Desi Bouterse, the brutal former dictator turned populist president of Suriname who was convicted of murdering some of his political opponents, has died. He was 79.
Ronnie Brunswijk, the country’s vice president, who was Mr. Bouterse’s former bodyguard and later his rival, confirmed the death in a post on Facebook. The post said Mr. Bouterse had died on Tuesday, but did not say where or give a cause. News media in Suriname, a small South American nation, reported that Mr. Bouterse had been suffering from an undisclosed illness.
Mr. Bouterse was a divisive figure in the former Dutch colony of Suriname: a national hero to some and a brutal dictator to others.
Born to a poor family in Suriname’s sugar belt on Oct. 13, 1945, he dropped out of high school and enlisted in the Dutch Army.
Mr. Bouterse seized power in a military coup in 1980 — five years after the country’s independence from the Netherlands — and ruled Suriname through terror. In 1982, fearing a countercoup, he ordered his soldiers to round up, torture and execute 15 prominent dissidents. The victims included journalists, professors, lawyers and others.
The killings, which have become known as the “December Murders,” traumatized the country and prompted the Netherlands to suspend economic and military cooperation with its former colony.
Mr. Brunswijk, his onetime bodyguard, led a guerrilla war against Mr. Bouterse that started in 1986. The bloody civil war ultimately led to the end of Mr. Bouterse’s rule and helped usher in democracy.
Suriname held its first post-coup elections in 1987 and returned to civilian rule in 1988.
Mr. Bouterse stayed on as the head of the army until he resigned in 1990, saying that he didn’t feel the Surinamese government sufficiently backed the military.
As a civilian, he got rich through timber and gold dealings while remaining a major force in Suriname’s politics. He formed the National Democratic Party, which over time grew from a military clique into the country’s first major multiethnic political movement.
But the shadow of the “December Murders” continued to loom: In 2007, Suriname’s military court initiated a case against Mr. Bouterse and 24 other defendants. Mr. Bouterse that year said he accepted “political responsibility” for the killings, but denied direct involvement.
The trial would last for more than 15 years, and during that time Mr. Bouterse reinvented himself as the country’s populist champion. In 2010, he won a national election and swept back into power as president.
Rather than playing down his checkered past — which included a 1999 conviction in absentia in the Netherlands for smuggling cocaine into the country — Mr. Bouterse celebrated it.
After assuming the presidency, Mr. Bouterse also began to remake Suriname’s governing institutions. He put his wife on the payroll for her duties as first lady and appointed his son to a counterterrorism unit. He showered supporters with cheap houses and food, spending that left the country practically bankrupt and forced the government to raid banking reserves to import food.
Mr. Bouterse also shifted Suriname’s alliances away from the Netherlands, its former colonial ruler, toward China and nearby Venezuela.
He was re-elected president in 2015 to a term that included a murder conviction for his role in the December 1982 killings. Mr. Bouterse — who had earlier been granted immunity by Suriname’s parliament for any crimes he might have committed, including the December Murders — appealed the conviction.
His decades-long hold on power in Suriname ended in 2020 when Chan Santokhi, a former police chief and leader of the opposition, defeated him in an election.
Last year, a Surinamese court upheld Mr. Bouterse’s 2019 murder conviction — the final ruling in a 16-year legal process — and sentenced him to 20 years in prison.
But Mr. Bouterse never served time.
This January, instead of surrendering to the authorities, Mr. Bouterse went into hiding.
“He’s not going to jail,” his wife, Ingrid Bouterse-Waldring, told reporters at the time.
Mr. Bouterse apparently remained a fugitive until his death.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Bouterse’s survivors include two children, Dino and Peggy.
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