Guinea-Bissau, 2005 — counter-coup attempt

Event Summary

The dataset records an event coded as a counter-coupi in Guinea-Bissau on 25 May 2005 during the volatile transition that followed the September 2003 bloodless coup which had ousted President Kumba Iala. That coup, led by General Verissimo Correia Seabra, had installed a transitional government, and legislative elections in 2004 were followed by a presidential contest in mid 2005 that would return the country's dominant figure, the former president Joao Bernardo Vieira, to power. But the period was chronically unstable, with a fractious, faction ridden military prone to mutiny; in October 2004 a soldiers' revolt had killed General Seabra himself.

In this atmosphere, an armed action in May 2005, coded as a counter-coupi, arose amid the tensions of the transition and the approaching election and did not overturn the transitional authority. Vieira won the July 2005 runoff and resumed the presidency, but Guinea-Bissau's cycle of instability, deeply entangled with the army's factionalism and the country's emergence as a major cocaine trafficking hub, continued to churn. Vieira himself was assassinated by soldiers in March 2009, and coups and mutinies persisted for years thereafter.