Dési Bouterse

Bouterse seized control of Suriname in a 1980 military coup and ruled as dictator until 1987. In December 1982, fifteen political dissidents were murdered under his command - the killings that would shadow him for life. He led again briefly from 1990 to 1991, then founded the National Democratic Party. In 1999, a Dutch court sentenced him in absentia to eleven years for trafficking 474 kilograms of cocaine; he called the conviction a frame-up. He was elected president in 2010 and served a full decade, shielded by office from arrest. In 2019 he was sentenced to twenty years for the December murders; in 2023 another twenty-year sentence came for the 1986 Moiwana massacre against a Maroon village during the Interior War. When ordered to prison in early 2024, he vanished. He died on the run in December 2024, age seventy-nine.