Two of us travelled to Italy to meet up with comrades from the Red Brigades. I travelled with someone else to France to speak with the members of an armed organization from Portugal who had asked to meet us, because they needed some help in falsifying documents. We spoke French with one another, which I could speak quite well. Nevertheless, it was difficult to understand one another, because the French that two comrades from Portugal spoke sounded pretty Portuguese and their way of expressing themselves was also strange to us. Their language consisted of a mixture of Maoist-Marxist vocabulary that we didn't use in that way. And we knew even less about what they told us: they mainly organized themselves within the Portuguese colonial army. Both comrades had already taken part in war in Africa, although they were still young, about the same age as we were, only just over twenty. They said that that was where the force to overthrow the Portuguese Salazar regime came from. They were working together with African liberation movements in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau. "We mainly carry out acts of sabotage. Many of the comrades from our organization have been tortured and killed. But the fight isn't going to last much longer, the fascist colonial regime is about to fall." Carrying out political work within an army was something we couldn't even begin to imagine. Armies were always part of the other side. US soldiers had found help among the German left to desert during the Vietnam war, but what we now heard from these Portuguese sounded alien to us.
We had met on the street and then went to a park for a walk. The two of them nervously watched the area around us at all times. I handed over the documents on forgery after I had explained the basic of our methods. Translating everything wasn't a problem; they said they had already organized that. "Do you need weapons?" they asked. One of their most important tasks, they told us, was to provide the African liberation movements with weapons they stole from the Portuguese army stocks. They could get something for us if we wanted.
We arranged to meet again some weeks later, but nothing came of this meeting.
Margrit Shiller, Remembering the armed stuggle, Life in Baader-Meinhof
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