José Eduardo dos Santos, from the communist guerrilla to the clan of millionaire rulers

Former Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos in July 2019.

José Eduardo dos Santos, the former president of Angola who died this Friday at the Teknon clinic in Barcelona in the midst of a family fight that includes accusations of murder, was able to be first a man of war and then a man of peace.

He is also a friend of money and an enemy of dissent, who governed his country for 38 years, the second longest term in Africa, only surpassed by the Equatoguinean Teodoro Obiang.

After nearly a million deaths and extreme poverty that left half the population sleeping rough after 27 years of civil war, Dos Santos defended reconciliation and signed a peace agreement in 1994 that included the reintegration of 50,000 guerrillas from the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), which had fought the Dos Santos government and his party, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA).

“He is the man who ended the war and the man of reconstruction.

That said, his administration is marked by a lack of transparency, nepotism and the institutionalization of corruption that his successor, João Lourenço, tries to fight.

The other negative aspect of his management was his failure to improve the living conditions of society and the great social inequality”,

, after three years as a correspondent in Luanda for Agence France Presse.

José Eduardo dos Santos, at a political rally in Angola in January 1989, months before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the socialist bloc. Patrick AVENTURIER (Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

Dos Santos represents the legacy of the Cold War and its contradictory mutations.

He never broke the umbilical cord that linked him to the USSR since he trained there as a petrochemical engineer.

He continued his good relations with Vladimir Putin, who twice awarded him the Order of Friendship (2006) and the Order of Honor (2012).

As happened in the USSR after the collapse of the communist bloc, the Angolan leader went from socialism in the 1960s and 1970s to wild capitalism in the 1990s, which would end up turning some of his children into the country's oligarchs.

His most prominent role corresponded to his eldest daughter Isabel dos Santos, who became the richest woman in Africa until the new president, João Lourenço,

Isabel dos Santos was the only child from José Eduardo dos Santos's first marriage to Tatiana Kubanova, whom he met in Baku (present-day Azerbaijan) while studying engineering and indoctrinating himself in socialism.

In 1961 she had started a fight against Portuguese colonization in Angola.

That same year José Eduardo dos Santos joined the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), one of the groups that was fighting the Portuguese and that had been founded in 1956 as a nationalist and Marxist organization.

In those wars between an empire that defended a dying world and colonies that had a cause (Angola, Guinea and Mozambique) the military conspiracy was born that would end up sinking the dictatorship of Portugal, the longest in Western Europe.

The Carnation Revolution swept away the Estado Novo regime, but it also facilitated African independence.

Dos Santos became in 1975 the first Minister of Foreign Affairs of emancipated Angola, a socialist regime presided over by Agostinho Neto.

When he died in 1979, the MPLA chose Dos Santos as his successor.

The party for independence in 1975 was short-lived.

Angola waged a civil war that other powers used to strike blows at each other, with the country turned into a hot battlefield of the Cold War, fueling confrontation between groups that in the past had shared the fight against the Portuguese.

While the USSR and Cuba supported the MPLA, the United States, South Africa and China - critical of the Soviets at the time - supported the alliance between the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) and the National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA). ), which did not recognize the independence proclaimed in Luanda by the MPLA.

The result was the longest civil war in Africa, which marked society with iron and turned one of the richest countries in natural resources (oil, diamonds,

fishing) in one of the poorest and most mined.

When the peace accords were signed in April 2002, there were 100,000 maimed and 50,000 orphans.

José Eduardo dos Santos is recognized for his commitment to ending the conflict.

His stated goal at the time was to make all Angolans "feel like citizens of the same homeland, where they can freely express their ideas and freely develop their personality."

He also announced elections in two years and his resignation from office.

He had then been in the presidency for 23 years.

He reneged on his promise to leave with tenacity.

So much so that the rapper Luaty Beirão dedicated a combative song to him in 2012,

, dressed in a black T-shirt where you could read “

” (32 years is a long time) and an incendiary letter: “The father of misery in the country, there is not only one, but the main one, it is not a secret, his name is Zedú [president's nickname]”.

Nor did Dos Santos keep his promises regarding political freedoms.

In 2015, Beirão was one of 15 jailed for sharing political books that encouraged protest.

They were sentenced to five and a half years in prison accused of preparing an attack against the president.

The 36-day hunger strike of the musician, who has become a symbol of the rebellion of young people from the Angolan middle class against the regime, and international pressure facilitated the early release of the dissidents.

Dos Santos still remained in power until 2017, when he handed over the presidency to his defense minister, João Lourenço.

The following year he passed the witness to the head of the party, the MPLA.

But also in Angola the transition was less tied down than his family would like.

"His power has been very curtailed now, especially compared to the days of the Dos Santos presidency," observes journalist Estelle Maussion.

The Angolan justice sentenced José Filomeno dos Santos to five years in prison for fraud, who presided over the sovereign wealth fund of Angola since 2013 by decision of his father, who came to consider designating him as his political dauphin.

The Angolan Attorney General's Office estimates that more than 1,000 million dollars [about 982 million euros] of public funds were lost during his administration.

José Eduardo dos Santos, together with his wife, Ana Paula dos Santos, and their daughter Isabel dos Santos (seated in the second row), at an electoral act in the Bay of Luanda in August 2012. PAULO NOVAIS (EFE)

Some chroniclers state that Isabel dos Santos was the favorite of the president's ten children.

For her wedding to Sindika Dokolo in 2002, planes were chartered from France and Belgium with a choir and food.

But it was not the greatest gift that the politician would give to his daughter.

Successive presidential decisions helped make Isabel dos Santos one of the greatest African fortunes.

The last of these gifts was her appointment as CEO of Sonangol, the all-powerful state oil company.

The low estimate of his wealth is 2,000 million dollars and includes businesses in oil, diamonds, banking, cement, jewelry or telephony, among others.

An even more striking enrichment in a country with 54% of the population [some 32.8 million inhabitants in total] living in poverty.

Isabel dos Santos' fortune is now under judicial investigation in Angola, where her assets have been confiscated, and in Portugal.

The leak of documents known as

, of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, brought to light the international network of advisers (McKinsey, PwC or Boston Consulting) who helped Isabel dos Santos set up a diversified network in more than 40 countries to enrich herself.

One of them is the United Arab Emirates, where she has taken refuge (in Dubai) after the fall from grace of her family in Angola.

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