The Admiral from draft to final design

First, there were just a few lines, but they clearly showed who was involved. Then, the face was completely drawn and the rest was sketched. Next, the face, uniform, tie, cap — and medals. The caricature of Gouveia e Melo was made for the Observador’s anniversary magazine, which hit the newsstands this week, precisely at the time when the admiral formally presented his candidacy for the Presidency of the Republic. On the final cover, the medals were not visible to make room for everything else, namely the title, which is a question: “Military men in politics again?” The caricature is by illustrator Henrique Monteiro, who has been working for years on the Observador’s anniversary magazines. He started doing cartoons in 1993, for Expresso, and then worked for Diário de Notícias, i and Sapo, where he is now. The art direction is by Luís Alexandre.

On the cover, there are three possible answers to the question in the title: “Yes”, “No” or “Good question: I need to read more about it”. We hope you chose the latter option because, to “read more about it”, we have an unpublished essay by Jaime Nogueira Pinto on the role of different military Presidents in the History of Portugal. We have had military Presidents in dictatorships, coups d’état, revolutions and democracies — and Jaime Nogueira Pinto explains what each of them did.

This magazine was coordinated by João Pombeiro, who was a journalist for the magazine Grande Reportagem, editor of Notícias Sábado (a magazine for DN and JN), contributor to Sábado, executive editor and director of the magazine LER. Since 2016, he has developed and coordinated several editorial projects for different media groups — and now he has had to make some difficult choices. A printed magazine has a limitation that Observador does not face in digital: space. As more advertising pages arrived, it was necessary to shorten texts and, unfortunately, remove topics that were part of the original plan. In any case, there is a lot to read. There is a long and fascinating conversation between Maria João Avillez and Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa about the 25th of April. There is a text about the legacy of Pope Francis and another about the various Cristiano Ronaldos who play in Portugal. There are international reports with Eduardo Mondlane in Mozambique; with Gino, the mini-Trump, in the USA; and with Pérola and her two granddaughters, in Israel, who tell how they escaped Hamas in the attacks of October 7. And there are, of course, the opinions of José Manuel Fernandes, Rui Ramos, Helena Matos, Alberto Gonçalves and several others.