Word: coupes
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...second passenger, a heavyset, balding man whom Pascal-Trouillot could not identify in the dark. Only after arriving at the palace did the President learn that her companion was Dr. Roger Lafontant, former head of the Tontons Macoutes militia, and that she was his hostage in a coup attempt...
...Claude ("Baby Doc") Duvalier from 1981 to 1985, turned out to be a general without an army. In an unprecedented gesture of support for democracy, the Haitian military, led by army Chief of Staff General Herard Abraham, declared its allegiance to the government. Less than 12 hours after the coup began, soldiers stormed the palace, freed Pascal-Trouillot and dragged off Lafontant and 15 of his henchmen in handcuffs...
...coup was quashed too late, however, to prevent a bloody and destructive outburst of public anger. A mob scaled the 10-ft.-high walls of Lafontant's Port-au-Prince compound, killing a dozen suspected Tontons Macoutes holed up inside. Infuriated at what was seen as support for the coup makers by the conservative Roman Catholic hierarchy, crowds torched Haiti's 220-year-old cathedral and destroyed the Vatican embassy, stripping the papal nuncio down to his shorts before he was rescued and assaulting his chief aide with a machete...
Much in the style of Liberia's late President Samuel Doe, Siad Barre, a onetime policeman who seized power in a military coup in 1969, sealed his own fate by depending more and more on his kinsmen and overreacting to any challenge to his autocratic rule. Former U.S. diplomat Chester Crocker, a professor at Georgetown University, calls Siad Barre an "old-style, feudal, tribal chieftain." The country is ethnically homogeneous -- 98.8% are Somalis -- so there are no significant tribal hatreds. But its 8 million people are split into rival clans that have been battling one another for centuries...
...will accentuate such a drift by removing one of the last and most eloquent advocates of perestroika from Gorbachev's inner circle. Among a parade of speakers to the Congress podium after Shevardnadze's speech, Vladimir Chernyak, a Ukrainian economist, gave a new twist to warnings of a coup: "At the head of the coup stands Gorbachev. It's possible he himself doesn't know it. By demanding for himself more and more powers, he is creating the legal basis for a dictatorship -- maybe not for himself personally...