Recent street protests in Suriname haven’t made many international headlines. Only newspapers in neighbouring Guyana and in the Netherlands, the colonial metropole, have covered the marches in which thousands of people have taken to the streets in recent weeks to protest spiraling economic chaos.
Suriname, a small nation on South America’s northern coast with a population of half a million, doesn’t often garner global attention. But maybe right now it should.
The next Venezuela?
Suriname’s current upheaval pales in comparison to the massive protests in nearby Venezuela, with (fortunately) no major casualties reported so far.
Yet events in Venezuelan are on many minds in Suriname, for both political and economic reasons.
Surinamese President Desire (Desi) Delano Bouterse is a great admirer of the late Hugo Chavez. Bouterse not only “adored” the man, as I have argued before, he also copied the Chavista hybrid political system, in which elections are held and opposition is allowed but weak institutions, clientelism, discretionary spending, and lack of transparency all advance the power of the executive – in this case, Bouterse’s.
Like Chavez, the opportunistic, charismatic, and controversial Bouterse also has a loyal following. He is especially popular among younger, lower-class Afro-Surinamese. Even a 1999 sentence in absentia to 11 years imprisonment for drug trafficking in a Dutch court did not hurt his popularity. In fact, it increased his street cred.
Sergeant Bouterse emerged on the national stage in February 1980, when he and 15 other non-commisioned military officers staged a coup against the democratically elected government. Their revolution – or “revo”, as it was locally called – soon became a nightmare as the dictatorship staged gross human rights violations, including the December 1982 massacre of 15 opposition leaders, economic collapse and social dislocation.
Champagne for the president, struggle for almost everyone else. Ranu Abhelakh/Reuters
Bouterse did not disappear into the shadows with the return of democracy in 1987. He immediately founded a political party, the National Democratic Party (NDP), and in 2010 was elected president. In the last elections in 2015, his NDP gained an absolute majority in parliament, a first in Suriname’s history, and Bouterse was again re-elected.
So has this dictator really turned into a democrat? People who lived through the 1980s remember what Bouterse is capable of, and they fear a repeat of that period’s threats, violence and murders.
As days of protests turned into weeks, signs of the bad old days are beginning to show. Radio shows aired by NDP-run stations are threatening a Dutch-born young leader of the current protests, Maisha Neus, with deportation. Freedom of the press has been curtailed for several years, with critical media barred from official press conferences.
Boom and bust
The second Venezuelan link is that Suriname also suffers from the continuing decline in oil prices paired with populist spending policies. Natural resource exploitation has long been the basis of Suriname’s economy, forcing the country to undergo regular boom-and-bust cycles.
In the 20th century, bauxite mining generated foreign exchange revenues and financed a rapid increase in state expenditure. In the post-second world war period, respective governments have expanded the large state bureaucracy, employing tens of thousands of party supporters.
But Bouterse’s dictatorship (1980-1987) saw a sharp economic decline, with shortages and long shopping lines that many elderly Surinamese still remember vividly.
By the late 1990s, a downturn in international aluminium prices combined with the expansionary economic policies of the NDP administration of Jules Wijdenbosch had completely wiped out the recovery that had taken place earlier that decade. Inflation accelerated, undermining the value of Suriname’s currency.
In 1999, in the largest demonstration in the country’s history, 50,000 to 75,000 people (10% of the country’s population) protested the rising cost of living in the capital, Paramaribo.