Updates on previous posts
Flash! Suriname's ex-dictator still on the lam
My previous postings have followed the comic farce playing out in South America’s star-crossed and smallest country, with last year’s conviction of former Surinamese dictator Desire Delano Bouterse for murder and his January disappearance while awaiting transport to prison to begin his well-deserved term.
A recent article on a regional news website—www.caribbeanlife.com, pubished in early June —added a tantalizing new layer of mystery to the saga, which draws only occasional attention from mainstream media. [You can check out the full article at https://www.caribbeanlife.com/surinamese-authorities-vow-to-find-bouterse/ ]
I could be wrong, but I, for one, do not believe that Desi, as he has always preferred to be called, is hiding in Venezuela, as the article seems to hint. If he ever went there, even that broken-down wreck of a once-flourishing country would have tossed him out by now in sheer exasperation for his crazy behavior and unrealistic demands. The only country unstable enough to allow him to hide out is, I am almost certain, is Suriname itself.
Ex-dictator Desi Bouterse, always up for a good time. File photo courtesy AP
I am told by one source that in January, just before he vanished, Desi was actually sighted on a boat near the upscale Torarica hotel in Paramaribo, waving goodbye to “supporters”—and pledging never to return—but that his small craft was reportedly headed only on a roughly 100-mile journey for Nieuw Nickerie, the nation’s third or fourth-largest city, near the Guyanese border, where authorities made no attempt to stop him from disembarking.
Map of modern Suriname, where most residents live along the Atlantic coast. Map courtesy Encyclopedia Britannica
And if he and his former bodyguard, Iwan Dijksteel, are, in fact, hiding in the country’s almost inaccessible interior, according to one rumor cited in the article—on land he supposedly purchased with looted funds from the government he either controlled or badgered into submission for the larger part of 40 years—the Surinamese authorities who are publicly pledging, on the one hand, to find him and put him in prison are indeed playing a dangerous and disingenuous game.
Having tolerated his presence as long as he stayed out of sight and did not interfere with larger governmental matters, I suspect they are now hoping to force his hand in advance of upcoming parliamentary elections—in which his old NDP party, which looks to win a lion’s share of seats, may yet stage another comeback and vote him back in for a third term as president, perhaps after first pardoning him.
Such a scenario is not possible, you say? I beg to differ. Nothing is beyond his crafty planning—or the stupidity of the system he perverted for so long. People there are still terrified of him—not unjustifiably —and like his separated-at-birth brothers in other American countries, the only thing that will ever put an end to his madness is Mother Nature herself. One can only hope.
I lived there for nearly two years while attached to the U.S. embassy in Paramaribo, and was daily bewildered by the continuing inability or unwillingness of locals—from other leaders to the ordinary man or woman in the street— to stand up to him, ever, and act for themselves. The country was a sad, running joke—bastardized democracy in action, nonsensical and counterproductive, like a kind of Alice in Wonderland come to life—which gave rise to an economic basket-case, widespread shortages of almost everything except formaldehyde-laced Parbo beer, and goose-stepping goons mindlessly guarding the airport against “unauthorized” visitors.
I remember one particular episode in which I traveled out to Zanderij International Airport to meet an incoming Marine Security Guard who had been transferred from Baghdad in 1989, but for logistical reasons, was unable to obtain the requisite diplomatic visa for proper entry into Suriname before arriving. After an exhausting halfway-round-the world flight, he and his belongings sat on Surinamese soil for less time than Desi might have required to finish his bathroom ablutions—despite our advance pleas to the pitifully cowed Foreign Ministry—before the guards ordered him back onto the departing KLM airplane. It was a thumb-in-your-eye move. Take that, Americans.
Granted, it made no sense—he would easily have been granted the visa he needed the next morning at the Foreign Ministry—but we had no recourse, no leverage. He got the better end of the deal, I suppose—a well-deserved week’s vacation in Amsterdam, while the addle-pated diplomats at the Surinamese embassy there sorted out his situation. But it always struck me that the inmates were running the airport and country as the asylum that for better or for worse, Suriname writ large had degenerated into since Desi had taken charge.
Some things may have changed since I lived there, of course. The recent advent of casinos and someone’s wet dream of offshore drilling wealth and gold mines—!!—have certainly nourished the pockets and offshore bank accounts of a few industrious and corrupt individuals, if not the general population. Recently discovered oil reserves may yet spark a wave of development that could change the face of modern Suriname. [See https://www.offshore-energy.biz/another-oil-gas-find-for-petronas-and-exxonmobil-offshore-suriname/ [
And I am told the country’s population is actually growing again, slightly —above 600,000 now, perhaps?—if only by the dubious in-migration of Chinese and Brazilian workers and expatriates. [Learn more at https://www.britannica.com/place/Suriname ]
But it is almost certainly never going to return anytime soon to its pre-independence population of 800,000—or its long-lost ranking of highest standard of living in the Western Hemisphere—before The Netherlands forced independence on its mostly-unwilling and totally-unprepared colony in 1975, and educated Surinamers began departing in droves … In the 1990s, it was vying with perennial beggars like Haiti, Nicaragua, and a few others for bottom-of-the-barrel status, while its nearest neighbors, French Guiana and Guyana, gradually found far more economic success and stability.
Despite any modest recent gains, the IMF still ranks Suriname as having South America’s second-lowest GDP [gross domestic product], around US $11 billion—barely holding 25th place among 34 countries listed [only Belize and a handful of islands have lower GDP’s]—while struggling to outperform smaller tourist-friendly islands like Saint Lucia, Grenada, and Barbados in GDP per capita. Worse, double-digit inflation is ravaging the nation’s economy, with the inept government unable to reign it in; the local Suriname dollar, introduced in 2004 to replace the even more hapless Surinamese guilder, is worth about 3 U.S. cents today, down from almost 4 cents a year ago.
[See the full 2023 report at the IMF website:
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2023/October/weo-report?c=311,213,314,313,316,339,218,223,228,233,238,321,243,248,253,328,258,336,263,268,343,273,278,283,288,293,361,362,364,366,369,298,299,&s=PPPGDP,PPPPC,&sy=2020&ey=2028&ssm=0&scsm=1&scc=0&ssd=1&ssc=0&sic=0&sort=country&ds=.&br=1 ]
Economic data and statistics are almost impenetrably opaque in judging rankings or actual living conditions, of course. So what does all this really mean? Only that the hole Desi Bouterse dug for a once-prosperous country has still not been filled in, nearly a half-century after he began murdering pesky intellectuals and anyone with half a mind to speak out against him, and plundered the country’s rich mineral wealth and other advantages to feather his own drug-ridden era of misrule and chaotic violence.
And along the way, he corrupted almost the entirety of Suriname’s political and social existence, perhaps for all time, as they rushed to do anything but annoy him. Almost laughably, his party appears ready in polls to reclaim majority status in 2025. If and when he does reappear—either to fanfare as the once-and-future king of Suriname, or in handcuffs in his new home in prison, where he will almost certainly face a darker form of justice for his ancient sins, or one can only dream, in a coffin—he will be dreaded by all and mourned by absolutely no one.
Watch this space.
Next time: My pet peeve: The Internet spawns an era of flagrant customer disservice