Bulletins and News Discussion from November 11th to November 17th, 2024 - Chapo? Like, the President-elect of Mozambique? - COTW: Mozambique

Thank you to @carpoftruth@hexbear.net for covering my position as Supreme Dictator of the Goddamn News while I was moving and getting set up in my new home in a top secret Kremlin-funded bunker five hundred feet below the ground. Our regularly scheduled programming returns this week.

On October 9th, Daniel Chapo won the Mozambique general election with about 70% of the vote. Chapo is the head of FRELIMO, the Marxist-Leninist party of Mozambique's liberation, which fought an internal anti-communist resistance called RENAMO which was backed by Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa; Frelimo won in 1975. However, as the USSR fell, Frelimo began to allow elections inside Mozambique, and has ruled the country with significant majorities in each election ever since.

The main opposition party inside Mozambique is Podemos, which is led by Venancio Mondlane, a former member of Renamo and trained inside the USA. He alleges that his polling figures predicted a majority win for him, not Frelimo, and has accused Chapo of electoral fraud. There have been the usual slogans about how they yearn for freedom. The EU, of course, "witnessed irregularities." As @WilsonWilson@hexbear.net has pointed out, Mozambique has massive undeveloped gas fields and is outsourcing the development process to France, Norway, the UK, and the USA, while mysterious Islamist groups have popped up to cause chaos in the exact regions which have the gas, slowing the process of actually developing those gas fields. Overall, it appears to be a cookie-cutter colour revolution attempt by the imperial core designed to install a comprador for cheaper resources. Its proximity to BRICS+ member South Africa may also be significant, noting the colour revolution in Bangladesh earlier this year exerting influence near India and China.

Protestors have been battling against the police and government since late October, resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries as well as massive disruption, as the government has intermittently blocked access to the internet and social media. As of today, calm appears to be returning, with border crossings beginning to reopen.

Please check out the HexAtlas!

The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.

You're viewing a single thread.

1.6K comments

Some Mozambique questions that I have on my mind after recently watching a vlog by a Palestinian-Jordanian vlogger who was in Maputo.
How anti-imperialist is FRELIMO these days and how come that they seem mostly kinda hated by the locals?
How prevalent is drug use and general crime in the country? There seems to be crazy amounts of drug users in some neighborhoods and even the metal car logo thingy in front of cars get stolen and sold in criminal markets that are semi-allowed in the country.
Has FRELIMO achieved some success in terms of addressing widespread poverty and living conditions in the slums? The situation seemed horrible from what I saw in the video.
How deep is Portuguese colonial penetration these days? We know that the French never really left the colonies despite the independence of the colonies. What's the situation with Portuguese imperialism?
- Iirc, All those Lusophone African communist parties became Socdems after the fall of the Soviet Union. I think Angola (MPLA, yes, the ones you fight against in CoD BO2, where you help the UNITA terrorists, who are portrayed as heroes, lol) basically ended its civil war in 2002, UNITA tried to restart it in 2006, but never did anything. The MPLA sold all its oil extraction rights to China, and China basically rebuilt the whole country. I think the capital is still the most expensive place to live in Africa because of the poor rail system.
  FRELIMO and Mozambique have much closer relations with Brazil (and Japan, due to Japan's very close relationship with Brazil) and South Africa than with China. The civil war destroyed their country and they have never recovered. It doesn't help that France is funding Islamic terrorist groups in northern Mozambique. Lula da Silva had close relations with Angola and Mozambique and went there to ask for forgiveness for the slave trade.
  Portugal had a left-wing military coup in 1974, the interim government was tired of the colonial wars and didn't have the money to continue. Basically, they signed a document giving them all independence, except for Madeira Island, Azores and Macau, which China refused to accept for fear that the UK would never give Hong Kong back, so Portugal had to wait until 1999 to give it back to China (between 1974 and 1999, China helped Portugal select pro-PRC leaders for Macau). I think most of the Portuguese settlers left, but some stayed and decided to live there as citizens of the new African states. I think Portugal has good relations with the African colonies, but the people there don't like Portugal and the colonialism shit very much, but I don't see them hating the Portuguese people or culture (although it is known that most Lusophone African states prefer to cheer for Brazil during the world cups rather than Portugal).

1582 comments