President of Angola for nearly 40 years whose rule was marred by corruption
Photograph: Laurent Maous/Gamma-Rapho/Getty ImagesPhotograph: Laurent Maous/Gamma-Rapho/Getty ImagesJosé Eduardo dos Santos, who has died aged 79, was president of Angola for almost four dramatic decades, commander in chief of the armed forces and party leader. A desperate struggle for independence from
In April 1974 the fascist regime in Portugal, the colonial power, fell. That September Dos Santos was elected to the central committee and politburo of the MPLA , while serving as a telecommunications officer. After independence in 1975 he became minister of foreign affairs and later minister of planning under the first president, the poet, doctor and intellectual Agostinho Neto, a veteran of Portugal’s prisons.
Cuba brought a military force across the Atlantic to support the MPLA, stopping that plan, and Angola, led by the MPLA, on 11 November 1975. However, a new war was promptly unleashed on Angola by South Africa, using Unita as a proxy. But in late 1987 Cuba turned the tide by sending their best planes, best pilots, weapons and 30,000 troops to southern Angola to relieve the 12,000-strong cream of the Angolan army surrounded in Cuito Cuanavale by a South African army with air superiority.
was convicted, and then acquitted, of profiting from illegal arms sale to Angola, while at the same time there were curious transactions over repayment of a $5bn debt to Boris Yeltsin’s Russian government.government of national unity Born in the capital, Luanda, José was the son of Jacinta José Paulino and Avelino Eduardo dos Santos. While at school he joined the MPLA, which sent him to the Soviet Union to gain degrees in petroleum engineering and radar transmission in Azerbaijan. In 1970 he returned via the Republic of Congo and joined the MPLA’s guerrillas as a wireless operator in the inhospitable equatorial forest of Cabinda.