Throughout his practically 4 many years in energy, from 1979 to 2017, Mr. dos Santos led his resource-plentiful nation via 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.

Greater than half 1,000,000 individuals have been killed in a civil conflict that displaced greater than Three 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 persona. Even his picture on the nation’s forex 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 houses.

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 girl. 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 information revealed by information organizations working with the Worldwide 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 houses 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 greater than $24 billion was looted throughout Mr. dos Santos’s rule, allegedly via unlawful diversion of oil income, sweetheart authorities contracts, deeply entrenched patronage and different schemes.

Mr. dos Santos “allowed his instant and prolonged household and associates to dominate industrial exercise in what grew to become a stagnating economic system [and] a textbook kleptocracy,” mentioned Alex Vines, head of the Africa program at Chatham Home, a British suppose tank.

Regardless of his understated public picture, Mr. dos Santos held practically unfettered energy. He headed the armed forces, oversaw safety businesses and led the Fashionable Motion for the Liberation of Angola, or MPLA, the forces which have dominated practically each side 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. America and apartheid-era South Africa supported the MPLA’s chief army rival, recognized by the acronym UNITA, fueling a ruinous superpower proxy conflict for management of Angola. The nation’s civil conflict outlasted the Chilly Struggle, sputtering to an in depth solely in 2002.

Throughout his lengthy tenure, Mr. dos Santos’s regime relied on what State Division human rights stories 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. Because the Soviet Union started to implode, the onetime Marxist-Leninist permitted a partial market economic system, permitting Chevron, Texaco and different U.S. corporations to faucet Angola’s huge offshore oil fields, the nation’s chief earnings supply.

In time, he deserted Marxism-Leninism fully, expelled Cuban forces and allowed the nation’s first multiparty elections. America grew to become Angola’s largest buying and selling associate, and Mr. dos Santos made 4 working visits to the White Home by 2004.

Since then, an growing share of the nation’s oil has gone to China. As a part of a loans-for-oil program, China has invested greater than $20 billion in roads, colleges, energy vegetation and different infrastructure in Angola, in keeping with the Portuguese information company Lusa.

Nonetheless, the World Financial institution estimates that greater than half of Angola’s greater than 30 million individuals survive on lower than $1.90 a day. Life expectancy in Angola stays among the many world’s lowest, and toddler 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 many few spots out there to African college students at a college attended by youngsters 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 help 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 Nationwide Union for the Complete Independence of Angola, or UNITA.

With assist from Havana and Moscow, the MPLA managed to safe a shaky new authorities below President Agostinho Neto, however his demise 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 Folks’s Meeting.

Angola — a rustic twice the dimensions of France — remained in dire straits. The forex was all however nugatory and the civil conflict, typically fought by baby troopers, destroyed infrastructure and despatched hundreds of thousands fleeing.

The 1992 multiparty elections, which have been carried out below a cease-fire and supervised by the United Nations, marked the primary actual probability for peace. However 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 minimize provide traces to cities, producing hunger in some areas. As casualties and atrocities mounted, Alioune Blondin Béye, the U.N. particular envoy to Angola, referred to as it “the worst conflict on the earth.” 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 youngsters by numerous wives and relationships, however no official record of survivors was instantly out there.

Affected by poor well being, Mr. dos Santos voluntarily stepped down on 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 shocked silence at an MPLA convention as his chosen successor denounced current “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 along with his “head excessive.”