João Bernardo Vieira
João Bernardo Vieira, called Nino, was president of Guinea-Bissau from November 1980, when he deposed Luís Cabral, to May 1999, when a year of civil war ended with his flight to the Portuguese embassy, and again from 2005, when the country elected him back, to March 2009, when soldiers hacked him to death in his house the morning after a bomb had killed the army's chief of staff, the guerrilla commander of Amílcar Cabral's war who governed the country for twenty-three of its first thirty-five years and died as its presidents have tended to. He was a Papel electrician from Bissau. He was the PAIGC's best field commander in the war against the Portuguese, the man who took the southern front and the surrender at Guiledje in 1973. The coup of 14 November 1980 against Cabral's brother was the black Guineans' coup against the Cape Verdean mulattoes who had run the party. It ended the union with Cape Verde and put the army in charge. The nineteen years were the one-party state. There were the coup plots of 1985, for which the vice-president Paulo Correia and five others were shot, the IMF's structural adjustment from 1987, and the cashew economy. There were the multiparty constitution of 1991 and the election of 1994 that he won in a run-off, and the mutiny of June 1998, when he dismissed the chief of staff Ansumane Mané over the arms being sold to the Casamance rebels across the border. Mané's men took most of the army with them and shelled Bissau for eleven months while Senegalese and Guinean troops held the palace for him. The peace of Abuja put a West African force in and the junta took the capital in May 1999 anyway. He spent six years in Portugal, came home in April 2005 to a crowd at the airport. He won the election of July against the PAIGC's candidate as an independent. He governed four years of the cocaine transit, the Colombian planes landing on the islands and the army's officers paid in kind. That made the country the first narco-state on the continent and the army the cartel's. There was the quarrel with the chief of staff Tagme Na Waie, who was killed by a bomb under the stairs of the army headquarters on 1 March 2009. The next morning soldiers loyal to Tagme came to the president's house. He was shot and cut with machetes on the veranda. The army said there had been no coup. He was born in Bissau. The country has had, since, a coup in 2012, an attempted one in 2022, and a president who dissolved the parliament. That is the state he left.
- Lived: 1939 CE – 2009 CE
- Nationality: Bissau-Guinean
- Roles: president, guerrilla commander, politician
