SOS! 2025 Security Emergency reopens forgotten Diary of 1990 Coup-bid

Blood and tears of victims ring with funerary bells and the silenced drums, echo the rattle in the bones of those of us who still quake with the memory of those harrowing days as we continue to walk barefoot on our blood-soaked soil so as to not lose touch with the ground, we the dwellers of natural lagoons and swamps and reclaimed and over-developed human-made lagoons and swamps in the city and more populous corridors.
We vowed never to forget, having seen babes and near-teens toting weapons twice their sizes, morphing into men hardened into criminals waving, still, guns and rifles shoved into newborn babes-in-arms in grooming to hold a nation hostage, then as now, extracting power from a place that renders its custodians powerless, hounding the watchdogs and stripping core pillars of our democracy off their dignity, reducing them to shadows of the emancipation and independence for which our nation builders fought …. (excerpted and adapted from my evolving autobiography LiFE HoleHeartedly. More excerpts follow below, adapted from the musings in the section, Roots of Social Violence. To Support Development make contact

SoE 2025 unsettling echoes of 1990

A State of Emergency, a popular government confronting criminality and corruption, weaknesses in justice systems and law enforcement agencies with weary and blood-thirsty citizens demanding guns and arms … Sounds familiar? It is 2025! As it was in 1990!

In 1990 I found myself the only journalist situated within the civilian districts that includes Trinidad and Tobago Television (TTT). From my home base I am feeding the newsroom with up-to-the-minute first-hand eyewitness details of unfolding dramas of the attempted-coup and efforts of the combined National Security forces trying to regain control and free hostages from the district around the television station to feed-out to anxious local and global interests.

Then at the end of the six-day siege I would pen the coup diaries, In The War Zone, Hostages in Our Homes, while piecing together the fragments and covering unfolding events and aftermath, finding victims, families, attending the funerals. (To support, sponsor collborate on retrival, preservation and digitisation efforts make contact)

To date they remain the only up-close reports of and on the only community and collective of civilians in siege, in the direct line of fire and under curfew for the six-day ordealwhen my building is occupied by soldiers, shooting at the television station from the rooftop!

Confronting Trauma Through Peace-Making

The experiences have resonated over the decades and have certainly informed my path hence, to some degree. People confront trauma in many different ways, and on hindsight, mine was immersing in interventions to build awareness and understanding and integrate sectors and line actors to advance peace-making processes, socio-cultural inclusion and integration, linking local insights into global development programme and actions.

These experiences and reflections feed into my evolving autobiography, LiFE HoleHeartedly and other creative offsprings as episodes of the MultiMedia MicroEpic – the newest creative genre that adapts the classical long form epic for creative-educational new media in CEIBA-EDUtainment forms that blend respect for traditional ‘CEIBA’ knowledge with technologies, utilising my own analytical model of AuthenThinKIntel that aligns and balances human intelligence and intercultural experiences with technologies and artificial intelligence (AI). (To support, collaborate and sponsor development of these make contact).

It defines the missing link, neglected, ignored, omitted and unfactored since, even in the 1600-plus, 300,000 words of the Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the 1990 attempted coup charged with bringing closure and mandated to providing information for decision and policy-makers to take action to plug the still gaping, gushing, national wound. They become an alternative to shortsightedness evident in the top-down ‘suits’ centric perspectives and approaches of officialdom that force amnesia on national memory, as panacea rather than cure as it misses the layered nuances and undercurrents that pulse in the underbelly of not just the body politic but which echoes through the national Trini bone to today’s State of Emergency called to get a handle on crime.

Unsettling Feeling

Now, gripped by this sense of unease of how closely the situation of today’s 2025 State of Emergency (SoE) uncannily resonates and mirrors those of the 1990 coup-attempt and ensuing State of Emergency, I reopen the files on the attempted coup, retrieve and thumb through my articles, reports, among them the almost forgotten coup diaries written in the heat of the day for daily accounts for the newspaper, In the War Zone – Hostages in Our Homes.

Wearing the sepia tones of decaying news clippings, they now sit among hundreds of other articles and stories – intimate accounts of the unfolding terror unleashed on the nation from that fated Friday afternoon and its aftermath which casts a long blood trail through to this day.

At the Red House threshold  

I was literally at the entrance of the Red House when serendipitously and impulsively – prompted by some divine intervention, or this account would be quite different, or not at all – my feet turned away from stepping into the Parliament in session and back onto the street, just about an hour before pandemonium broke, leading me into the other centre of assault by the insurrectionists.

