Lúcio Rodrigo Leite Barreto de Lara (9 April 1929 – 27 February 2016), also known by the pseudonym Tchiweka, was an Angolan revolutionary, physicist-mathematician, politician, anti-colonial ideologist and one of the founding members (and president) of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA).
[2][3] He was the main ideologist and thinker of Angola's self-determination, as well as an important theorist of Marxism,[3][4] being one of the biggest names in the country in the 20th century.
While participating in political party activities in Lisbon, he met Ruth Pflüger, a young Lisbon-born Portuguese Jew of German ancestry whom he married in 1955.
[10] He founded, together with several anti-colonial students and workers, the Clube Marítimo Africano in Lisbon, a recreational and sports entity that also served as a center for debates about colonialism.
In 1957, he joined the MPLA (founded the previous year), becoming its main ideologue, being even attributed to him the elaboration of the Marxist ideology of the party, which would become the dominant current.
[1][11] In 1963, with its expulsion from Democratic Republic of Congo/Zaire, and its flight across the river to Congo-Brazzaville, the MPLA fell into a state of total disarray and might have ceased to exist had Lara's brilliant organizational skills and cunning political decisions not saved it.
[12] After being elected as secretary general of the party, he moved permanently with his family to Brazzaville (in 1964), considered the pro-tempore seat of the MPLA during the period of Angola's war of independence.
His arrival was greeted by an ecstatic crowd of supporters, who broke through the containment barriers and invaded the runway at Luanda Airport when the delegation plane landed.
[10] In the purge of Fractionism between June 1977 and mid-1979, ordered by Agostinho Neto, "an undisclosed number of people, sometimes estimated to be in the tens of thousands, were executed".
[13][14] Though the work of arresting, jailing, torturing and killing dissidents, real or imagined, was ordered by Neto, and carried out by lower-level cadres, it is generally accepted that the operation was directed by Lara, Minister of Defence Iko Carreira, Head of DISA Ludy Kissassunda and Kissassunda's Deputy Henrique de Carvalho Santos (Onambwe).
On 10 December 1977, despite the tragic results of the purge, Lara was re-elected to the central committee of the MPLA, which made him the second most important member of the political bureau (after only Neto) and vice-president of the party, being responsible for the organization and the ideological sector.
[10] At the same time, in the 1980s and 1990s, the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had him as the main target to be neutralized and overthrown in the party's internal destabilization campaign.