Torn by their biggest scandal in decades, the Portuguese are unsure whether to cheer or despair at a widening investigation into child sex abuse that has ensnared senior politicians and a top showbusiness figure.
The case, described by President Jorge Sampaio as a national disgrace, brought outrage after whistleblowers exposed decades of abuse at state-run Lisbon boys' orphanages and group homes, which officials allegedly knew about but did nothing to stop.
Adolescents, their faces blacked out and their voices altered, have gone on television to tell appalling accounts of rape by adults in dark cellars and nighttime car journeys to secluded houses used by an alleged pedophile ring.
Other victims, now adults, have come forward with chillingly sober stories they previously were ashamed to recount. The number of victims is believed to run into the hundreds.
Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues, the leader of the Socialist Party, the second-largest party in Parliament, on Wednesday became the latest establishment figure to be questioned by prosecutors.
The session lasted five hours, and the politician said nothing to reporters when he came out. There was no indication what aspect of the matter prosecutors wanted to discuss with him.
The case is under a judicial seal of confidentiality, meaning investigators are barred from releasing details of interrogations or other aspects of the scandal.
It has sent the Portuguese into a Italspin, raising questions about national attitudes that are as hard to ask as they are to answer.
Portugal "is reeling from a far-reaching crisis of values and identity," Diario de Noticias said in an editorial Wednesday.
Counselors appointed by the authorities say 130 boys now living at the homes also have been abused. The Lisbon shelters are run by the Casa Pia, an institution established in 1780 that looks after roughly 4,500 orphaned and needy children.
The scandal is especially painful because it has caught the country at a time of low self-esteem.
It has come amid economic hardship that has shaken the confidence of Portugal, one of the EU's smaller countries and still one of its poorest despite huge amounts of development aid over more than a decade.
Also, recent celebrated fraud cases have tainted the reputation of officials. Those include a court appearance to face an embezzlement charge against the defense minister, who leads the minority party in the conservative coalition government, and a Socialist mayor who skipped the country just before police moved to arrest her for corruption.
The pedophile investigation can either restore trust in public institutions, especially the maligned justice system, or help wreck the public's faith in its leaders.
Some say Portugal is going through its darkest moment since democracy was introduced a quarter century ago.
"I can't recall, during the past 25 years of democracy, ever having felt we were going through such a disturbing, frail, demoralizing, upsetting time as we're going through now," prominent writer Antonio Mega Ferreira said in weekly magazine Visao.
Since a lowly employee at the boys home was arrested eight months ago, former officials have claimed the abuse stretched back to the mid-1970s but the authorities allegedly covered it up.
In many ways the legal system, generally perceived as lame, is also in the dock.
RSS