How UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is testing the limits of quiet diplomacy

Portugal's former prime minister seeks to resolve crises through patient negotiation, but success relies on leaders' willingness to act.

Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Guterres called President Bill Clinton from Lisbon on August 30 and September 8, 1999 to discuss the escalating crisis in East Timor. The tiny Southeast Asian territory, which has endured brutal Indonesian occupation since 1975, has plunged back into violence after voters overwhelmingly opted for independence in a referendum. Pro-Indonesian militias responded to the independence vote by waging a so-called "scorched earth" campaign, destroying infrastructure, displacing half a million people and killing thousands.

The crisis reverberated in Portugal, where linguistic, Catholic and historical ties to its former colony helped fuel the solidarity movement. An estimated 10,000 white-clad demonstrators formed human chains in the streets of Lisbon.

Guterres has already raised this issue. At a 1996 summit in Bangkok, he met with Indonesian President Suharto and raised the politically sensitive issue of East Timor, offering to restore diplomatic relations (broken since the 1975 invasion) in exchange for the release of Timorese resistance leader Xanana Gusmao. This proposal was met with awkward silence.

This time, Guterres wanted the United States to support a UN mission in East Timor, but Washington was reluctant to confront Indonesia. In his 2022 biography, The Honest Broker, Guterres recalled that during the second call, he warned Clinton that Portugal could reconsider the deployment of the international community in the Balkans. He could not intervene. Portugal's contribution to NATO was small, but it was well positioned politically, with troops in the alliance's prominent post-Cold War missions in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Guterres offered Clinton a choice: risk public conflict with a founding NATO ally, or use Washington's influence to accept an international force in Indonesia's East Timor. The next day, amid mounting international pressure, the White House announced that Indonesia "must" allow international aid.

For Guterres, it was an early test of multilateral crisis diplomacy, a skill he would later acquire as UN Secretary-General in 2017. East Timor, also known as East Timor, finally gained its independence in 2002. To advance diplomatic efforts during the 1999 crisis, Guterres received Timorese citizenship.

"Antonio Guterres pushed a lot for what we now call a referendum, and when the violence started, he was one of the people who called for the United Nations to intervene," said Christian Cabasset, a teacher at Catholic University of Lille and an expert on East Timor, reflecting on how the East Timor crisis foreshadowed the future of Guterres' career.

"Guterres was instrumental all along the way," he added, noting how he later pushed for the establishment of the UN Transitional Office in East Timor.

There's also a kind of love story with the UN, I mean that strong link between Timor-Leste and the UN... Multilateralism, which is still really the goal of the UN, has been very important in East Timor's independence. And Guterres [himself] became very important in the United Nations from 2005.

Guterres' response to the East Timor crisis reflected an approach shaped by his Catholic faith, his early work with Portugal's poor, and his political maturation after the fall of a dictatorship. He turned these experiences into a career built on finding common ground and helping people in crisis. But as UN secretary-general, he has faced the limits of that approach, struggling to translate calls for peace into action at a time when the world's most powerful nations are at odds.

Antonio Manuel de Oliveira Guterres was born on April 30, 1949 in Lisbon to Ilda Candida de Oliveira Guterres and Virgilio Dias Guterres, a senior employee of the Lisbon Gas and Electric Company. He spends summers and long periods with his grandparents in the small village of Dunas in the countryside. His childhood friend Vitor Díaz told the Publico newspaper that Guterres' grandmother stressed the importance of education and that at the age of three or four he already knew how to write his name. The grandparents' house was right next to the church where "Little Tony" often served as an altar boy.

Portugal was then ruled by the dictator Antonio Salazar, whose Estadio Novo regime closely resembled Italian fascism, but with less emphasis on brute force, personality cults, and revolutionary zeal and more on Catholic conservatism. As a result, the country is politically isolated and culturally isolated from much of democratic Western Europe.

"As a dictator, [Salazar] was very different from corporatism, the idea of an organic society without conflict, as well as conservative Roman Catholic values," says Antonio Costa Pinto, a historian at the University of Lisbon.

"But especially in the late '60s and early '70s ... it basically became a Cold War dictatorship and an anti-communist dictatorship."

Among the regime's core beliefs was that the seafaring Portuguese were naturally fit for colonization, stubbornly clinging to Portugal's centuries-old empire and fighting bloody rebellions in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau.

"We were a very closed country. We had censorship everywhere. We had political police," recalled João Goulao, a retired Portuguese doctor who grew up during that time.

