"President José Eduardo dos Santos was the interlocutor of all Portuguese Presidents in Democracy, for four decades, constituting a decisive protagonist in the relations between the Angolan and Portuguese States and Peoples", reads the official message published on the website. of the Presidency of the Portuguese Republic.
In that three-paragraph note, it is also mentioned that "Portugal bears witness to the respect due to this long memory, in a crucial period for the birth and start of the CPLP and the aggrandizement" of "bilateral relations after decolonization".
Speaking to SIC, minutes before the release of the note, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa precisely underlined the idea of being "a decisive protagonist in the most diverse moments of these decades, from the late 1970s until the replacement by President João Lourenço in 2019 ".
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa revealed that he had already expressed his condolences to President João Lourenço by telephone, and that "Portugal will be represented by the President of the Republic and the Minister of Foreign Affairs at the funeral".
"It is evident that he is a personality that marked relations in a particularly sensitive period, which was the period immediately following the post-independence institutionalization in Angola and also when the first phase of democracy was being institutionalized in Portugal", he maintained.
