Mário Crespo
| Mário Crespo | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Mário Crespo 13 April 1947 Coimbra, Portugal |
| Nationality | Portuguese |
| Alma mater | Instituto Superior Técnico |
| Occupation | Journalist |
| Years active | 1974-2014 |
| Spouse(s) | Leonor Alfaro |
Mário Crespo (born April 13, 1947) is a Portuguese retired journalist and reporter.
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, Lourenço Marques, with their only baby son. Mário Crespo went back to Europe with his mother, but returned to Mozambique and did all the high school in the Mozambican capital. Only when the university life appeared before him he moved one more time to the metropole (i.e. Mainland Portugal). In Lisbon, he went to the Colégio Universitário Pio XII (a kind of boarding school) and attended the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), the engineering school of the Technical University of Lisbon.
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 Kaúlza 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 Lourenço Marques where he would complete a number of academic disciplines but did not graduate. He also 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.
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