On the night of 25 February 1986, Ferdinand Marcos, his wife Imelda, their family, and some eighty members of their circle boarded United States Air Force helicopters from the grounds of Malacañang Palace in Manila and flew into exile. Within hours they were aboard aircraft bound for Hawaii, ending twenty years and two months in which Marcos had governed the Philippines — fourteen of them as a dictator who ruled by decree. He had been pushed from power not by an army or a foreign invasion but by an unarmed crowd: hundreds of thousands of Filipinos who massed for four days along Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, the Manila ring road known as EDSA, to shield mutinous soldiers and block the dictator’s tanks.
Marcos had first been elected president in 1965 and re-elected in 1969, the first Philippine president to win a second term. Barred by the constitution from a third, he chose not to leave. On 21 September 1972 he signed Proclamation No. 1081, placing the country under martial law, and announced it to the nation two days later. He padlocked Congress, shuttered the free press, jailed opposition leaders, and ruled by presidential decree. Over the martial-law years, human-rights monitors and a later government commission documented roughly 3,257 killed, some 35,000 tortured, 737 forcibly disappeared, and about 70,000 imprisoned. While Filipinos were detained and “salvaged,” Marcos and his associates looted the treasury on a scale Guinness World Records would later record as the largest theft from a government: an estimated five to ten billion US dollars.
The regime that seemed immovable came apart with sudden speed. The 1983 assassination of the exiled opposition leader Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, gunned down on the tarmac as he returned to Manila, galvanized the opposition and shook the business class and the Church. Cornered by economic crisis and pressure from his American patrons, Marcos called a snap election for February 1986 and tried to steal it. The brazen fraud, a walkout by his own election tabulators, a military mutiny, and a radio appeal from Manila’s cardinal brought millions into the streets. Abandoned by his generals and finally by Washington, Marcos fled.
He never returned. Marcos died in Honolulu in 1989, still under indictment in the United States and barred from his homeland. The “People Power” he could not defeat became a template studied worldwide for nonviolent regime change. Yet the wealth he stole was never fully recovered, the institutions he hollowed out were slow to heal, and four decades later his son would win the presidency his father had been driven from.
In mid-May 1997, Mobutu Sese Seko fled the country he had ruled for nearly thirty-two years. A rebel column under Laurent-Désiré Kabila was closing on the capital, Kinshasa; the army Mobutu had starved and neglected melted away rather than fight; and the dictator, his body wasted by advanced prostate cancer, boarded a plane into exile. On 17 May 1997 Kabila’s forces entered Kinshasa unopposed, and the country was renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mobutu died less than four months later, on 7 September 1997, in Rabat, Morocco, and was buried far from the nation he had treated as a private estate.
Mobutu had seized power on 24 November 1965 in a bloodless coup, his second intervention in the chaos that followed the Congo’s independence from Belgium. As army chief he had earlier helped engineer the removal of the elected prime minister Patrice Lumumba, whose handover to secessionists in Katanga ended in Lumumba’s murder in 1961. Backed by the United States, France, and Belgium as a Cold War bulwark against communism, Mobutu consolidated absolute power, banned rival parties, and in 1967 made his Popular Movement of the Revolution the only legal party — one every citizen was deemed to belong to by birth.
He recast the country in his own image. In 1971 he renamed the Congo “Zaire” and launched a campaign of authenticité, ordering Zairians to drop Christian names and Western dress; he took the name Mobutu Sese Seko, “the all-powerful warrior who goes from conquest to conquest.” Behind the nationalist theater, the state became a machine for personal enrichment. He nationalized foreign businesses and handed them to relatives and cronies who looted them, amassed one of the largest private fortunes on earth — by some estimates rivaling the size of the national debt — and let the country’s roads, hospitals, and schools rot while he built a palace in his jungle hometown and chartered Concorde flights to Paris. Ordinary Zairians, sitting atop some of the richest mineral deposits in the world, grew steadily poorer.
The regime outlasted the Cold War only briefly. When the Soviet collapse removed Mobutu’s value as an anti-communist client, Western support cooled. The decisive blow came from the east: the 1994 Rwandan genocide spilled millions of refugees and armed génocidaires into Zaire, and in 1996 Rwanda and Uganda backed a rebellion that gathered Zairian opponents around Kabila and marched across the vast country in months. Mobutu, dying and abandoned, could not stop it. His fall removed a kleptocrat, but it opened a far bloodier chapter: the wars that followed would draw in much of the region and kill millions.
