Tags: Criminal.
Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río (7 February 1913 – 18 October 1978) was a Spanish communist who became famous as the assassin of the Russian Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky in 1940 in Mexico. Declassified archives have shown that he was a Soviet agent.He served 20 years in Mexican prison for the murder. Joseph Stalin presented him with an Order of Lenin in absentia. Mercader was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union after his release in 1961.