Succession Fears Fuel Coup
26. A major reason behind the 1989 coup that brought down Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner was worry that either Stroessner’s cocaine-addicted son, Alfredo, or his gay son, Gustavo, would eventually follow him in power.
27. Ever since Bolivia became an independent country in 1825, it has experienced more than 190 revolutions and coups.
28. The choice by 18-year-old King Michael I of Romania to stage a coup against the Nazi ally and prime minister, Ion Antonescu, in 1944 is believed to have brought World War 2 to an end by as much as 6 months earlier.
29. Muammar Gaddafi was 27 when he toppled the Libyan monarchy in 1969. He elevated himself to colonel and changed from “virtually unknown” to immensely powerful within a few months.
30. In the 2014 Thai coup d’etat, sandwiches served as an anti-coup symbol, and a group of students were accused of “possessing sandwiches with ill intent.”
31. Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who converted to Islam, was responsible for the deaths of up to 400,000 people and was also once accused of cannibalism. After a coup in 1979, he fled to Saudi Arabia and was permitted to live there in exile for over 20 years until his death.
32. The western African nation of Liberia was founded by former American slaves. They established voting rights based on property ownership, which effectively denied native Liberians suffrage. As a result, no native Liberian became a president until 1980, when Samuel Doe staged a coup.
33. On September 11, 1973, US-backed General Pinochet toppled Chile’s democratically elected leader, Salvadore Allende. Pinochet ordered an airstrike on the Presidential Palace, and labor activists and famous folk guitarists were rounded up for torture, disappeared, and killed.
34. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, helped his country win independence in 1957 and was overthrown in a coup in 1966. He lived in exile in Guinea and was named the honorary co-president of the country.
35. Notorious mercenary Bob Denard was hired in 1975 to overthrow Ahmed Abdallah, president of Comoros. 3 years later, Abdallah hired Denard to remove his replacement, mad dictator Ali Soilih. 10 years later, Soilih’s half-brother paid Denard to remove Abdallah again. All coups succeeded.
Mark Thatcher Coup Plot
36. Margaret Thatcher’s son Mark Thatcher worked with a private mercenary company to organize a coup in a West African country for oil money. In 2005, he was found guilty and received a four-year suspended prison sentence and a fine in South Africa for financing the 2004 Equatorial Guinea coup d’état attempt.
37. In 1992, Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori launched a “self-coup.” Although he was already the democratic ruler of the country, he used military force to overthrow the Congress and Judiciary and took complete autocratic power.
38. General Ne Win, the dictator of Burma (Myanmar), was fixated on numerology. He took 50 Kyat and 100 Kyat banknotes out of circulation and substituted 45 Kyat and 90 Kyat banknotes. The economic instability that followed resulted in a coup d’êtát in 1988.
39. In 1953, Iran had a democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh. The US and the United Kingdom violently removed him and installed a west-friendly monarch, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to give British Petroleum, then AIOC, unrestricted access to the country’s resources.
40. The only coup in US history took place in North Carolina in 1898. A mob of white supremacists armed with rifles and pistols marched on City Hall in Wilmington and overthrew the local government, causing both black and white officials to resign. The leader of the mob was later elected as mayor.
41. In 1992, army captain Valentine Strasser, who was 25 years old, accidentally toppled Sierra Leone’s president, Joseph Momoh, while attempting to protest a shortage of boots and wages for his fellow soldiers, thereby becoming the world’s youngest head of state and governing the nation for 4 subsequent years.
42. In 1954, Soviet prisoners overthrew their guards and, for 40 days, formed a gulag republic with a democratically elected provisional government, marriages between male and female prisoners, indigenous religious ceremonies, and a general flowering of art and culture.
43. Princess Sophie, from a minor German principality, married a Russian prince. Shortly after he was crowned emperor, she overthrew him and crowned herself Empress Catherine the Great. She annexed most of Poland, which was then ruled by her former lover, helped modernize Russia, and began colonizing Alaska.
44. Project Fat Fu*ker was a CIA plot to overthrow King Farouk of Egypt and replace his British-aligned monarchy Mohammad Mosaddegh. Under the direction of CIA Director Allen Dulles, a coup d’état came to fruition on 23 July 1952.
45. Empress Dowager Cixi, one of the many concubines in the court of Emperor Xianfeng, carried out a successful coup after his death to unofficially control the Manchu Qing Dynasty. Although she faced many obstacles, Empress Dowager Cixi brought a medieval empire into the modern age, ruling China for almost 50 years.
Mistaken For Film Extras
46. During the 1965 Algerian coup d’état that overthrew Ahmed Ben Bella, army units moving through the streets of Algiers did not raise alarm because they were mistaken for extras in the film “The Battle of Algiers”, which was being filmed in the capital at the time.
47. One of the currencies in early colonial Australia was Rum. New South Wales Corps officers bought up all the imported rum and created a monopoly on its trade. It caused Australia’s first and only military coup. It would later be called the Rum Rebellion.
48. In 1974, Portuguese rebels used Portugal’s entry in the Eurovision song contest as one of two secret signals to begin the Carnation Revolution, a peaceful rebellion that overthrew the authoritarian regime that had governed the country for over 40 years.
49. Haiti is the only nation born out of a slave revolt. It could have been a prosperous country but was impoverished by a crippling, decades-long embargo imposed by Europe and the U.S. after former slaves overthrew the country’s European ruling elites.
50. Between 1924 and 1935, Greece had 23 changes in government and 13 coups.
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