On 11 April 1979, Idi Amin fled the Ugandan capital, Kampala, by air as Tanzanian troops and Ugandan exiles entered the city. The flight ended eight years of one of the most violent dictatorships of the twentieth century — a regime under which an estimated 100,000 to 500,000 Ugandans were killed, with figures commonly cited around 300,000. Amin escaped first to Libya, then briefly to Iraq, and finally to Saudi Arabia, where he lived in comfortable exile until his death in Jeddah on 16 August 2003. He was never tried for the killings that had earned him, abroad, the name “the Butcher of Uganda.”
Amin had seized power on 25 January 1971 in a military coup, while President Milton Obote was out of the country at a Commonwealth summit in Singapore. A career soldier who had risen from the colonial King’s African Rifles to command Uganda’s army, Amin declared himself president and quickly turned the state into an instrument of terror. He created security organs — the State Research Bureau and the Public Safety Unit — that abducted, tortured, and murdered with impunity. The victims included soldiers of rival ethnic groups, particularly the Acholi and Lango; clergy and judges who defied him, among them the Anglican Archbishop Janani Luwum and the former chief justice Benedicto Kiwanuka; and anyone perceived as an enemy.
His rule was as economically ruinous as it was bloody. In 1972 Amin expelled the country’s Asian minority — roughly 50,000 to 60,000 people, many of them Ugandan citizens — and handed their farms, shops, and factories to his cronies, who ran them into the ground. The economy that had made Uganda one of East Africa’s more prosperous countries collapsed into shortages and decay. Amin cultivated a grandiose self-image, accumulating titles and proclaiming himself President for Life, Conqueror of the British Empire, and the uncrowned King of Scotland, while presenting an erratic, menacing figure to a watching world.
The dictator was undone by a war of his own making. In late 1978, seeking to distract from mutiny and crisis at home, Amin invaded Tanzania and annexed a strip of its territory. President Julius Nyerere mobilized the Tanzanian army, joined it to Ugandan exile forces, and drove north. Despite reinforcements sent by Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Amin’s army disintegrated, and Kampala fell. His overthrow brought relief from the terror but not stability: Uganda endured years of further upheaval, and the militarized politics Amin entrenched outlived him.
Before dawn on 7 February 1986, Jean-Claude Duvalier — “Baby Doc,” the president-for-life of Haiti — drove to the airport outside Port-au-Prince and boarded a United States Air Force cargo plane bound for France. With him went his wife, members of his family, and a circle of associates, and, according to investigators, a large share of a fortune drained from one of the world’s poorest countries. His flight, arranged with American help, ended fifteen years of his own rule and twenty-nine years of dynastic dictatorship by the Duvalier family. As news of his departure spread, Haitians poured into the streets in celebration, and some turned on the symbols and enforcers of the regime.
Jean-Claude Duvalier had not earned his power; he had inherited it. His father, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, a country doctor who became president in 1957 and then president-for-life, had ruled Haiti through terror, voodoo mystique, and a private militia, the Tonton Macoutes, that murdered and intimidated his opponents. When Papa Doc died in April 1971, the office passed to his son, then just 19 years old — the youngest non-royal head of state in the world, installed by a referendum that allowed no opposition.
For a time the heir governed lightly, leaving affairs to his late father’s advisers and his own mother while he lived as a playboy. The machinery of repression remained: the Tonton Macoutes, by the 1980s some 15,000 strong, continued to enforce loyalty through fear. But the regime’s foundations rotted. Corruption on a grand scale, the looting of the treasury, a stagnant economy, and external shocks — including a US-pressured slaughter of the peasantry’s pigs and the collapse of tourism — deepened Haiti’s poverty and despair, while Duvalier’s lavish lifestyle, crowned by a multimillion-dollar wedding in 1980, advertised the regime’s indifference.
By 1985 the country had had enough. Protests over hunger, unemployment, and repression spread from the provinces to the capital and would not be put down. The security forces wavered, the United States withdrew its support, and in February 1986 Duvalier fled into a French exile that lasted twenty-five years. He returned to Haiti in 2011 and died in 2014, never convicted of the regime’s crimes. His victims — the tortured, the disappeared, the impoverished — were left to a country the Duvaliers had hollowed out.