Word: junta
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...able to pay their bands by selling crockery to customers for up to a dollar a plate. In recent months, however, good times à la grecque were getting wilder than ever: bored with just breaking things-and perhaps bored, too, by the puritanical reign of Greece's military junta-merrymakers had taken to tearing off their shirts and setting fire to their own coats...
...Premier avoided any reference to the seamier side of his army-backed regime, which still holds 1,800 Greeks in prison camps in the Aegean islands. He even denied the existence of the revolutionary council, which until recently was a stronghold of his more conservative opponents within the junta. His words-spoken in somewhat stilted English-reflect the complex and calculating nature of the former army colonel who now rules Greece...
...showdown had been brewing for some time. In the days following the April 1967 revolution, Papadopoulos was the favorite of the hardliners. They became increasingly disillusioned with him after he encouraged the drafting and promulgation of a constitution that ultimately would bring back exiled King Constantine and put the junta out of business. The breaking point came late last month, when Papadopoulos overruled a decision by his fellow military officers and stayed the execution of Alexandros Panaghoulis, a 30-year-old army private who had been convicted of an assassination attempt on the Premier's life...
Meanwhile, Papadopoulos began a campaign to put the revolutionary council, the junta's shadowy ruling body, out of business. In conducting affairs of state, he ignored the council, instead sought ratification of his programs from the civilian-dominated Cabinet. Government censors allowed two Athens papers to report that the revolutionary council no longer existed...
Military and civilian security officials in Greece, they claimed, were regularly using "medieval tortures" on prisoners. Marketakis, a member of an anti-junta resistance organization in Crete, described beatings with sandbags (which leave no marks) and with plaited steel wire. Meletis, a member of the leftist Greek Patriotic Front, spoke of the fa-langa, in which the victim is strung up head down, then has the soles of his feet beaten. "If you refuse to confess or if you pass out," said Meletis, "they set you down with numbed feet on a cement floor on which cold water has been...