José Manuel Tengarrinha Maria Armanda Pires Falcão (December 25, 1917 – August 19, 1996), better known by her pen name Vera Lagoa, was a Portuguese journalist and newspaper director.
Her parents were Armando Augusto Pires Falcão, a military officer who would later oppose the regime of António de Oliveira Salazar, and his second wife Beatriz Lúcia, who were both from Lisbon.
[4][6] Frustrated with her TV career, Falcão became a writer for the Diário Popular, producing the society column Bisbilhotices (a title meaning "Gossip" that she hated and that was chosen without her input).
[4][5][11] Markedly leftist, Vera Lagoa joined the Socialist Party for a period after the Carnation Revolution put an end to the Estado Novo, but she soon became disillusioned with the new democratic regime and began shifting rightward politically.
An independent and uncompromising woman, knowledgeable about the behind-the-scenes of Portuguese society and politics, she was disgusted by the number of opportunists and hypocrites who once supported the Estado Novo and rapidly switched to become vocal far-left radicals after the regime fell, persecuting those who did not do the same.
[5][12] For the weekly publication Tempo, edited by Nuno Rocha Morais [pt], she wrote rousing articles against the Processo Revolucionário Em Curso government and such figures as Vasco Gonçalves and Francisco da Costa Gomes.
She was arrested and charged with insulting Costa Gomes for a piece titled "Perdi-lhe o respeito, Sr. Presidente," published in O Tempo in September 1975, and tried by the Tribunal da Boa Hora in Lisbon.
In 1980, she spoke out against the reelection of António Ramalho Eanes, whom she criticized as having ambiguous political attitudes, drawing communist support, and wanting to perpetuate the power of the Revolutionary Council.
She called for a clear investigation into the plane crash that killed Francisco de Sá Carneiro and his companions, which she, among others including the political cartoonist Augusto Cid, believed was a bomb attack.