By BARRY HATTON, ASSOCIATED PRESS

LISBON, Portugal -- Jan 7, 2017, 1:01 PM ET

Mario Soares, a former prime minister and president of Portugal who helped
steer his country toward democracy after a 1974 military coup and grew into
a global statesman through his work with the Socialist International
movement, has died. He was 92.

Lisbon's Red Cross Hospital said in a statement he died there on Saturday
afternoon with his son and his daughter at his bedside. The hospital did
not provide a cause of death, but Soares had been a patient since Dec. 13
and in a coma for the past two weeks.

Soares, a moderate Socialist, returned from 12 years of political exile
after the almost bloodless Carnation Revolution toppled Portugal's
four-decade dictatorship in 1974. As a lawyer, he had used peaceful means
to fight the country's regime, which eventually banished him.

Soares was elected Portugal's first post-coup prime minister in 1976 and
thwarted Portuguese Communist Party attempts to bring the NATO member under
Soviet influence during the Cold War. He helped guide his country from
dictatorship to parliamentary democracy and a place in the European Union.

"The loss of Mario Soares is the loss of someone who was irreplaceable in
our recent history. We owe him a lot," Socialist Prime Minister Antonio
Costa said in India, where he was on a state visit.

Costa said three days of national mourning will begin Monday and that
Soares would have a state funeral at an unspecified date.

"His cause was always the same: freedom," President Marcelo Rebelo de
Sousa, said in a televised speech. "At decisive moments, he was always a
winner."

Soares' role as an international statesman was solidified through his work
with the International Socialist movement. As a vice president from 1976,
he led diplomatic missions that sought to help resolve conflicts in the
Middle East and Latin and Central America.

Soares was visiting Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in the Gaza Strip when
Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in Tel Aviv in 1995.
Both Arafat and Rabin were longtime friends of Soares.

In 1986, Soares became Portugal's first civilian president in 60 years. His
broad popularity brought him two consecutive five-year terms.

During terms as prime minister and foreign minister, Soares helped
rehabilitate Portugal on the international stage after decades of isolation
under the dictatorship established by Antonio Salazar in the 1930s. Soares'
insistence on using the ballot box instead of weapons to end the
dictatorship won him respect around the world.

Soares belonged to a generation of influential European Socialist leaders
that also included his close friend Francois Mitterrand of France,
Germany's Willy Brandt, Olof Palme in Sweden, and Felipe Gonzalez in Spain.

The 1974 coup shot Lisbon to the center of Cold War attentions as Portugal
lurched to the political left after the dictatorship's fall.

Days after the Carnation Revolution -- so named because people stuck
red carnations in soldiers' rifle barrels -- Soares returned home by train
from Paris to a rapturous welcome from crowds that flocked to meet him at
Lisbon's Santa Apolonia train station.

The Communist Party's influence surged following the coup, prompting fears
in the West that Portuga l-- a founding member of the Atlantic military
alliance -- would come under the Soviet Union's influence and encourage
other radical leftist movements in western Europe.

Soares said that at an October 1974 meeting in Washington, then-U.S.
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told him he thought Portugal was doomed
to communist rule. But Frank Carlucci, the new U.S. ambassador to Lisbon
and later head of the CIA, argued that moderate democratic forces,
especially Soares' Socialists, would prevail. The 1976 election proved
Carlucci right.

Soares, an affable figure and eloquent campaigner who led the Socialist
Party, won the country's first entirely free elections and became prime
minister.

Portugal had western Europe's last colonial empire, and Soares was
instrumental in quickly granting independence to Portugal's five colonies
in Africa. Protracted wars had sapped the Portuguese economy and soured its
relations with other western nations that had turned away from colonial
rule years earlier.

Soares later was criticized for cutting the colonies loose so abruptly. All
of them -- Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and Sao Tome and
Principe -- became single-party Marxist states supported by the Soviet
Union and Cuba after their independence. Angola and Mozambique drifted into
civil wars as proxies in the Cold War struggle for influence in Africa.

Soares held posts in a string of governments that lasted less than a year
in the post-revolution political chaos. Banks were nationalized, spooking
wealthy financiers who fled the country, and poor farmers seized the land
they had long worked at large private estates.

Born in Lisbon in 1924, Soares started out as a radical student organizer
and became a renowned defense lawyer.

He was a relentless opponent of Salazar's regime, which along with Franco's
roughly contemporary rule in neighboring Spain, shut off the Iberian
peninsula to outside influences. Salazar's secret police, known by its
acronym PIDE, jailed Soares 12 times and exiled him twice, once to the
island of Sao Tome off west Africa.

After democracy, Soares served four times as the country's foreign minister
and three times as prime minister.

As prime minister in 1986 he ushered Portugal into the European Economic
Community -- later the European Union. That turned out to be a watershed
year which placed the country on a fast-track modernization program.

Soares capped his political career that year by becoming head of state. He
rapidly set about keeping his campaign pledge to serve as "President of all
the Portuguese" after years of division and unrest which brought eight
governments between 1978 and 1985.

He was a fierce critic of the economic liberalism embraced by U.S.
President Ronald Reagan and British leader Margaret Thatcher which was
alien to his Socialist convictions about the benefits of welfare capitalism.

As president, Soares established a professional, if cool, relationship with
center-right Social Democratic Prime Minister Anibal Cavaco Silva, who
admired Thatcher. Though an unlikely team, Soares and Cavaco Silva together
oversaw the shedding of many left-inspired economic structures, such as the
nationalization of banks, adopted after the coup.

Opponents claimed Soares had abandoned his Socialist ideals, but Soares
insisted his "cohabitation" with Cavaco Silva contributed to the country's
new-found stability. He won a thumping re-election victory to serve a
second five-year term in 1991.

Soares then retired from politics to set up a cultural foundation. At the
request of the United Nations, he became head of the Independent World
Commission of the Oceans. He also led a U.N. fact-finding mission on human
rights to Algeria in 1998.

He returned to politics in 1999, winning a seat in the European parliament
as the main candidate of the Socialist Party but then failing to be elected
head of the assembly.

He also ran again for Portugal's presidency in 2006, at the age of 82.
Younger voters had little grasp of his historic achievements and he
finished third.

He is survived by two children and five grandchildren

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