Guerilla Warfare History: The World of Coup’s Since 1950

An attempted coup in Turkey last week shocked and surprised many across the world. But coups and attempted coups have long been an all-too-familiar occurrence around the world.

How many exactly? Well, at the time of writing, there have been around 475 coup attempts since 1950.

That’s according to a dataset compiled by Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne, two assistant professors who work in the political science departments of the University of Central Florida and the University of Kentucky respectively.

WorldViews reached out to Powell to ask him some questions about what the definition of a coup is, why a coup happens and what trends we’re seeing in coups. The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

WorldViews: How do we define a coup in this dataset? What did it mean that Turkey’s 1997 “postmodern” coup wasn’t included, for example?

Jonathan Powell: We define coups as “illegal and overt attempts by the military or other elites within the state apparatus to unseat the sitting executive.”

We don’t code the 1997 “coup” because we can’t definitively say the action was actually illegal. Omer Aslan of Bilkent University has written about the event in depth. Even including recent evidence that has come to light, he concludes the military ultimately relied on legal procedures to undermine Erbakan.

[Ed note: In 1997, generals used pressure behind the scene to force the Islamist government of Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan from power. The coup is often described as “postmodern” in Turkey as no military force was actually used.]

WV: There are some pretty big variations on the number of coups in different countries. Do you have any theories for what makes a country more likely to have a coup?

JP: The primary reason for large variation is that once a country has a coup, it very often experiences more. For example, coups are now a bit of a rarity, but in the last decade or so, Mauritania, Egypt, Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea Bissau, Thailand and Madagascar have all had multiple attempts (I could easily be forgetting others).

So the question becomes why did they have the first one? Coups also generally occur in disproportionately poor countries that suffer from other forms of political instability (such as protests and/or civil war). In recent years, there seems to be an increasing proportion of coups in new democracies, especially those that seem to already be backsliding toward authoritarianism. Ultimately, the legitimacy of the government is a crucial indicator.

Read the Remainder at Washington Post

Crusader Corner: The Story of Levi Shirley – The American ‘ISIS Fighting Vigilante’

When Levi J. Shirley was growing up, he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and join the U.S. military, his mother said. His father, Russell, had served three tours with the Army in Vietnam, and Levi became “obsessed” with joining the Marine Corps.

The younger Shirley had bad eyesight, however. He trained with other potential recruits, but was disqualified even after having surgery, said his mother, Susan.

Instead, Shirley last year joined with other Westerners in traveling to the Middle East to fight Islamic State militants in Syria with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG). He returned to the United States months later and vowed never to go back, but vanished with little notice again in January and resurfaced in Syria, his mother said.

On Thursday, the YPG announced that Shirley, just short of his 25th birthday, was killed July 14 in a battle with the Islamic State. His mother confirmed his death, but said she knew little beyond what the YPG announced.

“He’s not usually what you would first think of as a fighter,” Susan Shirley said. “He’s not someone who would strike out an offensive on someone. But he also has a strong sense of justice and sticking up for the underdog, and the Kurds are about as underdog as you can get right now.”

What motivated Shirley remains something of a mystery. A Brit who uses the pseudonym Macer Gifford said he befriended Shirley in the YPG last year and was struck by his love for the Marine Corps and knowledge of American military history. Shirley, he said, often talked about how he had served two years in the Marines before he was hit by a car and discharged.

Read the Remainder at Washington Post

If “All Lives Matter” Where is The Outrage Over The Murder Of Zachary Hammond?

Zachary Hammond was on a first date when he was fatally shot by a police officer in his car during a drug bust in South Carolina, his family says.

At the time the 19-year-old was shot and killed, his date, Tori Morton, was eating an ice cream cone, according to the family’s attorney, Eric Bland.

Morton, 23, was arrested and charged with possession of marijuana — all 10 grams of it — which, according to police, was the reason undercover agents set up the drug buy.

