From the sublime to the ridiculous: a former South American dictator disappears …

Desi Bouterse, in a wheelchair, on walkabout

Readers of my blog may recall my entries last year on Foreign Service life in Paramaribo, Suriname, where much of the perennial nervous excitement plaguing Suriname’s political world revolved around what the then-former dictator, Desire Delano Bouterse—always “Desi” for short—had up his sleeve for domestic opponents, fellow drug dealers, livestock, and the rest of South America in general.

Not yet president of the republic—that would come only in 2010—when I lived there for nearly two years in 1989 and 1990, Bouterse reputedly went into hiding when the U.S. invaded Panama briefly in 1989 to arrest another criminal leader and fellow drug-sniffer, Manuel Noriega. Even after his NDP party was forced out of control of Parliament, Bouterse remained the power behind a string of weak, ineffective governments that were elected during the 1990s and beyond.

Grimly smirking, Desi Bouterse prepares for life as Suriname’s president in 2010. Associated Press photo

For years, Suriname had floundered as the continent’s inept poster child for corruption, drugs, disappearances, intrigue, and violence. Bouterse himself was openly suspected of masterminding the murders of more than a dozen opposition leaders and intellectuals in 1982, not long after he seized power.

But as readers learned from me last year, his long reign began to crumble when he was finally tried for those nasty 1982 murders. And then—against all odds, convicted. And in the most shocking turn yet, the country’s highest court upheld his conviction and sentenced him to 20 years in prison. Effectively, a life sentence for the 78-year-old former dictator, supposedly in failing health. He even showed up to court in a wheelchair.

It provoked a collective sigh of relief from his terrified opponents in the tiny, long-ridiculed former Dutch colony between Guyana and French Guiana. So where is he now? No one seems to know.

His shrewish second wife, Ingrid 2, isn’t talking. She all but screamed at reporters in early January that her husband was not going to turn himself in. And lo and behold, he did not. (See the Reuters article at https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/suriname-ex-president-bouterse-will-not-report-jail-wife-2024-01-12/ ).

Now, how he got onto a plane heading out in a wheelchair, without anyone noticing, is anyone’s guess. Probably with secret help from the government, which would not have wanted him in prison as a martyr. Chances are the wheelchair appearance in court in 2023 was shrewdly faked to try to generate some sympathy for the murderous bastard, who may well have donned a dress and wig—like ex-Confederate president Jefferson Davis was long reported to have done after the Civil War—to avoid capture. (Spoiler alert: The Davis report, of course, was also “fake news.”)

Cocaine addicts, even when they dry out, remain crafty creatures. I’m betting on Venezuela—or Nicaragua—where longtime friends with dictatorial baggage rule and suspected illegal drug revenue still rule as “pretend” presidents. Follow the money, I say—Bouterse certainly squirreled enough away during his three decades as chief scavenger of the economic basket case he ruled, and not just from the $48,000-a-year salary he insisted Parliament pay Ingrid 2—Ingrid Bouterse-Waldring— during her long and lamentable tenure as First Lady.

The grinning Bouterses shown in Brasilia with a frowning then-President Dilma Rousseff in 2011. Public domain photo

I doubt it will be the lavish retirement in Brazil (see above photo) he might have envisioned, or any Western country, even a balmy Caribbean island. Certainly not one with a democratic government—or with an extradition treaty with the new Suriname. Definitely not his former home in the Netherlands, where he and Ingrid 1 (Ingrid Bouterse-Figueira) once lived, but which has a separate 16-year sentence, imposed in absentia for drug trafficking, awaiting him (since 1999).

I suppose North Korea, Belarus, Russia, and other cold-climate countries are also off limits for a useless, cold-blooded old relic with very little more to trade but an evil grin. Iran, which once tried to gain a terrorist foothold in Suriname through his equally brain-dead son, Dino, might make him convert to Islam first. But Dino got a pardon. Desi never will, if there is any justice left …

When I lived in Paramaribo, in an old American neighborhood around the corner from the well-guarded 1950s-style residence of Ingrid 1, the recently discarded first wife, the rumors were that he had to marry someone with the same name in order to remember it—his brain was that fried on cocaine, as the story went.

For some inexplicable reason, she kept a life-size floor-to-ceiling portrait of her thuggish ex-husband as a reminder, visible from the street as I walked by when the drapes weren’t drawn. Maybe she thought he would forget and stumble home, by accident, some night?

My ambassador, as I remember, refused to entertain Surinamese political officials at his residence because Desi might hear about it and turn up, unwanted, uninvited, and unannounced. And no way to stop him. Still the commander of the Army, after all, he was that kind of a guy—the one no one wants to run into even in broad daylight, much less a dark alley.

In March, INTERPOL got in on the action, adding him to its dreaded “Red Notice” wanted list, months after Surinamese authorities issued an international arrest warrant for the convicted killer.

[See https://caribbean.loopnews.com/content/suriname-bouterse-placed-interpols-wanted-list ].

Someday, he should turn up, of course, unless he does us all a favor and drops dead first. Until then, of course, he will probably still be smirking all the way …

Next time: Now, back to the sublime: Remembering Margrethe, the former Queen of Denmark