Representatives of Portugal and Angola's three liberation movements, the MPLA, FNLA and UNITA, signed the Alvor Agreement after five days of talks in southern Portugal. It promised an end to nearly five centuries of Portuguese rule, created a transitional coalition government and called for elections before independence. The fragile power-sharing arrangement collapsed within months into a civil war that lasted 27 years.
Portugal's 1974 Carnation Revolution had toppled the authoritarian Estado Novo regime in Lisbon, and its new leaders moved with startling speed to divest from Africa's remaining Portuguese colonies. Angola, rich in oil and diamonds and roughly the size of Western Europe, was the largest prize, but it was also home to three armed liberation movements with deeply divided ideologies, ethnic bases, and Cold War patrons.
In early January 1975, leaders of the MPLA (backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba), the FNLA (backed by the United States and Zaire), and UNITA (which would later draw South African and American support) met with Portuguese officials to hammer out terms for a transitional coalition government. The talks produced the Alvor Accord, signed January 15, which set November 11, 1975 as independence day and called for elections beforehand.
The power-sharing government never functioned. By the summer of 1975 the three movements were fighting each other in the streets of Luanda, and foreign powers poured in weapons, soldiers, and mercenaries. Angola's civil war would grind on for 27 years, killing hundreds of thousands and turning the country into one of the Cold War's bloodiest proxy battlegrounds—a tragic epilogue to negotiations that began that January.