Word: strongman
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They did fail, of course, and farcically, and because of their own blunders. The collapse of the coup was inevitable only because it was so badly planned and halfheartedly carried out: had the plotters acted with half the acumen and ruthlessness of the routine Latin general or African strongman seizing power, they might have succeeded. But some appeared to be more terrified than any of their prospective victims. Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov and Vice President Gennadi Yanayev, the ostensible head (really figurehead) of the so-called Emergency Committee, reportedly spent most of the three days of the coup dead drunk...
Widespread reports that retired strongman Ne Win had recently suffered a stroke fanned hopes that the military might finally yield. Yet when 700 students gathered at the University of Rangoon to press for Suu Kyi's release, hundreds of heavily armed troops surrounded the campus, arrested scores, and shut the universities...
...Orleans' problems reflect the stagnation of a state that relies on natural resources, from oil to sugarcane, as its main source of income. In the days of Huey Long, the populist strongman of the 1930s, oil money was the lubricant for a vast share-the-wealth program that provided the public with highways, charity hospitals, free textbooks and old-age pensions; largely shielded from taxes, the people tolerated the corruption that went along with the system. But that party is long since over. When oil prices went bust in the past decade, so did the state treasury, which now faces...
Even as the latest round in this fitful contest was being played, a few Iraqi citizens talked as defiantly as they had before the war. During a week's visit to Iraq, photographer Les Stone was told that Iraq would always need a strongman like Saddam, if only to keep foreigners off its soil. "I'd fight the Americans again if they came," said a hotel worker in Baghdad...
...most remarkable episodes in the history of U.S. law enforcement: the capture and prosecution of General Manuel Antonio Noriega, head of the Panama Defense Forces and "Maximum Leader" of his country. The Cessna's pilot, captured four months later, provided the first testimony linking the strongman to drug running. On Sept. 3, almost six years after that steamy chase, Noriega will walk into downtown Miami's federal courthouse to face a 12-count indictment. He is charged with taking $4.6 million in payoffs between 1981 and 1986 and turning Panama into the ultimate full-service center for Colombian drug lords...