Carlos Cardoso

Plaque in honor of Carlos Cardosos

Carlos Cardoso (* 1951 in Beira ; † November 22, 2000 in Maputo ) was a Mozambican journalist. After his murder in 2000, his newspaper investigated corruption cases in the privatization of Mozambique's largest bank.

biography

Cardoso was born in Beira in 1951 as the son of Portuguese immigrants to the colony of Mozambique. His father worked in milk production. Cardoso grew up in Mozambique and attended secondary school in South Africa , where he then studied at Witwatersrand University . He spoke Portuguese and, as second languages, the Shona dialect Ndau and English .

After the withdrawal of the Portuguese colonial administration from Mozambique in 1974 and the seizure of power by FRELIMO , Cardoso was one of the few white Mozambicans of Portuguese origin who remained in the country. He first worked in the state radio and from 1980 as editor of the state news agency AIM . After being briefly imprisoned, Cardoso worked as an advisor to Samora Machel . In 1989 he left AIM and initially worked as an artist. He founded Mediacoop , an independent press association. In 1989 he met his wife Nina Berg, a Norwegian lawyer with whom he had two children.

In 1992 he founded the newspaper Savana , but left its editorial team in 1997 to start a new daily newspaper Metical, which is about business. This appeared until 2001. In 1998 he was elected to Maputo City Council.

assassination

Location of the murder in the Avenida dos Mártires de Machava , today with a plaque and the slogan "Carlos Cardoso vive" (Carlos Cardoso lives)

Cardoso was shot dead in central Maputo on November 22, 2000. He was investigating a $ 14 million fraud in connection with the privatization of Mozambique's largest bank, Banco Comercial de Moçambique, at the time . At the 2002 trial, three of the six suspects testified that Nyimpine Chissano , the son of then Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano , commissioned and paid for the murder. The Portuguese Anibal dos Santos was convicted in absentia after escaping from prison in 2003. A follow-up trial in 2006 (after Santos' second escape) confirmed the sentence to 30 years in prison.

In 2006, Nyimpine Chissano was charged by prosecutors for Cardoso's murder and numerous economic crimes. AIM reported anonymous lawsuits on May 11, 2006 that the arrest warrant for Chissano had been withdrawn after former President Chissano and his wife intervened.

Web links

literature

Paul Fauvet, Marcelo Mosse: Carlos Cardoso. Telling the truth in Mozambique . Double Storey Books, 2003. ISBN 1-919930-31-0

personal data
SURNAME	Cardoso, Carlos
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Mozambican journalist
DATE OF BIRTH	1951
PLACE OF BIRTH	Beira
DATE OF DEATH	November 22, 2000
Place of death	Maputo