Patrice Lumumba (1961)

The CIA-backed assassination of Patrice Lumumba in January 1961 ensured the Democratic Republic of Congo's vast mineral wealth — worth an estimated $24 trillion today — would enrich Western corporations rather than its people. Lumumba's murder set Congo on a 32-year path of foreign-backed dictatorship under Mobutu and laid the groundwork for the Congo Wars that have killed over 6 million people since 1996, a death toll that makes this assassination more devastating in regional human cost than #7 Rabin's in geopolitical scope.