentration camp, in Cape Verde, where he died from illness in 1942.