Friday evenings almost invariably found me in the media gallery of the Parliament, covering sittings or gathering fodder from the folly of parliamentarians for one of my columns for the Trinidad Guardian – located opposite and in direct site lines of the Red House and Police Headquarters  (the National Library which now intercepts the line of vision between the two had not yet been conceived). The Parliament’s clerk had also called earlier in the day to let me know a document I had requested was ready for collection, but even as I was heading there earlier too, a phone call interceded on those plans and redirected me elsewhere to delay retrieving to later.

Languid City Air Woodford Square

However, instead of entering the Parliament as I intended, I felt the urge and seized a moment to bask in the unusually languid air in the city and a kind of distinctive quiet for a Friday evening (July 27, 1990.) I crossed over instead to the Square laid out as a Union Jack over the bones of indigeneous First Peoples, long written-out of existence through genocide and history, through distorted narratives, witness to riots, marches and protests, where the grassroots mingled in sessions of the people’s parliament.

I enjoyed soaking in their earthy philosophizing and pontifications on issues of the day, conducting their own debates outside while the suits were on this day, debating the topic of the sizzling Tesoro Scandal on official corruption and siphoning of national income. The people’s voices would inform one or the other of my news stories holding down social, cultural, diplomatic, political and other beats, to nourish such columns as I Beg to Move, In Gabilan, The Week That Was, The C Monologues, Between the Lines and others that now constitute my archives, along with Reporter’s Notebooks, research, images, videos, books and other paraphernalia that a researcher, writer, journalist accumulates over decades.

I soon drift out as most of the city’s energy is being pulled towards its other end, a football match at the National Stadium which was sure to dominate tomorrow’s news, or so I thought.

FIFA World Cup Football

I stroll past the Police Headquarters, itself monument to colonial muscle, dressed in stiff collars wearing the stern face of the once-Empire, unaware that within the hour, it would be engulfed in flames. Police boots echo as they strut through the arched doorways still exuding aura from classical Roman columns that old-world authority of a Roman tribunal and a colonial order of pens and pistols in haughty salute to passersby.

A group of policemen entered a police-vehicles chattering about that evening’s FIFA World Cup
Football match at the National Stadium on the other side of town.

Watching them, excitedly heading for the game evoked for me the collapse of the grand national aspiration when the country turned red in support of our Strike Squad team a few months earlier, in November 19, 1989, when they were defeated one-nil in what was described as a ‘shot heard around the world’ in their bid against the USA to qualify for the 1990 World Cup in Italy.

Shot Heard Around the World

 Eight months later, more shots will ring out that will be heard around the world from this country, not in, but during a football match that will punch and puncture the national psyche in ways we have not yet fully analysed, nor addressed.

It was not the Strike Squad’s defeat per se that had so affected and stayed with me over those months. I was not much of a sport or football fan myself. My repertoire of articles on sports delve more into the cultural and human interest colour as painting the mood of jubilance, commentary and interviews with cricketeer Brian Lara’s as a promising teen player for Fatima College ‘Letter To Lara – You’ve Only Just Begun’ or articles on celebrating outstanding career victories of with families and community and other foundational factors of success.

Cross Country

As treated in the previous section in my AVM television stint, for the 1989 football match, apart from eliciting the public euphoria for an AVM Special Report, I had focused an entire episode of Cross Country, the award-winning programme that provided the song track of my life for my new creative genre, the MultiMedia MicroEpic Biopic that launched the world’s newest creative genre.

I conceptualized, researched Cross Country, trailing through towns and villages discovering little-known nooks and crannies, and wrote and partly directed,until a few weeks earlier to the Coup-attempt when I left AVM Television to begin a new phase pursuing university studies while freelancing and returned the Guardian’s newsroom.)

The week prior to the November 1989 football match, my crew and I joined hunters who wanted to share how their affinity to nature aligned to their sport. And there among the hunters was one who introduced himself to me as Everard Gally Cummings, coach of the Strike Squad on whom the nation’s aspirations for World Cup championship rested.

Edited Out

 The Cross Country programme I penned was less about hunting and more about the forests, living in harmony with nature supported by camaraderie and joviality of sitting around pot on a blazing campfire, hunters exchanging stories of quests and conquests, singing to guitar, bottle and spoon and drumming on old logs, SuperBlue’s rallying calypso, ‘On The Road to Italy’ . This became my closing scenes for that episode of Cross Country. But it was not to be. Match lost, much to our disappointment, I returned after the disappointing game to the studio with an entirely crestfallen editor mirroring the deflation of the national spirit to edit-out the euphoric ending for something more mundane. The edited version was the programme aired the next day, Monday November 20, 1989 on Trinidad and Tobago Television, the only TV station at the time.

