1982 Guinea-Bissau coup attempt
During the centralization of Guinea-Bissau high ranking Balanta officers attempted to overthrow President João Bernardo Vieira to prevent restructuring the state led by Paulo Correia.
Prelude
Guinea-Bissau had declared independent from Portugal in 1973 following a long insurgency which was recognized by Portugal in 1974. A coup in 1980 would overthrow the first president of Guinea-Bissau, Luís Cabral, in favor of FARP General João Bernardo Vieira due to Cabral being a mestiço with black Guineans having grown increasingly disgruntled with perceived mestiço economic and political control.Vieira sought to transform FARP's political wing, PIAGC into a genuine Vanguard Party in the Marxist Leninist style, consolidating the party from its highly decentralized and guerilla cell based structure into a hierarchical party to create a class of mobilized political professionals, which would extend the party's influence outside of the capital and into the more rural parts of the countryside.
Political crisis
However, the existing decentralized power-structure in PIAGC was heavily favored by the more rural Balanta which besides making up a majority of the country's population while Vieira was a Papel, also constituted the vast majority of the PIAGC's political base. Centralizing power around the urban elite in Bissau had been a goal that the PIAGC's political writers had been striving for since at least 1977, however, was always denied by the party's Balanta base.In 1981 Vieira held the "Extraordinary Party Congress" wherein he created a 51-member Central Committee and 16 member Political Bureau to govern the party, all stuffed with his loyalists including 8 of the 9 members of the executive "Revolutionary Council", the ruling Junta that Vieira established after his coup. Paulo Correia was a military hero from the war for independence, and a Balanta nationalist seeking to make the Balanta the politically dominate ethnic group in the country.