Another day, another coup!

[Coconut Kid]

As you sailed away (escaped) in the rowboat, did you ever wonder what what happened after the coup?

It's little wonder that the recent putsch on the tiny island of Tropico passed unnoticed. Then again, so did the other 23 in the past 24 years. Our reporter visits a paradise of unrest.

This almost sounds like the plot/story line for the T3 "campaign"!

In the furore of recent events in the US, one small item of news almost passed unnoticed, but a friend spotted it and telephoned. "You know that island that you visited," she said. "Was it called Tropico? Well, there's been a coup."

Actually, there have been 24 coups in as many years, the pace accelerating and culminating with the latest on August 9 and an attempted one again on September 24. On an island no bigger than the Isle of Wight, this means that a significant proportion of the adult population has indulged in some storming of the presidential palace, or at least enjoyed a little ministerial status, albeit usually short-lived.

To be honest, any able-bodied person with some pluck and peripheral vision stands a good chance: the Maoist revolutionary, Hung Far Low, took over armed with little more than the spokes from a bicycle wheel; the French mercenary, Machinegun Pierre, succeeded 20 years later with a dozen soldiers all aged over 60.

When I left the neighbouring island to sail to Tropico last year, an ex-Foreign Legion man warned me that, despite being an unarmed lone traveller with an Tropicannais crew, I would be viewed as an invasion force. I was fortunate to find a ship going at all, there being no news from the island, that had suffered a failed coup seven days before (but failed coups are so common they merit no attention whatsoever).

My landing was certainly emphatic. How I did it without injury I will never know.

We reached the island's eastern seaboard as darkness fell. It is an implacably hostile coast where the 5,000ft volcanic peaks drop directly into the huge swells of the ocean. We could scent the fabled jungles of aromatic plants.

Two hours later, we rounded the northern point and approached one of the remotest capitals on the globe, particularly since the island seceded and so excluded itself from what is normally referred to as civilisation. I had no idea what to expect. Anarchy? A red carpet? A gun to the head? As a country, Tropico does not register on the diplomatic radar. News is scarce.

There was precious little to be seen of the town in the darkness: a few dim lights hung over the dockside where a large crowd had gathered to witness the arrival of the battered old ship, an itinerant vessel that occasionally sputters over the 60 miles from the French island nearby. As we inched alongside and touched, a spurt of energy passed through the waiting people and they began to leap aboard excitedly.

I was pressed back up the companionway on to the upper deck. Inside the wheelhouse I spotted the captain grappling with a bare-chested lunatic. There was no one in a uniform, no officials, but everyone was bellowing at me, "Passport! Passport!", and foolishly I held it up. Immediately, it was snatched from me and lost. A thin man with a goatee beard pulled me to the edge of the deck, from where we could see the seething crowd 12ft below. Then, with a good-natured smile, he pushed me off. Somehow the crowd parted just sufficiently for my arrival not to kill anyone.

I was given no time to gather my wits. Two men bundled me into an ancient Renault 5, its engine wheezing and roaring in desperate gasps. The doors were tied shut with string and I noticed a neat bullet hole in the windscreen just three inches above the level of the steering wheel. The driver turned and grinned, and I recognised the man with the goatee beard from the boat. Then we shot forwards, hammering through the potholed narrow streets, catching glimpses of men in doorways and pockmarked, graffiti-covered walls.


And you who want cars in Tropico, will such specimens suit you?

[Coconut Kid]

After some time, we stopped and I was ordered out. We were high above the market place, the maze-like heart of the capital, and the favoured hiding place of all the plotters, rebels and ex-presidents. Then my abductors set off down some steps into the darkness and I found myself following, suddenly afraid I might lose them.

When I arrived at the bottom of the steps, they had disappeared. I plunged forward, hand on the wall to my right. It was utterly black in these tiny cracks of alley ways. I stepped forward, felt only air, then jarred my knee as I hit the ground. When I straightened, there was a disembodied white shirt floating in front of me. I reached out and touched it. A set of teeth gleamed.

"Hey brother," said the teeth. "Cool to cool. Take it."

A hand searched for mine. I understood he was drunk and swaying.