Acrid Taste on Tongue

On this July 1990 eve, only a few months later, something else would edit-out the national bid for victory in a World Cup, and the thought of football, which since November 1989 left an acrid taste on my tongue, as in the nation’s, would be layered over by others, more nauseating, when seven days later I will be gingerly stepping through the still-smoking ash and rubble exuding the putrid stench of death, destruction and decay smothering the city.  

And a quarter of a century later, in a city across the world, where bombings targeted a Stadium where a football match was in progress, this moment would hauntingly resurface – when with kindly strangers I was rushing breathlessly up the Montmatre hills of Paris seeking shelter, in a night air haunted by the macabre specter of that city’s patron saint Sant Denis walking up these same hills with his severed head under his arms tobecome a matryed cephalophore.

Eternal Resonance

As an aside, digressing again within that digression – experiences stayed, haunting, until recently when it dissolved off me in the wake of the phenomenal experiences of the Maha Kumbh Mela and weeks in Kashi when I experienced the relief of Kankalamurti, shedding the weight of struggle to retrieve history in a city that pulses with the accumulated living heritage and energy through eternal unending cycles of time. (Kankalamurti is a form of Shiva not to be confused with another manifestation of Shiva as Kala-Bhairava. Kankalamurti, punished to roam the earth, carries proof of his ghastly act of violence, the head of Brahma who dreamed the world into existence wearing skulls and skeletons of his victims until he is released on entering Varanasi/Kashi/Banares. Kashi is the city which reverberates the energy Shiva in its every pulse, manifested through Kala-Bhairava, the protector of Kashi/Varanasi with his power over time, destruction of evil and negativity in an eternal cycle of life and death. But those are other stories for other volumes to come in this unfolding MultiMedia Epic.

  Seeming indestructible

But on the evening of July 1990 when, I am entirely unaware that I am seeing Port of Spain as I never would again.

I am strolling, pass the stolid and seemingly indestructible Police Headquarters on one side, and the Red House in its crimson colonial cloak, at the literal and figurative heart of Port of Spain as the seat of Parliament. It proudly proclaims its legacy rooted in imperial power in a bipolar WestMinister system with governance mechanisms designed to ignore, subsume and render invisible minorities and the multi-pronged multicultural character of the evolving Nation.

Ticking Clock

The clock is ticking now, before the explosive events that would eternally kink the armour of the perceptions of the powers of both.

The evening of July 1990 is a beautiful enough evening for a walk. The skies are clear with a few wisps, no signs of the brewing storm within the politics, nor the pending storm that was to pass through Trinidad that weekend and into the week, literally and figuratively.

I stroll past the tucked-in dingy-looking law offices, up St Vincent Street, to Green Corner getting itself ready for Friday evening liming, onto Tragarete Road along Lapeyrose Cemetery named for the first Frenchman who came to establish a sugar estate from where ghosts of leaders and city burgesses of old still-occasional haunt the city.

French Influence

I turn up Victoria Street named for the monarch who would give her name to the county in South Trinidad and whose grandsons’ visit to the town caused its renaming that shaped and propelled my earliest impulses to rediscover and rewrite our histories as it relinquished its embedded native First People’s identity to be retitled Princes Town. Her grandfather, George III, had first wrestled the piece of real estate that was Trinidad from Spain in 1797 from then formalized the deal through the Treaty of Amiens in 1804.

Gingerbread Houses

 I admire the otherworldly character of the street’s ornate gingerbread houses, fringed with white filigree latticework that is Woodbrook’s fast-disappearing charm on my way towards the Queen’s Park Savannah. It always strikes me as significant that although the French never ruled Trinidad, their cultural influence is so deeply embedded in the north/city-based landscapes, the patois creole that invades our language, expressions in festivals and lifestyles that form part of our multicultural mix and milieu even today and so succinctly represented in the now disappearing ‘French Creole’ architectural styled homes making way for more modern, less enchanting, business architecture.

It is one of the routes I walk mainly at Carnival time, sometimes several times, to and from the office to the Savannah between covering and filing stories of the masquerade and parade of the bands.

Outside of Carnival, trekking through the city was not something that a fast-paced life of journalism allows, and usually exhausted at the end of the day, hopping into a taxi to home was a more attractive option.

Youthful Humour

Lured by sweeps of cool breezes from the Northern Range which frames the city, I walk towards the Queen’s Park Savannah and sit for a moment on the bench in front of the former notorious Queen’s Park Hotel – now headquarters of bpTT, of a history its current-day occupants know little.

