26Seychelles Coup Attempt
In 1981, a group of white African mercenaries tried to stage a coup d'état in Seychelles, disguising themselves as a rugby and beer social club which donated toys to orphans. The toys didn't conceal the AK47s in their luggage well enough and the plot completely failed.
27. Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, a convert to Islam was responsible for the deaths of up to 400,000 people and was also once accused of cannibalism. He fled to Saudi Arabia after a coup in 1979 and was allowed to live there in exile for over 20 years until his death.
28. Turkey became an official ally of the U.S. after the CIA backed a right-wing coup there in 1980.
29. British Prime Minister Harold Wilson was so unliked by senior members of the army and MI5 that there allegedly were discussions about a military coup against the government in 1974.
30. The CIA orchestrated a coup in Syria in 1949 so that it could freely build an oil pipeline. The overthrow launched decades of counter-coups and CIA further tried on multiple occasions to orchestrate coups throughout the 1960s until the Assad family rose to power in 1970.
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31Trinidad and Tobago Coup Attempt
The only attempted coup by a radical Islamist group in the western hemisphere occurred in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago in 1990. During the attempted coup d'état Trinidad and Tobago’s Prime Minister A. N. R. Robinson was held hostage for days. When instructed to order the army to stop firing where they were held hostage, Robinson instead instructed them to “attack with full force,” which earned him a beating. He was also shot in his leg.
32. José Sanjurjo, a senior leader of the 1936 coup that started the Spanish Civil War, died at the start of the coup because his plane, which was dangerously overloaded with his luggage, crashed. When warned of the danger he said, “I need to wear proper clothes as the new leader of Spain.”
33. In 1992, Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori initiated a “self-coup.” Despite already being the democratic ruler of the country, he overthrew the Congress and Judiciary with military force and assumed full autocratic power.
34. In 1987, Thomas Sankara (then president of Burkina Faso) was killed in a coup held by Blaise Compaoré. Ten years earlier, they were in a band together called ‘Tout-à-Coup Jazz.’
35. A driving force behind the 1989 coup which saw the downfall of Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner, was concern that either Stroessner’s cocaine-addicted son, Alfredo, or his gay son, Gustavo, would one day succeed him.
