It was almost a palace coup in reverse. With the cool, crisp disdain of a modern-day Victoria, India's Rajmata of Gwalior informed the governor of the state of Madhya Pradesh last week that 36 members of the state's ruling Congress Party had defected to her opposition United Front Party. That gave the Rajmata, who is 47 and as tough a politician as they come, a clear majority in the 296-mem-ber state legislature. Flabbergasted, the governor suspended the legislature indefinitely, ...

No one ever got rich betting on the demise of Hugo Chvez. As a leftist Venezuelan paratrooper officer, he led a failed coup in 1992, but he was let out of prison just two years later and started campaigning for the presidency, which he won in 1998. In 2002 Chvez himself was the target of a coup; it threw him out of power for a few days, but he survived it. Ditto a 2004 recall referendum. He ...

More often than not, dictators, like mafia dons, can never retire. It's a rare strongman who can avoid an assassination, coup or revolution and fade into the sunset on his own terms rather than with a prison term. Yet according to members of Burma's newly inaugurated government, Senior General Than Shwe, who ruled the impoverished Southeast Asian country since 1992, has hung up his epaulets and handed over power to chosen successors. Few Burma watchers, and few ...

Madagascar is an island nation in limbo. A 2009 coup, in which the opposition leader toppled the country's President with army backing, has created a stalemate with no single party able to form a transitional government. While travel advisories don't caution against visiting Madagascar, they do remind you that unrest still breaks out sporadically — mostly in and around the capital, Antananarivo.

If he holds his handy lead in the polls, Porfirio Lobo will be the next President of Honduras. Problem is, the last man elected to that office, Manuel Zelaya, was ousted last summer in a military coup. That makes it unlikely that any nation — except maybe the U.S. — will recognize Lobo if he wins the Nov. 29 election. But as he relaxes in his opulent house near Honduras' capital Tegucigalpa after a day of campaigning, Lobo ...

Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in Bangkok, Thailand, on Saturday to mark the third anniversary of a military coup that ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. About 30,000 protesters, who wore red shirts in support of Thaksin, gathered in the country's capital near the Government House, said police Lt. Gen. Tritote Ronnarithvichai. The crowd was calm and there was no sign of violence, he said. The demonstration was expected to end by midnight. Thaksin, who served two terms ...

Few things have peeved Latin America more than Washington's hypocrisy regarding coups. Overthrowing our friends at gunpoint is bad, the traditional U.S. line seemed to go, but toppling our foes — even the democratically elected ones — is O.K. So it surprised Latin Americans when U.S. President Barack Obama condemned the June 28 military ouster of leftist Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, a critic of the U.S., and called for his return to office. "We respect the universal principle that ...

Deposed Honduran President Jose Manuel Zelaya arrived Wednesday in Costa Rica a day ahead of planned discussions with the man who ousted him and the host country's president. and He vowed he has no plans to negotiate. "I want to clarify that our presence here does not represent any negotiation," he told reporters at the airport in San Jose. "It's simply listening through a mediator ... to the approach of those who have established this regimen of fact, those who ...

If the Latin American left knows anything, it's the value of political theater. When leftist, coup-ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya tried to return to his country on Sunday in a private jet, buzzing the Tegucigalpa airport before soldiers blocked the runway, many inside the Organization of American States and the Obama Administration considered it a reckless stunt that might hamper a negotiated solution to the crisis. But as it turns out, the aerial spectacle may have aided their cause: ...

The gunshots echoed around the streets of this sweltering Central American capital like a firecrackers. Amid the onslaught of bullets on Sunday afternoon, hundreds of protesters ran for their lives, taking cover behind cinder-block walls or running into the homes of kindly residents. Five, 10, 15 minutes passed, and the automatic rifles kept going. Finally the smoke cleared to reveal the carnage: parts of the skull and brains of a teenage boy lay on the concrete; another bleeding man ...