It is a quiet moment of communion with the writer who was not yet declared a Nobel Laureate for Literature, chuckling to myself as I often do as it evokes for me hilarious scenes from one of Sir Vidia’s Naipaul’s early pristine youthful comic short stories, The Night Watchman’s Occurrence Book, recaptured in my book LiTTscapes as on the scenes etched into our Landscapes of Fiction that has bypassed critical attention in favour of his later burdensome excursions and excavations into the colonial and neo colonial mentality.

Blissfully unaware am I that in a few short hours I will be writing my own ‘occurrence book’ of sorts, chronicling not the notorious happenings of a city hotel of eyebrow-raising questionable repute, but of other events that have left recurring echoes in my Trini bones, and of Port of Spain which had grown a new layer of skin over my rural and country roots.  

I cross over past All Saints’ Church, conceived the same year my ancestors first set foot in Trinidad as indentured immigrants, into Marli Street past the US Embassy and its Library where I had spent many hours researching other stories.

At the Cross Roads

I am now standing at the crossroads, equidistant between the US Embassy near the Savannah and a block away from Trinidad and Tobago Television on Maraval Road.

I turn right, into the street named for the Britain’s most blood-covered Governor stained by the blood of the excruciating torture of Louisa Calderon and other slaves, in the district where the first sugar cane estate on the island took root, and for which my ancestors were brought to fill the forced labour vacuum left by slaves from proclamation of the Emancipation Act of 1834, 191 years ago to this day of writing, August 1.

My apartment, on the top floor of the three-storey building – one of the tallest buildings in the area of generally low-lying or at most two storeyed houses – waves me up.

As pleasurable as it is, exhausted from my tillaylaying and vowing I would never walk that mile and a half from downtown ever again. There is no elevator.  I drag myself up to my top-floor apartment, set almost obliquely opposite Trinidad and Tobago Television (TTT) on Maraval Road and plopped down on my bed.

I am just drifting off when pop-pop-pop! The sounds of metal on concrete. The landlord drilling concrete?  I struggle through sleep. My roommate was pounding on my door to wake up!

Fracture in Reality

I could feel the vibrations of each round echoing and rocking the building, the district. Dogs howling, car alarms blasting, screaming, radios and TV sets turned up to full volumes, phones ringing. I am firstly the frightened and bewildered citizen, resident, civilian whose reality was being hijacked,

Quickly shaken out of sleep’s daze, I morph into the reporter cataloguing every sound, every distant yell, every sudden siren. The insurrectionist declaring they had overthrown the government was not just declaring war on the government, he was declaring war on my reality, truth, freedom, justice.

I called my Editor, John Babb. He updated me on the flaming police headquarters I had just past and the mayhem in the Parliament. Does he want me to come in? I need someone there, close to TT, he says. And from there emerged the chronicles, In the War Zone, Hostages in Our Homes along with information fed into the daily newspaper reports over those days when we faced numerous challenges to get news out.

The diaries and writings carry the rest. Here’s an excerpt:

THE QUIET fled screaming on Monday as the peace of the morning was interrupted by gunshots; it was nothing compared to the events of Saturday. … But just when the residents of Newtown were beginning to relax… It was 9:15 am when the shooting resumed.  This time it seemed to be non-stop…..We watched as a grenade was thrown at the Southern end of TTT.  Within seconds, smoke emerged; and before long, we watched red-gold flames emerging from the building. The rains began. It was 10:50 am. In a matter of seconds, the flames, and thick black smoke, were climbing to the skies. From In The War Zone – Hostages In Our Home (Coup Diaries) Kris Rampersad, Trinidad Guardian August 1990 in Roots of Social Violence volume in evolving upcoming Autobriography LiFE HoleHeartedly

It’s a worm’s view of moments of time that continue to resonate through my bones, as a resident of Newtown, Woodbrook, Port of Spain, the district and civilians who became collateral, unaccounted for, as Police and Army and insurgents combatted across the neighbourhood where hostages were being held at gunpoint at TTT, then the only television station on Maraval Road.

Hostages In Our Homes

The first outlay of bullets wasn’t just noise—it was a fracture in reality.
As a resident it was more than just proximity. It was personal. My district. My city.  As a journalist it was my friends and colleagues.

The sun was cast a blood-orange hue across the district, dipping and as its glow faced the city was no longer home. It made me a hostage.

Out of shock, or instinct, or the dawning awareness in horror that the thin line between order and chaos in our tiny island was being shattered didnt just shatter peace, they shattered the lenses of innocence and optimism. Not just form me.  It was the moment Trinidad stopped being naïve.

