Career
The former head of the Suriname Anti-Terrorist Unit, he is currently serving a 16-year sentence in the United States after being convicted in Manhattan, New York, on charges of drug smuggling and trying to help Hezbollah set up a base in Suriname and Latin America. In July 2003, Bouterse was arrested on charges of large-scale theft of weapons in Suriname, when he attempted to enter Curaçao, part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, under a false passport. He was sentenced in 2005 to eight years imprisonment for international drug and arms trafficking.
On August 29, 2013, Bouterse was arrested by the Drug Enforcement Administration in Panama while traveling on a diplomatic passport.
He was extradited to the United States and taken to New York City, where the United States. attorney for Manhattan, Preet Bharara, sought and obtained a 16-year prison sentence. According to some conspiracy theories, these charges may be President Obama’s way of punishing Bouterse"s father, President Desi Bouterse, for his political and economic alliance with the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), the alternate Latin American/Caribbean alliance formed by the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez to provide the hemisphere with a counterweight to the United States.-dominated Organization of American States (Organization of American States).
According to Wayne Madsen, Obama"s hostility towards President Desi Bouterse would date back to the 1980s: Obama"s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, would have been active in efforts to overthrow Bouterse while she was working for the Central Intelligence Agency-linked Ford Foundation in New New York
