The 20th century is full of examples of dictators in Europe, America, Africa and Asia.
They are leaders who sometimes came to power democratically or by forcibly overthrowing a constituted regime. They wanted to build a "new society", and for that, they committed crimes against humanity.
From left or right, we present a list of 15 dictators of contemporary history.
1. Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
President and Chancellor of Germany, adolf hitler he was a precursor of Nazism, conceived and waged the Second World War (1939-1945).
Austrian by birth, Hitler went to Germany in search of a better life. He fought as a soldier in World War I. He followed the two empires, the German and the Austrian, which crumbled after the defeat.
This fact will shape his political attitude, as he joins those who blamed the communists, Jews and international capitalists for the German defeat. With some companions, he plots the Munich Coup, but is defeated and arrested. There, he would summarize his ideas in the book "Minha Luta".
Hitler defended the idea of the superiority of the Aryan race and, therefore, tried to eliminate all those who considered inferiors such as Jews, Gypsies, physically and intellectually handicapped people, homosexuals, etc.
For this, he created and used the Nazi concentration camps to their macabre goals. These were the main victims of Nazism. Furthermore, it led Germany to war on two fronts, east and west, in battles that cost the death of thousands of young people.
Realizing that Germany would be defeated, Hitler committed suicide.
Read more at Holocaust and Nazism.
2. Josef Stalin (1879-1953)
Stalin was born in Georgia. After Lenin's death in 1924, Joseph Stalin reached the power of the Soviet Union.
His first step was to nationalize the means of production and collectivize arable land. The objective was to reach the level of industrialization of countries like Germany or England.
Hunger crises due to misguided agricultural policies have shown the Russian people and the world the worst face of socialism. He also relentlessly pursued his enemies by exiling them, sending them to forced labor prisons known as Gulags or killing them.
In Stalin's 30 years in power, it is estimated that around 20 million people have died.
Stalin died of natural causes in 1953.
3. Mengistu Haile Mariam (1937)
Ethiopian military and politician, also known as “Negus Rojo”. He rose to power by overthrowing Emperor Haile Selassie I and installing a socialist-inspired government in Ethiopia.
His administration was marked by crimes against the Human rights, collective famine, persecution of the opposition and war against Somalia.
His regime was responsible for between 725,000 and 1,285,000 deaths. In 2006, Ethiopian justice found Mengistu Haile Mariam guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity.
Despite this, today Mengistu Haile Mariam lives in Zimbabwe.
4. Hissene Habré (1942)
Military and politician he was president of Chad from 1982 until 1990. Hissène Habré came to power through a coup d'état that overthrew President-elect Goukouni Oueddei.
At this time, Oueddei had the support of Libya, from Gaddafi (read no. 13).
Thus, the United States and France, fearing that yet another anti-Western government would form in North Africa, supported the ousting of Oueddei led by Habré.
During his government, Hissène Habré committed genocides against the tribes and ethnic groups that opposed him. It is estimated that the secret police tortured some 200,000 people and murdered around 40,000.
Habré received the dubious nickname "Pinochet from Africa" for his methods of disappearing and torturing political prisoners.
After being defeated in 1990, he went to Senegal. After unsuccessful attempts by European justice to deport him to Belgium to stand trial, Senegal created a special court that sentenced him to life imprisonment.
Hissène Habré is currently serving a life sentence in Dakar.
5. Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006)
Chilean military and dictator. In 1973, he directed the coup d'état that defeated the government of the president-elect Salvador Allende.
During the Cold War, the United States intervened in governments that were socialist in orientation.
Chile experienced important political and social changes after Allende's election. It was the first time that a leftist politician had come to power through elections in Latin America.
The military, led by Augusto Pinochet, declared hostility to Allende and invaded the presidential palace on September 11, 1973. Allende committed suicide and Pinochet took control of Chile.
Pinochet committed serious human rights violations such as censorship, the use of torture in interrogations and the disappearance of people. Pinochet's regime ended with more than 3,200 people missing and 38,000 tortured.
Although the Chilean authorities carried out investigations with the aim of taking him to court, Pinochet died without going to trial.
6. Idi Amin Dada (1920-2003)
Military dictator and president of Uganda, Idi Amin Dada came to power with the 1971 coup d'état.
His government was characterized by the repression of freedom of expression, corruption, ethnic persecution and murders of political enemies.
Idi Amin Dada moved from pro-Western ideology to anti-imperialism. In this way he got the support of Libya, the Soviet Union and East Germany.
He expelled Indians, Pakistanis and European Christians from the country in order to make Uganda a black-only country. The number of victims attributed to his regime ranges between 100,000 and 500,000 people.
In addition, he even ordered the assassination of senior members of his government such as ministers and the Anglican bishop Janani Luwum, who denounced the atrocities of his regime.
