The Goa connection with the UN

PANJIM: Hidden in a mass of information available on the next Secretary General of the United Nations was a single quote from the man himself, Antonio Guterres, establishing a Goan link. He was quoted by The Wire some months ago as saying, “My wife was born in Goa. Her father was a doctor and the family moved back to Lisbon after it became part of India… But we have been back to visit, to see where she was born, where she was baptised.”

The search of who was the wife and where in Goa was she born led Herald not too far from its present office. For, Catarina Vaz Pinto, the wife of Guterres and currently an elected councillor of the Camara Municipal de Lisboa, was born in Panjim, in the Portuguese Military Hospital in Campal, about 18 months before the Portuguese colonial rule ended in Goa.

And though she was still a baby when the family left Goa, Vaz Pinto has returned to the place of her birth, even as recently as a couple of years ago. “My last time in Goa was in December 2014. I went there with my husband and my son, as I wanted to show them the place where I was born,” Vaz Pinto told Herald in an email interview from Portugal, confirming what her husband had said months earlier.

Her father, Dr Luis Vaz Pinto, was a military doctor who was posted in Goa and came to the then Portuguese colony along with his wife Maria Jose. “After finishing his medical school, my father was recruited for the military service in Goa, where he served as a medical doctor,” Vaz Pinto said. The family – she is the oldest of six children – lived in Panjim in the military neighbourhood (Messe dos Oficiais).

Vaz Pinto is herself into politics. She was the Secretary of State for Culture from 1997 to 2000, when Guterres was Prime Minister of Portugal. They got married in 2001 and currently as a member of the Municipal Council of Lisbon she is the Councillor for Culture and just last month was decorated by the French government with the Knight Insignia of the Order of Arts and Letters for her work in the field.

And it is in that field that she will continue to work. While her husband is set to start a new innings in New York, Vaz Pinto is looking at a more local role for herself. “I think I’ll promote through my work in the local cultural field the same values my husband is promoting at the global level: diversity, respect and mutual understanding,” she said.