Park Chung-hee

Park Chung-hee was the second-highest officer in the South Korean army when he seized power in the May 16 coup of 1961, ending the brief Second Republic. After two years running a military junta, he won election in 1963 and launched economic reforms that became the Miracle on the Han River - state-backed conglomerates like Samsung and Hyundai, labor suppressed, growth rates that remade a war-shattered country into an export juggernaut within a decade. Popular through the 1960s, he faced stiffer resistance by 1971; the next year he staged a self-coup, declared martial law, and imposed the Yushin Constitution, ruling as dictator with total control over the military, media, and dissent. On October 26, 1979, Kim Jae-gyu - his own intelligence director - shot him dead during dinner following the Busan-Masan Uprising. Whether it was planned or spontaneous remains unclear, but the economy he built kept roaring and the country eventually democratized in 1987, leaving him the most divisive figure in South Korean memory: the man who made Korea rich and crushed anyone who asked at what cost.