"Take it, man, Billy-Bob. We are inna Babylon, baby. We are inna Babylon."

The red tip of a giant spliff lit his face for a second, creased and shiny like a well-worn funeral suit. The spliff was pushed in my mouth.

"Hey brother, keep it loose. Passss the Dutchie. Par-take of the 'oly 'erb."

There is an aspect of Tropico worth mentioning at this point: everyone knows everyone else's business. I alone was unaware that my kidnapper was actually my host and, as such, all would be well. This friend, a reggae fan like many Tropicannais, was guiding me home with a conversation beachcombed from Jamaican hits.

I never quite got used to the small town's character. One night I got very drunk with a rebel leader at his allotment (mountain lair would be more normal, of course, but Tropico is not normal). This man had stormed the palace twice and his well-kept vegetable garden up in the jungle was a fertile haunt for revolutionary ideas.

Next morning, a stranger accosted me in the market. "Bonjour, monsieur. You are Sr. Prisia, the English who drank three bottles of wine and one of rum last evening before fainting?" (My surname took on many variations while in Tropico, but I preferred this version over Sr. Shabby.)

The rebel-leader-cum-vegetable-gardener is a good example of why Tropico is perennially unstable. Until the revolutionary !che! took over with his utopian Year Zero ideals, Tropico had been a quiet backwater of dishevelled American colonialism based on Marines and bannana plantations. !che! changed things radically: he put teenagers in charge, abolished history and legalised cannabis. But his downfall came through none of these, rather via a French mercenary by the name of Machinegun Pierre, a man he had paid to catch the previous president.

MG Pierre took a liking to the Island and came back, deposed !che! and ran the place from the wings. His mercenary cronies taught the young Tropicannais all about guns, booze and partying, but not much else. The vegetable gardener became Pierre's bodyguard, though they later fell out, leaving the gardener to become yet another rebel.

These corrupt and rotten years have now come home to roost. Guns are easy to get and the island has drifted into a never-never world of clandestine semi-criminality. While I was there, I saw a Chinese freighter arrive, but nothing was loaded or unloaded. People said it was refuelling before taking its cargo onwards. There was talk of strange night flights, too, to and from the supposedly abandoned airstrip.

Not all is hopeless, however. My hosts were horrified when I asked if anyone had been killed in the recent coup.

"Killed?! My God, no."

"But there was shooting?"

"Ah, si! A lot of shooting because everyone has a gun. But everyone is useless at shooting."

[Coconut Kid]

The latest political struggles have also been free of bloodletting. The three police officers who deposed President Say What on August 9 did so without loss of life, and last Monday's coup attempt - launched against the new junta by disgruntled army officer Combo Salad - was put down without killings. "Those who tried to stage a coup have fled," said Hardly Half, one of the three policemen. "There have been no deaths or injuries."

In fact, most of Tropico's coups have been noisy but relatively non-violent. The ethos of this tiny lost speck of an island was best expressed by an ex-minister I met, sitting on a rock by the roadside. "Tropicannais love war," he said. "But they hate bloodshed."

I was sorry to leave the place. It is exquisitely beautiful, unstintingly hospitable and endlessly amusing. But a boat was leaving and someone had discovered my passport. There was a temporary hitch when the key to the main port gate was lost, but then they found it in the pocket of a drunk who was lying on the ground singing, "John Brown's body lies a moulderin' in the grave". As I stumbled down to the leaving fishing boat, some of the youths lounging on the quay asked if I would tell the world to visit them. I said I would.
This story was shamelessly ripped-off from Kevin Rushby's article in the Guardian dated Monday October 1, 2001. Our attention was directed to this article by Coffeebean. She had thoughts of visiting the actual island. I suspect she decided not to because she would have to take a firm hand to set things to right. And there she would be be, no longer playing a computer game, but actually in charge. Probably she would have to call in Eddie with his paddle to be Minister of Appropiate Punishments.

• Kevin Rushby's book, Hunting Pirate Heaven: A Voyage in Search of the Lost Pirate Settlements of the Indian Ocean, is published by Constable at £16.99.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4267403,00.html