Dési Bouterse

Desiré Delano Bouterse dominated Suriname for forty years, first as the sergeant who seized power in a coup, later as an elected president, and throughout as a man convicted of crimes he never served time for. He was a physical training instructor in the Dutch army before independence in 1975. In February 1980 he led sixteen sergeants in the coup that overthrew the elected government, and he ruled as a military dictator until 1987. The defining episode came in December 1982, when fifteen prominent critics of the regime - lawyers, journalists, union leaders and a university dean - were taken from their homes to Fort Zeelandia and shot. The December murders were never plausibly explained and were followed by a civil war in the interior against Maroon guerrillas, in which the army massacred civilians at Moiwana in 1986. He handed over to civilian rule, staged a second coup by telephone in 1990, then built a political party and won the presidency by election in 2010 and again in 2015. He had already been convicted in absentia in the Netherlands in 1999 of cocaine trafficking. The parliament he controlled passed an amnesty for the December murders in 2012; the courts pressed on anyway, and he was sentenced to twenty years in 2019 with the conviction upheld in 2023. He lost the 2020 election, went into hiding rather than report to prison, and died as a fugitive in December 2024. The December murders remain the central fact of modern Surinamese politics, and the annual commemoration is a political event in itself. His son Dino was sentenced in the United States in 2014 for offering the country as a base to people he believed were Hezbollah. Bouterse was buried with a large public turnout, which says something about how divided the country's judgement of him remains.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history