Word: strongman
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...With Yudhoyono, a former three-star general and Indonesia's first directly elected President, in front with a commanding lead, the opposition is now warning that the election - the country's second free poll since the fall of strongman General Suharto in 1998 - will be fraught with irregularities. "I have raised the issue of the voter rolls since day one," candidate Megawati, who currently stands at a distant second with a projected 20% of the vote, recently told foreign journalists. "There is a big chance that there could be a lot of cheating during the elections." (See pictures...
President Nicolas Sarkozy may have promised on the campaign trail to clean up the less than savory relationship France maintains with various strongman leaders in its former African colonies, but that's proved to be easier said than done. So, France's judiciary is looking to step in where diplomats have been leery to tread, by filing corruption charges against three African heads of state...
...been governed by Shi'ite Islamist parties arguably closer to Tehran than to Washington, and reluctant to govern according to the American script. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who succeeded Ibrahim al-Jaafari in April 2006, has proven adept at outfoxing rivals and building the foundations of a strongman regime rooted in the loyalty he has cultivated in the security and intelligence services. But his electoral power base remains rooted in the Shi'ite majority, and he has largely declined to implement the U.S. benchmarks for national reconciliation deemed essential for ending the civil war by strengthening the Sunni political...
Current President Martin Torrijos - the son of the late Panamanian strongman Brigadier General Omar Torrijos, who got the U.S. in 1977 to sign the treaty that eventually gave the canal to Panama - has pushed through some anticorruption reforms. But scandals have persisted. Herrera's campaign had to fight allegations that it received financing from a Colombian national now in prison in Bogotá on charges of alleged extortion, money laundering and drug trafficking in exchange for political favors. (It didn't help Herrera when it was disclosed that while he was staying in Panama, the Colombian, David Murcia, had employed...
...Fujimori's success, however, was based on reclaiming the image of the populist caudillo, or strongman on horseback, just as the continent was ridding itself of the legacy of dictators who had turned disappear into a verb when dealing with their political opponents. He shut down Peru's Congress and judiciary in 1992; he created an "emergency" government that gave him and his spooky security chief (Vladimiro Montesinos, who himself was convicted in 2002 on a variety of corruption and human rights abuse charges) autocratic powers; and he rewrote the constitution to allow himself to be re-elected...