Word: coup
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...tomb of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the populist Pakistani President overthrown in a military coup in 1977 and executed the following year, looms like an hallucinatory apparition over the poverty-stricken salt marshes of central Sindh Province. Meant to evoke the soaring grandeur of Mughal monuments, from a distance the concrete monstrosity rather resembles a Play-Doh model of the Taj Mahal pinched to fit on a foundation substantially trimmed by the high price of land in the family's ancestral seat of Larkana...
...take more than whitewash, however, to restore Bhutto's image as a tireless campaigner against military rule. Talks of a power-sharing deal with General Pervez Musharraf, who seized power in a coup, have dimmed voter enthusiasm for her party, as have her statements that she would allow U.S. military strikes against terrorists in Pakistan, and would make nuclear proliferator (and national hero) A.Q. Khan available for questioning by the IAEA. Pakistan's parliament votes for a President on October 6, and the increasingly embattled Musharraf desperately needs the support of Bhutto's party. She, in turn, wants the corruption...
...starters, Burma (also known as Myanmar) is ruled by one of the world's longest-standing military dictatorships. An army-led coup in 1962 initially brought men in uniform to power, first the charismatic and superstitious Ne Win, now his rather less magnetic successor Than Shwe. The generals took control not only of the armed forces but all aspects of politics and the economy as well. In the decades since the takeover, Burma has evolved into a nation where "the military is the state," according to Burmese historian Thant Myint-U. "Army officers do everything. Normal government had withered away...
...since the heyday of independence, Burma's military has lost the love of its people. Coup leader Ne Win ruined one of Southeast Asia's most promising economies by nationalizing businesses and unveiling the disastrous "Burmese Way to Socialism." Paranoid about maintaining power above all else, the army has repeatedly turned its guns against its own people, most tragically in 1988 when a student-led protest movement was crushed, leaving some 3,000 dead. Even as the masses have grown poorer, the military has enriched itself through timber and natural-gas deals. In 2005, the ruling junta mysteriously moved...
...landowning oligarchy even sided with the rowdy Sandinista rebels, hoping that the overthrow of the dictatorship would allow them to reclaim lost power. But the Sandinistas had other ideas: After seizing power in the insurrection of 1979, they systematically dismantled the power of the oligarchy in subsequent years. The coup de grace, Nunez says, came last year when the Sandinistas formed a political alliance with the Catholic Church, the oligarchy's last institutional bastion...