The official police report never mentioned the two gunshots that killed Hammond on July 26 in a Hardees parking lot. Seneca police say a second report — which has not been released to the public — details the officer’s account of the shooting.

Amid heightened scrutiny of fatal police shootings across the country, Hammond’s death has prompted numerous questions, few answers — and almost no national outrage.

More than a week after Hammond’s death, his family’s attorney says race is almost certainly playing a role in the disconcerting silence. Unlike the victims in the highest-profile police shootings over the past year — in cities from Ferguson and Cleveland to North Charleston and Cincinnati — Hammond was white.

“It’s sad, but I think the reason is, unfortunately, the media and our government officials have treated the death of an unarmed white teenager differently than they would have if this were a death of an unarmed black teen,” Bland told The Washington Post this week. “The hypocrisy that has been shown toward this is really disconcerting.”

He added: “The issue should never be what is the color of  the victim. The issue should be: Why was an unarmed teen gunned down in a situation where deadly force was not even justified?”

So far this year, 25 percent of the people shot dead by police have been black,according to data collected by the Washington Post. But black people make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population.

Police say the officer was a victim of “attempted murder” by Hammond, who was driving the vehicle. According to Seneca Police Chief John Covington, Hammond was driving the car “toward the officer” who was trying to make the stop.

The officer fired twice, striking Hammond in the shoulder and torso.

His death was classified as a homicide; an autopsy conducted by the Oconee County Coroner’s Office did not specify from which direction the bullets hit Hammond’s body.

On Wednesday, Hammond’s family released the results of a private autopsy, which concluded that both bullets entered Hammond’s body from the back. According to the autopsy, the second bullet proved to be fatal, entering from the back of Hammond’s left side and passing through his chest, piercing his lungs and heart.

In a statement Wednesday, Coroner Karl E. Addis said he does not know how Hammond’s body was positioned at the time he was shot.

The facts of the fatal shooting are not unlike other cases that have prompted national outcry — most recently the shooting death of Sam DuBose, an unarmed black man who was shot dead during a traffic stop by a University of Cincinnati police officer. Officials released police dashboard camera footage of the incident which appeared to contradict the officer’s report that he was being dragged by DuBose’s vehicle. The video showed that the car was not moving when the weapon was fired and the officer was named and charged with murder.

The officer, who has been placed on administrative leave while the investigation is pending, used a similar rationale as the one in Cincinnati — that the vehicle was being used as a weapon.

“The driver accelerated and came toward the officer,” Covington, the police chief, said a day after the shooting, according to Fox Carolina. The officer “fired two shots in self-defense, which unfortunately were fatal for the suspect.”

Initially, Covington said his department would not release the officer’s name because of fear that it would “possibly subject the officer and family to harassment, intimidation or abuse.” But on Thursday, he told the Washington Post that the officer’s name and the report of the shooting would be released in “the next few days.”

The response to Hammond’s death has been disappointingly muted in Seneca, in South Carolina and nationally, said Bland, the family lawyer. He insists there would be more focus on the case if Hammond had been black.

“They’re called the civil rights organizations, they’re not called the black rights organizations,” Bland said. “The color of his skin should not matter. White-on-white crime does not get the same impact as white-on-black crime.”

Black activists are similarly asking why more people who countered the Black Lives Matter movement by saying “All Lives Matter” have been so silent on Hammond’s death.

Read the Original Article at Washington Post

Texas Border News: Headless Body Leads to Arrest of TX Border Patrol Agent

The Texas Tribune is taking a year-long look at the issues of border security and immigration. This part of the project focuses on U.S. law enforcement corruption, which has undermined efforts to secure the border.

SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Tex. — It looked like a crab trap floating in the calm waters of Laguna Madre, just off South Padre Island. At least, that’s what the man who spotted it while boating with his two daughters would tell police.

But when he poked the floating mass with a pole, he discovered otherwise. He dialed 911 and told the South Padre Island Police Department what he’d found: “A headless body floating in the bay.”

