Mário Crespo

On 26 March 2014 Mário Crespo presented the last Jornal das 9 performing a critic speech in the end.

The Mozambican transition to independence was marked by the mass exodus of ethnic Portuguese citizens from a territory that was about to become a totalitarist Marxist–Leninist failed state - the People's Republic of Mozambique. Many Portuguese went to neighbouring South Africa, others choose Europe, the US, and Brazil as destination. Those who returned to Portugal were collectively known as Retornados. In South Africa Mário Crespo found employment in Johannesburg as a trainee radio employee of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC). A couple of years later, television was launched in South Africa and the editorial staff of the radio was called to perform on the screen. Working for SABC, Crespo reached the capacity of Chief Editor. In 1981 he divorced Helen de Souza, and by 1982, in his own words, South Africa's apartheid "had become claustrophobic". There was a vacancy in the Voice of America in Washington, D.C., for him, but it was considered of little professional interest.

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.

Mário Crespo (born April 13, 1947) is a Portuguese retired journalist and reporter.