During his almost 4 a long time in energy, from 1979 to 2017, Mr. dos Santos led his resource-plentiful nation by way of seemingly infinite battle and an uneasy peace marked by corruption that funneled huge riches to his household and a popular few whereas leaving most Angolans in dismal poverty.
More than half 1,000,000 folks had been killed in a civil war that displaced greater than 3 million and left a lot of the nation in ruins or pocked with land mines, at the same time as Angola grew to become Africa’s second-largest oil producer and third-largest producer of diamonds.
A fiercely personal, even reclusive determine, Mr. dos Santos largely eschewed any cult of character. Even his picture on the nation’s foreign money was partly hid by one other portrait. He gave few speeches or interviews, revealing little of his private life. He provided a tight-lipped smile in official images, none of which confirmed his workplace or properties.
Mr. dos Santos was finally compelled into exile — to a $7.2 million mansion in Barcelona — after his successor, President João Lourenço, unexpectedly launched an anti-corruption crackdown that closed in on the long-untouchable dos Santos household and its associates.
The chief goal of the probe was Isabel dos Santos, the previous president’s eldest daughter and seemingly Africa’s richest lady. She was charged in 2020 with cash laundering, forgery and different monetary crimes stemming from her tenure as head of Angola’s nationwide oil firm, Sonangol.
Prosecutors relied largely on an enormous trove of leaked monetary and enterprise data revealed by information organizations working with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a Washington-based investigative nonprofit. The “Luanda Leaks” scandal tied Isabel dos Santos or her husband to greater than 400 company entities in 41 international locations and offshore tax havens.
She had opulent properties in London and Dubai and constructed a secretive enterprise empire price an estimated $3.5 billion, however denied wrongdoing. Two of her half siblings fled overseas. A half brother, José Filomeno dos Santos was arrested in 2018 and later sentenced to 5 years in jail for embezzling as much as $500 million from Angola’s sovereign wealth fund, which he had led.
In all, the Lourenço authorities estimated that more than $24 billion was looted throughout Mr. dos Santos’s rule, allegedly by way of unlawful diversion of oil income, sweetheart authorities contracts, deeply entrenched patronage and different schemes.
Mr. dos Santos “allowed his immediate and extended family and associates to dominate commercial activity in what became a stagnating economy [and] a textbook kleptocracy,” mentioned Alex Vines, head of the Africa program at Chatham House, a British assume tank.
Despite his understated public picture, Mr. dos Santos held almost unfettered energy. He headed the armed forces, oversaw safety businesses and led the Popular (*79*) for the Liberation of Angola, or MPLA, the forces which have dominated almost each aspect of Angolan life for the reason that Portuguese colony gained independence in 1975.
At that time, Mr. dos Santos’s faction was backed by Cuba and the Soviet Union. The United States and apartheid-era South Africa supported the MPLA’s chief army rival, identified by the acronym UNITA, fueling a ruinous superpower proxy conflict for management of Angola. The nation’s civil conflict outlasted the Cold War, sputtering to a detailed solely in 2002.
During his lengthy tenure, Mr. dos Santos’s regime relied on what State Department human rights experiences described as arbitrary arrests, torture and extrajudicial killings, in addition to a murky judicial course of and limits on free meeting, speech and the press.
A shrewd dealmaker, Mr. dos Santos achieved his political longevity by swapping allies and ideologies because the world modified round him. As the Soviet Union started to implode, the onetime Marxist-Leninist permitted a partial market financial system, permitting Chevron, Texaco and different U.S. corporations to faucet Angola’s huge offshore oil fields, the nation’s chief revenue supply.
In time, he deserted Marxism-Leninism utterly, expelled Cuban forces and allowed the nation’s first multiparty elections. The United States grew to become Angola’s largest buying and selling companion, and Mr. dos Santos made 4 working visits to the White House by 2004.
Since then, an rising share of the nation’s oil has gone to China. As half of a loans-for-oil program, China has invested greater than $20 billion in roads, faculties, energy crops and different infrastructure in Angola, in accordance with the Portuguese information company Lusa.
Nevertheless, the World Bank estimates that greater than half of Angola’s greater than 30 million folks survive on lower than $1.90 a day. Life expectancy in Angola stays among the many world’s lowest, and infant mortality ranks among the many highest.
José Eduardo dos Santos, the son of a bricklayer, was born in Luanda, the capital, on Aug. 28, 1942. His excessive grades secured him one of the few spots out there to African college students at a faculty attended by kids of the Portuguese elite. Amid rising anti-colonial sentiment on the continent, he enlisted within the MPLA’s military at age 20 decided to finish 4 centuries of Portuguese rule.
Like many African militants, he discovered assist in Moscow. He obtained a level in petroleum engineering in 1969 from a university in Baku, Azerbaijan, then a Soviet republic.
He was serving on the MPLA’s central committee when Portugal agreed to grant independence to Angola in 1975. The transitional authorities in Luanda collapsed when combating broke out between the MPLA and rival guerrilla teams, together with the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, or UNITA.
With assist from Havana and Moscow, the MPLA managed to safe a shaky new authorities underneath President Agostinho Neto, however his dying from most cancers in 1979 elevated Mr. dos Santos — then a key cupboard member — to president, commander of the armed forces and head of the People’s Assembly.
Angola — a rustic twice the scale of France — remained in dire straits. The foreign money was all however nugatory and the civil conflict, usually fought by little one troopers, destroyed infrastructure and despatched tens of millions fleeing.
The 1992 multiparty elections, which had been carried out underneath a cease-fire and supervised by the United Nations, marked the primary actual probability for peace. But when Jonas Savimbi, the U.S.-backed UNITA chief, misplaced decisively to Mr. dos Santos, he falsely claimed fraud and reignited the conflict.
Savimbi’s forces quickly captured huge swaths of territory and lower provide traces to cities, producing hunger in some areas. As casualties and atrocities mounted, Alioune Blondin Béye, the U.N. particular envoy to Angola, known as it “the worst war in the world.” A peace deal was achieved solely after Angolan troops killed Savimbi in February 2002.
Mr. dos Santos was married to Ana Paula dos Santos, a former trend mannequin and flight attendant. He was reported to have fathered 4 to eight kids by numerous wives and relationships, however no official checklist of survivors was instantly out there.
Suffering from poor well being, Mr. dos Santos voluntarily stepped down at the 2017 legislative elections and handed energy to Lourenço, his former protection minister and political protege.
A 12 months later, Mr. dos Santos sat in surprised silence at an MPLA convention as his chosen successor denounced latest “corruption, nepotism, flattery and impunity” in a barely veiled assault on the previous ruling household.
To the gathering, Mr. dos Santos provided no apologies, acknowledged unspecified errors and mentioned he was leaving together with his “head high.”
