Word: strongmen
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...commission, hopes the tough gun ban (the early arrests have been widely publicized in the local media) will reduce the potential for violence in the run-up to the polls, along with the efforts by the security forces to break up the private armed groups of feudal-style political strongmen scattered throughout the provinces. Candidates fearing they may be targeted by rivals can apply to Comelec for a maximum of two armed bodyguards drawn from the police or armed forces...
...Since the Maguindanao massacre, President Gloria Arroyo has faced a clamor of calls to dismantle the long-established private armed groups run by regionally powerful strongmen to protect their political and economic interests. Elections routinely become a dirty showdown when a clean sweep isn't anticipated, as armed goons intimidate rival candidates, cow voters and coerce Comelec officials with bribes and threats to rig votes...
...results of the Aug. 31 presidential election weren't fueled only by accusations that the contest had been rigged. A large portion of the fury was also focused on former colonial power France, which critics claim continues a long tradition of tolerating antidemocratic and repressive behavior by Africa's strongmen in exchange for their political and economic deference to Paris...
...earthy llanero, or Venezuelan plainsman, can be a maddening and bullying ideologue. (As far as the rest of the world is concerned, so was Bush.) And so are all the other anti-U.S. strongmen out there, from North Korea to Iran, with whom Obama believes he should grit his teeth and engage in the interest of U.S. security. To avoid doing in Latin America what he deems sensible in the Middle East and Asia would repeat Washington's careless habit of treating the continent in ways that helped give rise to the Castros and Chávezes...
...creeping czarism is also a way of exploiting the undemocratic yearning for strongmen, playing on the idea that compromise is fine when the stakes are small, but when the chips are down, only a tyrant will do. Generations of Russian dissidents braved prison, execution and revolution to rid their nation of czars. And the Founding Fathers so feared czarlike power that they fashioned a government intricately checked and balanced. Hard to imagine Madison and Mason agreeing to put the really difficult problems in the hands of unelected superstaffers...