"There was very limited movement of citizens; we couldn't travel abroad without a lot of formality. We weren't a very attractive destination for tourism, so people didn't visit us and we were very isolated."

However, Portugal was a founding member of NATO, an ally of the United States, and a participant in Western economic institutions.

"Especially in the late '60s, there was a big contrast between the kind of censorship and the kind of values—very conservative—supported by the dictatorship and the structure of Portuguese society, which was already much more modern," says Costa Pinto.

"There was a conflict between the values of the political elite and the values of a more developed and educated middle class."

Portuguese citizens saw these contradictions in everyday life: Coca-Cola was banned in Portugal, and until 1970, anyone with a lighter needed an annual license – a regulation put in place to protect the national match industry.

Although literacy rates improved in Salazar, outside the big cities, many Portuguese children received only minimal education from teachers who often only had a fourth-grade education themselves. The main merit of the trainers was loyalty to the regime.

But Guterres' grandmother's efforts to ensure he had a proper education paid off. He achieved excellent grades at his high school in Lisbon and was reportedly awarded the National Academic Award in 1965. The future politician went on to study electrical engineering at the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon, graduating in 1971.

While there, Guterres led the university's Center for Social Action, which did social work in the capital's poorest neighborhoods. He also joined Grupo da Luz (Group of Light), a Catholic student club led by Father Vitor Melisias, who became a close personal friend and confidant.

Although the Noor Group never directly challenged the regime, Melissias told Global Mission magazine that its members frequently changed meeting locations to avoid attracting the attention of the secret police.

Even before university, Guterres' faith influenced his views on community service and volunteerism. He was particularly inspired by the Second Vatican Council, 1965-1962, which reaffirmed the Church's commitment to human rights and encouraged everyone to play an active role in society. In 1967, at the age of 18, he joined a mass movement to help victims of the catastrophic Lisbon flood that killed hundreds. Meanwhile, the regime tried to hide the scale of the disaster.

"There was a huge mobilization, especially of students - not just Catholics - to support the shantytowns that flooded the outskirts of Lisbon and the Tagus River," explained Costa Pinto.

Many students became politicized against the dictatorship as another result of this massive movement to support the poor slum dwellers.

Guterres met his future wife, Luisa Amelia Guimaraes y Mello, through the Catholic University Youth Movement, according to his biography. The couple married in 1972 - Melisias' father officiating - and had two children, Pedro and Mariana. Guterres said his wife, who is a child psychiatrist, shared a valuable lesson with him that has served him well in his international diplomacy.

In a 2016 debate hosted by The Guardian, he said: "He taught me something that has been very useful for all my political activities. When two people are together, they are not two but six. What each is, each thinks he is, and each thinks what the other is."

And what is true for the people is also true for countries and organizations... the general manager must [ensure] that misunderstandings disappear and misconceptions disappear. Guterres said: Perceptions are necessary in politics.

Salazar fell ill and was removed from office in 1968, dying two years later. The Estado Novo survived until 1974 under his successor Marcelo Caetano. A cadre of military officers, disillusioned with the colonial wars, staged a coup and took control of the government on April 25 of the same year. Crowds poured into the streets to rally behind the rebels, and women stuck red carnations into the barrels of soldiers' guns, begging them not to kill. The Carnation Revolution, as it came to be known, set Portugal on a completely new path.

"There was a complete change, a sudden opening in our society," said Gulao, then 20.

"We began to demand the right to talk about our problems without censorship in the press," he explained. Portuguese citizens were also suddenly able to travel abroad, something he had never done before. This inspired Goulao to buy an Interrail train ticket and travel across the continent. I traveled in Europe and saw things I never would have guessed. "Portugal became fashionable, so we started seeing a lot of people from us."

The immediate post-coup period also saw a tense revolutionary upheaval, Costa Pinto said, with some worried that Portugal would fall to a reactionary counter-coup or communist takeover. But in 1975, more moderate forces prevailed, and the country is still another Western European-style democracy.

In 1974, Guterres joined the Socialist Party (PS) and grew a mustache in tribute to Salvador Allende, the ousted leftist president of Chile.

In a 2016 interview with journalist Annabella Mota Ribeiro, he said: "I had no significant political activity before April 25 [1974].

He said: "My involvement was in social issues. I was slowly awakened to political options this way."

In 1976, the young engineer was elected to Parliament representing Castelo Branco in Portugal's first democratic elections.

During his years in the PS, Guterres was on several government committees.