Megalomaniac in personality, he offered to be King of Scotland in order to lead the Scots to defeat England.
In 1978, Idi Amin Dada declared war on Tanzania, but would be defeated by that country. So he went into exile in Libya and later in Saudi Arabia, where he died after 24 years of exile.
7. Saddam Hussein (1937-2006)
Saddam Hussein was born in the town of Tikirit and came from a poor herding family. At the age of 20, he joined the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party and built his career from there.
This party had the ideology of reconciling socialist ideas with Arab nationalism. During Saddam's rule, oil companies and banks were nationalized. This attracted the distrust of the United States that depended on Iraqi oil to satisfy its demand.
He also abolished the courts and Islamic law - the sharia - and this earned him criticism from the religious sectors. He also harshly repressed ethnic Kurds and Shiites, accused of collaborating with Iraq's enemies.
Saddam Hussein's government was marked by arbitrary arrests and torture. He participated in the Gulf War and on Iraq war and is responsible for the Kurdish Genocide during the Iran-Iraq conflict.
Captured by American troops, he was handed over to Iraqi justice. The Iraqi court sentenced him to death by hanging.
Read more at Kurdish.
8. Francisco Franco Bahamonde (1892-1975)
Spanish military and dictator member of the coup d'état that overthrew the Spanish republic in which he ended up in Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). During the war, there are arbitrary arrests and summary trials.
Franco allowed the allied countries, Germany and Italy, to bomb cities like Guernica, Barcelona and Madrid. Only from malnutrition is it estimated that they died in the Spain some 50 thousand people.
Later, his regime was marked by a violent persecution of opponents, censorship, rebuke of nationalisms, exile for those who had fought for the republican cause.
In forty years of government, the death penalty was instituted and 23,000 people were shot.
He passed away in 1975 of natural causes. To this day, Franco's memory and legacy is a controversial issue in Spain.
9. Jorge Rafael Videla (1925-2013)
Argentine military and dictator. In 1976, after consummating the coup d'état in Argentina against President Isabelita Perón, he sowed terror throughout the country.
His regime called itself the "National Reorganization Process" and was based on eliminating opposition through arbitrary arrests, kidnappings and assassinations. It is estimated that around 30,000 were left missing at this time.
Under his protection, some Argentine soldiers took advantage of the assets of those who were detained. They even kidnapped the babies born in prisons and gave them up for adoption.
Likewise, he promoted the opening of the market, the suppression of unions and became involved in a territorial dispute against Chile. With disagreements among his comrades-in-arms, Videla was replaced by General Roberto Viola.
Videla was tried several times in the following decades, ranging from prison to freedom. Finally, in 2010, he was sentenced to life in prison, where he would die at the age of 87.
10. Pol Pot (1925-1998)
Saloth Sar, better known as Pol Pot, was a Cambodian dictator and leader of the Khmer Rouge. attracted by socialism, especially Maoism, took up arms against the monarchy and the Vietnamese.
Once in power, his idea was to build an agrarian country. Everything that was modernity like machines and technology was banned in Cambodia. Intellectuals, religion and study were banned.
It also forced people who lived in cities to go to the countryside. There, they were confined in forced labor camps where they died of starvation and fatigue.
He became primarily responsible for the so-called "Cambodian Genocide" which wiped out a third of Cambodia's population. Torture was used systematically and large common pits were opened to bury the dead.
In 1979, Vietnam invades Cambodia. To fight them, Pol Pot orders the mining of the country's fields, which leaves consequences to this day, as land mines continue to claim victims.
Even defeated, he retreats to the interior where he leads the dissent. The conflict turns into a war between the government and the Khmer Rouge, still led by Pol Pot.
Pol Pot dies without being tried for his atrocities in 1998.
11. Mao Tse-Tung (1893-1976)
leader of chinese revolution who introduced socialism in China. Its industrialization and agricultural reorganization policies have left 70 million dead.
Mao Tse-Tung approached the Soviet Union in order to gain external support and market for Chinese products. He admired Stalin and imitated his methods of forced collectivization and the leader's personality cult, for example.
China's version of socialism was called Maoism and inspired left-wing movements around the world.
It also promoted purges of intellectuals and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in the 1960s, which plunged the country into a wave of violence and arrests that cost the lives of students and opponents.
Even so, it received a visit from the American president Richard Nixon in order to win over western political opinion.
Mao's legacy remains controversial. If, on the one hand, it laid the foundations for Chinese modernization, industrializing the country, on the other, it ended for compromising several generations due to political persecution, malnutrition and working hours strenuous.
Mao Tse-Tung died in 1976 due to illness.
12. Benito Mussolini (1883-1945)
Benito Mussolini he was born into a humble family in Italy and at first was enchanted by socialist ideas because of their revolutionary content.
