Guinea-Bissau, as foreshadowed here at CompHyp in previous analysis, has undergone a military take-over.
Yes, it is the real thing. Troops have seized the interim President and perhaps more importantly the retiring Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Junior, who was forecast to be the most likely winner of the coming Presidential election. Oh, and he was campaigning on a plan to cut the military...
...and that hasn't been well received by the uniformed set, to say the least. In fact, they believed he was about to set "peacekeeping troops" on them:
In a statement read on state radio on Friday morning, the military said it had acted to halt what it called foreign intervention.As far as rumormongering goes, that's a pretty good motivator for a troop insurrection.
It alleged the interim government had done a secret deal to allow Angolan troops to wipe out Guinea-Bissau's army.
Here's a longer report from Reuters Africa that, while written a bit earlier in the events, has more information on the Narcostate and Narcoterror issues involved in all this.
There are some players that need to be eliminated (politically) from the picture before things start getting better in Guinea-Bissau. This isn't how. This only lets one group of kleptocrats push out the other.
3 comments:
What exactly are the kleptocrats stealing? It's not as though G-B has oil. Their main export is cashews, and the archipelago at the river delta draws tourists to their white, sandy beaches. Other than that, what's there?
Africa...
@Mr. Bill
Post-colonial aid money, International aid money, some modest amount of that export and commerce activity (which, you are right, isn't much) and then there are the criminal opportunities. I wrote a bit on all that a few years back, in a Weekly Item.
@Tawanda Moyo
as in ...this is....
((small grin))
Welcome!
@All
Actually, I didn't use the TIA line at the end of recent articles because many of the recent problems in the West and North are not typical of the post-colonial experience. The role of the South American Narcos is pretty much a problem of the new millenium, just to pick one example.
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