Helmin Wiels

Helmin Magno Wiels (9 December 1958 – 5 May 2013) was a leftist politician, and was a vocal campaigner for Curaçao's independence from the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Biography Wiels was born on 9 December 1958 into a lower-middle-class family from Westpunt. He became a social worker and radio maker In 2005, he founded Sovereign People (Pueblo Soberano), a leftist political party that won the popular vote in the October 2012 elections.

Assassination According to Nelson Navarro, Minister of Justice at the time of Wiels' assassination, the party leader had received several death threats and the government was assisting him with security personnel but on 5 May 2013, Wiels had sent the bodyguard home and went to Marie Pompoen Beach, located on the eastern side of the island. Around 5 pm, while he was drinking a beer and socializing at the pier, two men approached him and shot him five times before fleeing the scene in a gold-colored car. His body fell face down and lay in the sand until the paramedics arrived and pronounced him dead.

In the days that followed his assassination, the local authorities pursued several lines of inquiry. One of them, suggested by Donald Balentina –Wiels' successor as leader of – was a political vendetta, as Wiels constantly made anti-corruption speeches and had recently denounced the sale of Robbie’s Lottery numbers through UTS, a public telecommunications company with no license to do so (in the process, making them available to minors and allegedly concentrating the profits at an offshore bank in Sint Maarten). Other politicians, such as Ronald Plasterk, Minister of the Interior and Kingdom Relations of the Netherlands, were hesitant to blame Wiels' murder on the recent scandal, claiming that “it could also be because of the way he took on corruption, or the drugs world or something else rotten.” Eventually, the police arrested Elvis Kuwas alias "Monster", a gunman for the "No Limit Soldiers" drug gang of the Koraalspecht district, which had planned the execution and paid him to carry it out. In late August 2014, Kuwas was sentenced to life imprisonment, and the ruling was upheld by the Supreme Court of the Netherlands in July 2016.