Dino Bouterse

Dino Bouterse
Born	Dino Delano Bouterse (1972-09-27) 27 September 1972 Steenwijk, Netherlands
Nationality	Surinamese
Relatives	Dési Bouterse

Dino Delano Bouterse (born 27 September 1972) is the son of the president of Suriname, Dési Bouterse. 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 DEA in Panama while traveling on a diplomatic passport. He was extradited to the United States and taken to New York City, where the U.S. attorney for Manhattan, Preet Bharara, sought and obtained a 16-year prison sentence.

Conspiracy theories

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 U.S.-dominated Organization of American States (OAS).

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 CIA-linked Ford Foundation in New York. Bouterse had overthrown the previous civilian government in a coup and he steered his nation into the pro-Cuba and socialist Third World camp.