Blood was still dripping from the neck when Cameron County Sheriff’s Deputy Ulises Martinez arrived, he would later report. It looked to him like the head “had been cut off with one swift motion with a fine sharp cutting instrument.”

The grisly discovery came at a busy time on the island. It was March 16, 2015, the frenzied start of Texas Week, when thousands of college students on spring break descend on Padre to guzzle from beer bongs and get rowdy. Maybe one drank too much, fell in the water and collided with the wrong end of a propeller-driven barge?

That was an early theory, but Cameron County Sheriff Omar Lucio, with more than a half-century in law enforcement, sensed something more sinister.

“We’re just across the border from Matamoros,” he said. Investigators couldn’t find the man’s head, and there were other suspicious cuts on the body. Mexican drug cartel payback often comes at the end of a fine, sharp cutting instrument, Lucio observed.

“It’s just kind of the way that they handle people,” he said. “They take revenge that way.”

Luckily, the body still had hands. Using a portable fingerprint reader from U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, police quickly matched the prints to Jose Francisco Palacios Paz.

Before he was found naked and decapitated days after his 33rd birthday, Palacios Paz — “Franky” to his friends — worked at Veteran’s Tire Shop in Edinburg, one county over. In no time, authorities came to suspect that tire repair wasn’t the only thing going on there. It’s where they think Palacios Paz — about to rat out a drug-trafficking operation with links to the powerful Mexican Gulf Cartel — met his end.

Over the ensuing weeks, the investigation led authorities on a meandering journey through the Gulf Cartel’s internal bloodletting, featuring tales of a supposed double-crossing cartel hit man, a U.S.-born narco turned folk legend and a major mafia capo nicknamed “Commander Pussy” now locked up in a federal prison in Beaumont, Tex. And by last summer, they had arrested four of Palacios Paz’s tire shop associates on murder and drug-trafficking charges.

With fall trials expected, authorities say they have turned up the familiar markings of mafia muscle and hardball tactics experts have come to associate with 21st-century cartel warfare — complete with a severed head supposedly secreted off to Mexico to prove a snitch was dead.

 

All of which would sound familiar to anyone versed in Gulf Cartel etiquette had it not been for one late-breaking and quite unexpected development: the alleged involvement and eventual arrest of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

Joel Luna, a six-year Border Patrol veteran, was supposed to protect the country from drug trafficking and spillover violence. If the indictments are to be believed, he participated in it instead.

Read the Remainder at Washington Post

 

Modern Crime: The Twisted and Sadistic Tale of the “Vampire” Truck Driver

Take a look at this Creep. For All Women out there: Don’t get into vehicles with strangers and Carry Pepper Spray and a Gun 24/7. Trust Nobody These Days, Nobody.-SF

 

The woman told investigators she met Timothy Jay Vafeades at the Sapp Brothers truck stop in Salt Lake City. It was April 2012, and she got into his tractor-trailer after agreeing to get dinner with him, according to court documents.

But about 10 minutes into the drive, Vafeades told her that  “they were not going to dinner and that she was going on the road with him for a week or more,” an FBI agent wrote in a criminal affidavit. “She reported that she knew she could not do anything.”

For months after that, investigators allege, Vafeades forced the woman to live with him, work on the truck — and have sex with him almost daily.

Vafeades told the woman “she was his ‘slave’ on the truck,” and he beat her often, according to the affidavit.

Vafeades was eventually charged with kidnapping the woman and one other and transporting them for illegal sexual activity aboard his truck, dubbed the “Twilight Express.” Prosecutors alleged that he also kidnapped and sexually assaulted four other women over a span of two decades, subjecting them to beatings and holding them captive as he drove his truck across the country.

On Thursday, Vafeades, 56, agreed to a plea deal just days before his trial was to begin.

He pleaded guilty to the illegal sexual activity charges. The kidnapping charges were dropped in exchange.

The deal means Vafeades — referred to by local media as the “vampire” truck driver because of the fangs on false teeth he once wore — could face more than 20 years in prison.

Read the Remainder at Washington Post