Word: strongmen
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...there was a snag. Jimmy Carter had instituted an informal ban on U.S. manufacturers' selling sophisticated offensive weapons like F-16 and F/A-18 attack fighters to Latin America, because most military strongmen wanted the jets for flybys over the presidential palaces they occupied. Every American President since Carter supported the prohibition. If Lockheed Martin, which produces the F-16 Falcon, and McDonnell Douglas, which manufactures the F/A-18 Hornet, wanted in on the Latin American arms market, they had to change that policy...
Once they were the strongmen of Central America and the Caribbean. Now they're in exile, in prison--or on the campaign trail...
Richard III, as conceived by actor Ian McKellen and director Richard Loncraine, is one bold customer. Here is Shakespeare's upper-class mass murderer reimagined as a clever fascist in the court of Edward VIII. The 1930s was a decade of ruthless strongmen, in both European politics and Hollywood movies. Gangsters, mesmerizing in their amoral ambition, were the men of the moment; they lent a sick thrill to the front page and entertainment section. This Richard is such a fellow, Hitler as Scarface. From the opening titles, which explode in a blast of artillery, to the closing image of Richard...
That attitude has helped change the way the country is run. Aristide has fired the notorious chefs de section, the rural military strongmen who ruled vast areas of rural Haiti like medieval fiefdoms, terrorizing villagers with their raw power. Some hang on, but this is a first step toward whittling them down. Another important step was taken last week when the Senate fine-tuned a new law designed to establish a 4,000-man police force removed from army control. But Aristide has yet to reform the judiciary fully or settle on a mechanism for dealing with those responsible...
From their headquarters in a former brassiere factory in Port-au-Prince, the Green Berets have fanned out to more than 500 villages. Upon arriving, they have often been forced to refashion local government after the soldiers and strongmen who terrorized the area faded away like zombies in the night, leaving behind a brutalized population. In Mirebalais, the prodemocracy deputy mayor was beheaded and his body thrown into a nearby river. At the prison in Les Cayes, inmates were treated so abominably that one man's spine was visible through the lesions on his back...