Portugal is mourning the death of Colonel Carlos Matos Gomes, one of the influential “Captains of April,” who passed away today at the age of 78 at a hospital in Lisbon. The President of the Republic expressed profound condolences to his family through the official website of the Presidency.
President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa paid tribute to Matos Gomes, recalling his extensive civic and educational contributions, underscoring a lifelong dedication to defending values championed more than five decades ago.
A family statement released on social media expressed deep sadness: “To all the friends and followers of my father, Carlos Matos Gomes, it is with profound sadness that I inform you of his passing today, April 13, at the Hospital Cuf Tejo in Lisbon. He departed peacefully, surrounded by the songs of April.”
Born on July 24, 1946, in Vila Nova da Barquinha, Carlos de Matos Gomes served as an Army officer and undertook missions in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau.
In 2022, Matos Gomes published “Geração D,” a work he described in an interview as both a tribute and an autobiography of his generation, one that experienced dictatorship, the Colonial War, and the revolution of April 25, 1974.
The “Geração D,” he explained, represents the generation of “Democracy, Desertion, Decolonization, Doctrines and Indoctrination, Discussion, Dialectics, Demystifying, Demobilizing, Denunciation, Disobedience, Divorce,” a generation that liberated itself from an “empire of madness.”
In 2020, alongside his comrade Aniceto Gomes, he published the essay “Guerra Colonial.”
Under the pseudonym Carlos Vale Ferraz, Matos Gomes authored several books on the Colonial War, including “Nó Cego,” “A Última Viúva de África,” and “Os Lobos não Usam Coleira” (1995), which was adapted into a film by António-Pedro Vasconcelos, and “Os Imortais” (2003).
