Soldiers assassinate Guinea-Bissau president

[blackstone]

Soldiers assassinated the president of Guinea-Bissau in his palace Monday hours after a bomb blast killed his rival, but the military insisted no coup was taking place in the West African nation.

HOLY SHIT

It's getting real out there in Guinea-Bissau

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090302/ap_on_re_af/af_guinea_bissau

[scarletghoul]

Wow, interesting.

Anyone know what the socialist scenes like there?

[Sankara1983]

The African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) of the current Prime Minister of Guinea-Bissau (Carlos "Cadogo" Gomes, who is also reputed to be the country's richest man) was founded by the great revolutionary Amílcar Cabral. When it proclaimed independence in 1973 and formally took power in the capital a year later, all sorts of infighting took place that included the mysterious death of Guinea-Bissau's first head of government (Francisco "Chico Té" Mendes) and Vieira ("Nino") launched a coup to overthrow Luís Cabral, the murdered Amílcar's half-brother, in 1980. Nino's government moved away from socialist planning within a couple of years and Guinea-Bissau became a run-of-the-mill African one-party authoritarian state. To directly answer your question, socialism was essentially co-opted by Nino's "reforms" in the early 1990s that inaugurated a very weak bourgeois democracy that collapsed into a civil war in the late '90s. As in most African countries, its political parties have for the most part dropped all pretense of ideological difference and have become ethnic factions.

[Sasha]

the mainstream media over here claim the recent turmoil is most likely part of a destabilisation campaign by the drugcartels who are deeply infiltrated in both the goverment and the military, that or the also drug-mob related buisness of ordinary fighting over controll over the cocaine smugle profits by rival factions.