However, resentful of Italy's defeat in World War I, he broke with socialism. He starts to defend the fascism, extreme, violent and undemocratic nationalism as a solution to recover lost territories and pride.
In 1922, he shows the power of his Fascist Party by putting 50,000 militants to parade in the episode known as “The March on Rome”.
Like all dictators, Mussolini spared no effort in persecuting opponents such as Communists and Socialists. Allied with Hitler, he enacted anti-Semitic laws that resulted in the deportation and death of thousands of Jews.
Italy's participation in World War II was a complete fiasco and Germany had to intervene in every battle to help its ally. In 1943, Mussolini is deposed and imprisoned, but was rescued by German paratroopers.
He is still trying to found a republic in northern Italy. Expelled, he would try to cross the Swiss border, but is discovered and shot in 1945.
13. Muammar Gaddafi (1942-2011)
Libyan politician, military and revolutionary. He overthrew the monarchy through a coup d'état and was proclaimed the leader of the country.
It used the proceeds from oil production to modernize Libya by building houses, promoting free education and health. Under his command, the country had the highest HDI in Africa.
A practicing Muslim, he did not agree with communism because this ideology was an atheist. Thus, he approached the pan-Arab ideas defended by the President of Egypt, Gamel Adbel Nasser, who sought to unite the Arab world, which had just emerged from European colonialism.
Gaddafi was literally eliminating any internal opposition. For this, he had the secret police that watched over and arrested the Libyan citizens without the need for formal charges. In June 1996, he had some 1,000 prisoners executed, accused of “opposition to the regime”.
Abroad, he declared war on American imperialism. Thus, he financed several European groups that used violence to achieve their goals such as the German Baader Meinhof, the Vasco ETA, the Irish IRA and Palestinian organizations.
Likewise, he promoted a series of terrorist attacks. The most notorious were the abduction of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, which ended with 12 dead, and the explosion of the Pam Am 103 plane in 1988, which killed 270 people.
Despite this, Gaddafi did not support terrorism practiced by groups like the al-Qaeda or the Islamic state, as I saw them as competitors.
In this way, he condemned the 9/11 attack and declared himself a friend of the Western powers. In the first decade of the 21st century, it received a series of leaders from France, Spain and the United Kingdom.
However, with the Arab Spring, Libyan organizations rose up against Gaddafi with support from UN troops. They managed to expel him from the capital and later, the leader was persecuted as he headed for his hometown. There he was captured and shot to death.
14. Pope Doc (1907-1971)
Papa Doc, nickname by which he was called François Duvalier, was a Haitian doctor and politician.
He came to power through elections, but quickly became the "eternal president" of Haiti. To this end, he replaced the army commanders with men he trusted and created the "Tontons Macoute". These consisted of a personal guard who directly obeyed Duvalier.
The victims made by the Tontons Macoute can reach 150,000 people between murders and disappearances. Likewise, many Haitians were exiled or left the country because of political persecution.
The increase in Papa Doc's power is explained by the financial and strategic support of the United States, which feared losing another ally in the Caribbean after the Cuban revolution.
Papa Doc also knew how to use voodoo, an Afro-Caribbean animist religion, to terrorize the Haitian population. Thus, the legend was created that all those who opposed his desires died.
Papa Doc died in 1971 as a result of complications from diabetes. He was succeeded by his son Jean-Claude Duvalier, the "Baby Doc" who ruled until 1986.
15. Kim Jong-un (1983)
He is the current dictator of North Korea since 2011, born in Pyongyang. He is the third member of the Communist Kim dynasty to hold power.
His grandfather, Kim Jong-sum (1912-1994), was the founder of the communist state of North Korea and stopped the Korean War.
As a result, the Korean peninsula was divided into two countries that followed zones of different influence. The one from the north allied with the Soviet Union and the one from the south, linked to the United States.
During Kim Jong-an's rule, around one million people may have died of starvation, shootings, torture and disease.
He was succeeded by his son, Kim Jong-il (1941-2011), who continued the policies of personality cult, one-party and North Korea's closure to the world.
Kim Jong-il was the probable mastermind of the attack against South Korean leaders carried out in Burma in 1983, in which 21 people died.
Also in retaliation for the Seoul Olympics, a Korean Air plane exploded in 1987, killing 115 people.
it was expected that Kim Jong-un was to begin opening North Korea to the world, as he had been educated in the West. However, Kim Jong-un has been as much or more despotic than his grandfather and father.
One of his first measures was to have his uncle killed, accusing him of espionage. He then carried out a purge at the top of the military, arresting or killing anyone they thought would not be loyal to him.
Now, he is dedicated to showing the world the arsenal of weapons he has. This has caused more than one international incident and has fueled conflict between US and North Korea.
read more:
- What is dictatorship?
- Democracy
- Terrorism
- Civil war
- Totalitarian Regimes in Europe
- ETA: all about the Basque separatist group
