Mozambique Liberation Front

FRELIMO was formed in Dar es Salaam on 25 June 1962 when three regionally based nationalist organisations merged: the Mozambican African National Union (MANU), the National Democratic Union of Mozambique (UDENAMO) and the National African Union of Independent Mozambique (UNAMI). The anthropologist Eduardo Mondlane was elected president and the Reverend Uria Simango vice-president, and the movement set up its headquarters in Dar es Salaam in 1963. It could not be based in Mozambique, which was controlled by the Portuguese police, and Tanzania's President Julius Nyerere was sympathetic to it. Convinced by events such as the Mueda massacre that peaceful agitation would not bring independence, FRELIMO launched its first offensive in September 1964.

During the war of independence FRELIMO received support from the Soviet Union, China and the Scandinavian countries. By the late 1960s it had established "liberated zones" in the north in which it, rather than the Portuguese, was the civil authority, widening peasants' access to education and healthcare and organising cooperative farming. Experience in the liberated zones moved the leadership towards Marxism; it regarded economic exploitation by Western capital as the principal enemy but took a non-racial stance, and many white people were members. The Second Congress in July 1968 approved socialist goals. After Mondlane's assassination in February 1969 Simango's leadership was disputed; a triumvirate of Samora Machel, Marcelino dos Santos and Simango took over in April, and in November Machel and dos Santos ousted Simango. FRELIMO suffered heavy losses in Portugal's Operation Gordian Knot in 1970, but by the early 1970s its guerrilla force numbered about 7,000.

Negotiations followed Portugal's Carnation Revolution of April 1974, and according to the Portuguese-language source the Lusaka Accords of 7 September 1974 led to independence on 25 June 1975. FRELIMO set up a one-party state with Machel as president. The English-language source says that Simango, his wife and other dissidents were arrested; the Portuguese-language source says they were executed without trial. At its Third Congress in February 1977 FRELIMO transformed itself into a Marxist–Leninist vanguard party of the worker–peasant alliance, took the name FRELIMO Party and expanded its Central Committee to over 200 members. By then land, many enterprises, rented housing, the banks, health and education had been nationalised. According to the English-language source, illiteracy fell from 95% in 1975 to 73% in 1978.

The civil war against the anti-communist Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO), backed by the white minority governments of Rhodesia and South Africa, lasted until 1992. After Machel died in a plane crash in 1986, Joaquim Chissano took over the party and the state, adopted the World Bank and IMF Economic Rehabilitation Programme in September 1987, and at the Fifth Congress in 1989 removed Marxism–Leninism and class struggle from the party's documents. The English-language source says democratic socialism became the official ideology then; the Portuguese-language source says the party moved towards social democracy from 1993. A new constitution introduced a multi-party system in 1990, and the Rome General Peace Accords ended the civil war in 1992.

FRELIMO won the first multi-party election in 1994 and has held a parliamentary majority after every election since. In 1999 Chissano was re-elected with 52.3% of the vote and the party won 133 of 250 seats. In 2004 Armando Guebuza was elected president with about 60% and the party won 160 seats, but RENAMO and other opposition parties alleged fraud, and observers from the European Union and the Carter Center criticised the electoral commission.