Portuguese journalist
Mario Crespo
(born April 13, 1947) is a
Portuguese
retired journalist and reporter.
Early life
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He was born in
Coimbra
. His father was an employee of the Portuguese bank
Banco Nacional Ultramarino
(BNU), and his mother, a professor at the Commercial School. As
civil servants
of the
Portuguese Empire
, they moved to
Portuguese Mozambique
capital,
Lourenco Marques
, with their only baby son. Mario Crespo went back to Europe with his mother, but returned to Mozambique and finished his high school in the Mozambican capital. Only when the university life appeared before him did he move one more time to the
metropole
(i.e.
Mainland Portugal
). In
Lisbon
, he went to the
Colegio Universitario Pio XII
(a kind of
boarding school
) and attended the
Instituto Superior Tecnico
(IST), the engineering school of the
Technical University of Lisbon
.
The Portuguese Colonial War
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In 1970, 22-year-old Crespo had dropped out of IST and was eventually drafted into military service in the
Portuguese Colonial War
. He transferred to Mozambique where his military occupation was to check the cement cargoes from
Beira
to the
Cahora Bassa Dam
construction site, near
Tete
. Some time later, due to his good fluency in English, he was placed in the press office of
Kaulza de Arriaga
, the commander in chief of the
Portuguese Armed Forces
in Mozambique, who had coordinated a massive anti-guerrilla operation against
FRELIMO
separatists in 1970 - the
Gordian Knot Operation
. While serving in the army, Crespo also entered the newly created School of Medicine of the
University of Lourenco Marques
where he would complete a number of academic disciplines but not graduate. He married Helen de Souza from
Johannesburg
, a South African woman with Portuguese ancestry who worked in genetics. After the
Carnation Revolution
left-leaning military coup at Lisbon in April 1974, fresh out of the troop, Crespo fled Mozambique for South Africa.
Life in South Africa
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The Mozambican transition to independence was marked by the mass exodus of ethnic Portuguese citizens from a territory that was about to become a totalitarist Marxist?Leninist
failed state
- the
People's Republic of Mozambique
. Many Portuguese went to neighbouring
South Africa
, others choose Europe, the US, and Brazil as destination. Those who returned to Portugal were collectively known as
Retornados
. In South Africa Mario Crespo found employment in
Johannesburg
as a trainee radio employee of the
South African Broadcasting Corporation
(SABC). A couple of years later, television was launched in South Africa and the editorial staff of the radio was called to perform on the screen. Working for SABC, Crespo reached the capacity of Chief Editor. In 1981 he divorced Helen de Souza, and by 1982, in his own words, South Africa's
apartheid
"had become claustrophobic". There was a vacancy in the
Voice of America
in
Washington, D.C.
, for him, but it was considered of little professional interest.
Return to Portugal and life in the US
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Crespo probed
Radiotelevisao Portuguesa
(RTP) in Lisbon, where vacancies were also opened. Throughout two decades working for RTP, Crespo reached notability as a reporter and journalist, and made friendship with other personalities of the Portuguese media such as
Jose Eduardo Moniz
,
Manuela Moura Guedes
, and
Miguel Sousa Tavares
. Mario Crespo was a RTP reporter in the
First Gulf War
as well as a White House accredited journalist in
Washington, D.C.
He described the time he lived in the US with his second wife, Leonor Alfaro, and children as the best of his life. During the
socialist
legislature of Portuguese Prime Minister
Antonio Guterres
, Crespo was removed from his capacity as a reporter in the US. Back to Lisbon, Crespo's responsibilities and work for RTP were scaled down. He was placed in standby and later would accuse RTP administration of ostracizing him. In this period of his life he taught nightclasses at the
Independente University
.
SIC Noticias
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Depressed and on a shrinking salary, Crespo resigned from his contract with RTP and sought a job at the
SIC Noticias
television channel in the year 2000, to be an international information correspondent, and it turned out not to happen. Emidio Rangel, the news channel's director at the time, offered him an extra contract. He presented the prime time news program on the
Jornal das 9
channel, and also the talk-shows
Pontos de Vista
and
Plano Inclinado
whose resident guests included Medina Carreira, Nuno Crato and Joao Duque, and the American television
news magazine
60 Minutes
in a Portuguese version.
[1]
[2]
On March 26, 2014, he presented the last Jornal das 9 news program making a critical speech at the end saying "God bless Portugal".
Personal life
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Crespo is married to Leonor Alfaro, a Portuguese woman with South African and Mozambican background, who works as a lawyer for the Portuguese Ministry of Culture. They have two sons, Ricardo and Eduardo, and a daughter, Denise. He is an avid sailor. In his youth his parents got divorced and he stayed with his mother. His mother's lawyer was
Antonio de Almeida Santos
, at the time a prominent lawyer in
Lourenco Marques
,
Portuguese Mozambique
.
References
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