FLAMA

FLAMA's flag - very similar in design to what would become the Flag of Madeira.

The Frente de Libertação do Arquipélago da Madeira (English: Madeira Archipelago Liberation Front), or FLAMA (which could be read as an archaic Portuguese word for "flame", flama), was a right-wing terrorist paramilitary organisation from Madeira, whose main goal was to achieve Madeira's independence from mainland Portugal.

FLAMA carried out more than 70 armed and bomb attacks between 1974-1976, during the revolutionary period that followed the Portuguese Carnation Revolution (April 25, 1974). The Carnation Revolution effectively changed the Portuguese regime from an authoritarian dictatorship (the Estado Novo) to a democracy (the Third Republic), but only after two years of a transitional period known as PREC (Processo Revolucionário Em Curso, Portuguese for Ongoing Revolutionary Process), characterized by social turmoil and power dispute between left and right wing political forces. During this period the new government withdrew from Angola and Mozambique, the last Portuguese colonies on mainland Africa. Some in Madeira thought that their area should be the next to separate.^[1]

FLAMA's demands were more a right-wing political reaction by some of the regional elites to the left-wing nature of the Revolution and its main actors, than a truly ethnic or nationalist separatist goal. After the normalization of the Portuguese political system, early in 1976, and the constitutional grant of autonomy to the Portuguese North Atlantic archipelagos of Madeira and Azores (where a similar organization existed, the Frente de Libertação dos Açores), the organization vanished.

Allegedly one of FLAMA's most important activists was the controversial Alberto João Jardim, the former President of the regional government of Madeira, co-founder of the Madeiran branch of the popular centre-right-wing Portuguese party PSD and former Vice-president of the European People's Party.

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