FRELIMO

in full Frente de Libertao de Moambique, English Mozambique Liberation Front political and military movement that initiated Mozambican independence from Portugal and then formed the governing party of newly independent Mozambique in 1975. Frelimo was formed in neighbouring Tanzania in 1962 by exiled Africans from Mozambique who were seeking to overthrow Portuguese colonial rule in their country. The movement's original leader was Eduardo Mondlane; he held the nascent organization together, obtained support from both communist and western European countries, and built a force of several thousand guerrillas who became active in northern Mozambique. Mondlane was assassinated in 1969 and was succeeded by Samora Machel, a pragmatic military commander who extended Frelimo's activities to central Mozambique. By the mid-1960s the Portuguese colonial authorities had 70,000 troops in Mozambique to put down the insurgency, but to no avail. Following the left-wing military coup in Portugal in 1974, Mozambique attained independence in 1975 under a Frelimo government headed by Machel. Frelimo subsequently restructured itself as a Marxist-Leninist party and tried to revive the country's shattered economy, but its efforts were hampered by its commitment to collective agriculture and by the destructive activities of the dissident Mozambican group known as Renamo (q.v.). Frelimo and Renamo signed a peace accord in 1992, and Frelimo won multiparty elections held in Mozambique in 1994.