Ana Gomes

Ana Maria Rosa Martins Gomes (born 9 February 1954), better known as Ana Gomes, is a Portuguese former diplomat and politician of the Socialist Party (PS).

She earned wide recognition for her role in negotiating independence for East Timor, a former Portuguese colony, and in the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between Portugal and Indonesia.

Ana Gomes was born in 1954 in Alfredo da Costa Maternity Hospital, in the Lisbon parish of São Sebastião da Pedreira, and she grew up during the authoritarian Estado Novo regime.

Her father, Jorge Pedro Martins Gomes, was an officer of the merchant marine and her mother, Maria Alice Rosa Gomes, a homemaker.

Both were politically minded and opposed the authoritarian regime.

In her teenage years, she accompanied her father to the rallies of the opposition movements Democratic Unity Electoral Commission (CEUD, Comissão Eleitoral de Unidade Democrática) and the Portuguese Democratic Movement/Democratic Electoral Commissions (MDP/CDE, Movimento Democrático Português/Comissões Democráticas Eleitorais) that unsuccessfully ran in the fraudulent 1969 legislative election, amid extensive harassment of opposition candidates and voter manipulation.

Her parents allowed her and her sister a liberal education, initially at Colégio da Baforeira, a boarding school in Parede, and then the lyceum in São João do Estoril, and later still the Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho Lyceum in Lisbon, where she became an activist of the Associative Movement of the Lisbon Secondary Education Students (MAEESL, Movimento Associativo de Estudantes do Ensino Secundário de Lisboa), at the time led by Nuno Crato.

In what she considered a "political act", Gomes formally requested to be released from religious education classes at school.

She began attending the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon in 1972, a period marked by the regime's increasing academic repression climate in the aftermath of the student opposition resistance movement of the Academic Crisis in 1962, later revived by the international revolutionary movements of 1968; notably, 1972 was the year of the assassination of fellow law student Ribeiro dos Santos by agents of the political police, and early in the year that followed, the Minister of Education Veiga Simão had "surveillers" (vigilantes; commonly referred to as the "gorillas") placed at the Faculty to enforce police control over students.

Ana Gomes soon became active in student political activism against the regime as part of the underground Anti-Colonial Struggle Committees (CLAC; Comités de Luta Anti-Colonial), groups with links to the Re-Organized Movement of the Party of the Proletariat (MRPP; Movimento Reorganizativo do Partido do Proletariado), a clandestine communist party.

As an initiation, she was recruited to paint large murals against the Colonial War.

By the time of the Carnation Revolution that overthrew the dictatorial regime in 1974, Ana Gomes had been suspended from the Faculty of Law for "subversive activities"; she had been briefly arrested as an agitator, along with a group of fellow students, in December 1973 and was suspended the following month.

At around this time, she was first employed part-time as a waitress at the restaurant Caldeiro owned by a popular actress of the time, Maria José Curado Ribeiro (she worked there alongside Rita Ribeiro and Guida Maria), and then as a translator for the exports department of the Companhia Portuguesa de Congelação (Portuguese Frozen Foods Company).

She was present at the Largo do Carmo in the afternoon of the day of the revolution, 25 April 1974, when the forces of the Armed Forces Movement led by Salgueiro Maia and a crowd of civilian supporters besieged the headquarters of the National Republican Guard, where Prime Minister Marcelo Caetano had sought refuge, demanding he cede power.

She later went to the Fort of Caxias to witness the release of the political prisoners.

She was preparing to marry a fellow law student and political activist, António Monteiro Cardoso, just as the revolution took place, but the marriage had to be postponed to the following month.

She was elected to the Faculty's student council in the electoral list supported by MRPP in November 1974 (alongside Durão Barroso and Garcia Pereira) as well as to the Faculty governing board.

After the birth of her daughter in August 1975, she dropped out of law school and quit her job, and focused on working as a translator and interpreter for the press division of the Central Committee of MRPP.

During the political tensions of the "Hot Summer" in 1975, during which the country was on the brink of civil war, culminating with the attempted Communist coup of 25 November, Ana Gomes was on the side of the democratic forces, supporting General Ramalho Eanes and the Socialist Party against the Portuguese Communist Party.

Shortly after, however, in January 1976, disillusioned with the party's disbelief in the Portuguese transition to democracy, she abandoned MRPP and active politics.

She returned to work as a secretary for an import/export company and resumed her law degree after working hours, finally completing it in 1979.

She was working as a teaching assistant at the Faculty of Law and training to become a lawyer under Manuel Figueira, a specialist in public international law and maritime law, when she was challenged by friends João Ramos Pinto and José de Freitas Ferraz to apply for the diplomatic service.

She came out on top of all applicants in the concours to gain access to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Ana Gomes became a career diplomat in 1980 and worked for the department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that dealt with the negotiations for the accession of Portugal to the European Economic Community.

During the 1980 presidential election, Gomes was invited to join the National Commission to Support the Reelection of President Eanes (CNARPE; Comissão Nacional de Apoio à Reeleição do Presidente Eanes) as a jurist.

In 1982, she was chosen to replace José Filipe Moraes Cabral as the diplomatic advisor to President António Ramalho Eanes, and was in the position until the end of his term in 1986, additionally, she acted as the President's personal interpreter when meeting foreign dignitaries.

Among the dossiers she at the time came into contact with was the unfinished business of the decolonisation of East Timor (formerly a Portuguese colonial possession, abandoned after the Carnation Revolution, and subsequently invaded by Indonesia), with which she worked with the President's special advisor for East Timor, former Prime Minister Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo.

Subsequently, she served in the Portuguese Missions at the United Nations in New York, and also in the Embassies in Geneva, Tokyo and London.

After Indonesian President Suharto's fall from power in 1998, Ana Gomes was part of the diplomatic talks about East Timor between the Portuguese authorities led by Jaime Gama, and Indonesian authorities led by Ali Alatas.

When it was decided Portugal would set up an Interests Section in Jakarta (with the Netherlands acting as protecting power), she was chosen to head it.

In 2000, with the reestablishment of bilateral relations with Indonesia, Ana Gomes was the first Portuguese Ambassador in Jakarta, having played an important role both in the process leading up to the independence of East Timor and in the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between Portugal and Indonesia.

In December 2001, following the resignation of Socialist Prime Minister António Guterres, President Jorge Sampaio dissolved the Assembly of the Republic and called for fresh legislative elections; the Socialist Party, led by Ferro Rodrigues, then lost the 2002 election to Durão Barroso's Social Democratic Party.

Ana Gomes was indignant Ferro Rodrigues, who she regarded as an honest politician, lost the election, and joined the Socialist Party the day after the election, on 18 March 2002.

Later that same year, she was invited to positions in the party leadership and to join the party's electoral lists for the European Parliament.

She later suspended her career as a diplomat to enter party politics, and served as a Member of the European Parliament from 2004 until 2019, where she was an outspoken campaigner on corruption and human rights.

She was elected Member of the European Parliament in the 2004 election, and served for three terms (reelected in 2009 and in 2014).

Political responsibilities:

According to ambassador Fernando de Oliveira Neves, as relayed in his work O Negociador (2019), Gomes showed "unusual professionalism" and had an "extraordinary role" in the negotiations, and became a friend of Ali Alatas who came to admire her.

On 10 September 2020, she officially announced her candidacy for the 2021 Portuguese presidential election, without official support from the Socialist Party.

She finished second, with 13% of the votes, the best result ever achieved by a woman in a presidential election in Portugal.