Watch HDToday. On December 17, 1962, Mamadou Dia, president of the council of Senegal, was arrested, then sentenced to life imprisonment, accused of a coup d'état by his friend and companion Léopold Sédar Senghor with whom he had been working for 17 years to build the same ideal. The next day, the constitution was modified, the presidential regime succeeded the parliamentary regime and gave Senghor full powers. Fifty years later, while the 2012 presidential campaign stirs the country around the values ​​of democracy, witnesses and actors of the events of 1962 speak out.