For the first time in 35 years I reread my chronicling of the Coup-attempt, inked in fear and panic and the taste and smell of gunpowder that filled the air of Newtown, my apartment building topped with rifled soldiers, the rattle in the bones as bullets and grenades.

Reliving Terror of Civilians

Rereading the pieces, Hostages In Our Homes, brings back to life the terror we felt as the only community in the direct line of crossfire during the insurrection, forgotten and written out too, in all the reflections and pontifications and memorials about the insurrection. It doesn’t crow and chest- thump heroism, merely chronicle a bewildered and for the most part helpless community ignored and invisible in a war zone.

In my idyllic stroll from office to home that afternoon, little did I know that it was the last time I would make that walk through the city, with those eyes of innocence and wonder that had chronicled not just the city, but us and our life and styles, from my early days in journalism, scourging our annals to bring together the award winning series, Discover Trinidad and Tobago that morphed into the television series Cross Country, the  first national television programme to occupy prime time both of which feed into LiTTscapes – Landscapes of Fiction.

The year 1990 meant many things to many people. To me it was was the end of my age of creative innocence, which would make way for a deeper probing, and herculean efforts to try and bridge the gaps and fissures spounting the lifeblood of our nation!

Written out of history

To date, this, my coup chronicles, is the only account of its kind delivered in the immediacy of unfolding events, minute by minute tabulation of the coup and the district and residents and civilians left to duck for cover while bullets and grenades reigned. Forgotten. Invisible.

 Written into the newspaper annals that little by little are being wiped out in the changing media landscape, the volume of material I churned out taking the different view, approach, from the grounds up, interviewing families of hostages, insurrectionists, victims, operatives of the government would be written out again in the official history of record of the 1990 attempted-coup as the Commission of Enquiry (CoE) has become.

Unconscious Bias Unconscious Blindness

It is an erasure that is much different from editing out a scene, as much as I loved it, out of a television programme in sympathy to a nation nursing its disappointment over defeat at a football match. More perniciously, it represents not just unconscious bias but also unconscious blindness that continue similar trends of historical erasure that feed a national leanings towards amnesia and that allow wounds to fester, grow and spread to the  cancerous state that crime, criminality and lawlessness has become.

 It is the kind of ignominy that fell on indigeneous First Peoples in this district in Woodbrook, which, too, in all official renderings removes their existence to stamp its ‘origin’ to a land-deal with the Spanish that brought French settlers to the area in the person of Picot De Lapeyrouse, who gave his name to the city’s illustrious cemetery. The French, though they never ruled the island, implanted a culture so potent that many components persist to this day, even when much else that comprises the complex filigree of cultures and experiences that weave through our national tapestry, including in districts like Newtown and Woodbrook which have absorbed the national multicultural character, is being erased, deliberately or by omission, through official organs of law, as with the CoE, political blindness, and a constipated education system from primary through tertiary levels that cannot inspire and ignite imaginations of the large majority of our youths to aspire and achieve.

It continues to echo in bayonets richochetting off the Northern Range and into the heart of our national conscience, a place where the National Security aparatus cannot reach, because it is not conditioned, nor has the necessary experience or guidance to do so, and which the top-heavy approach and perspectivesof the Commission of Enquiry preoccupied with the suits, missed entirely.

As we celebrate Emancipation we must again be asking, have we formed a society envisioned by the hundreds freed from the sugar cane fields and who joined through rebellion and riots in marching for Independence to today? Happy Emancipation!

Next:

For the first time in 35 years I reread my chronicling of the Coup-attempt, inked in fear and panic and the taste and smell of gunpowder that filled the air of Newtown, my apartment building topped with rifled soldiers, the rattle in the bones as bullets and grenades and the Army’s pride, the Bazooka B300.

1.Where are the People? Comparing Reality, Reporting & A Close Review of the Commission of Enquiry into the 1990 Attempted Coup

2. The Blood Trail: Between State of Emergency 1990 and State of Emergency 2025

I am tracing a Blood Trail to the roots of social violence weaved into the tapestry of national to international experiences as in the States of Emergency – in Paris in 2015 and Trinidad and Tobago in 1990 and now, in 2025. They are intimately intertwined with my life’s path and its journeys, unearthing, linking, interpreting this patchwork of lost and fragmented, distorted and whitewashed, personal, national, global, all as a single thread.   

About Dr Kris Rampersad

The Kris Rampersad is an independent multilateral relations specialist. Find out more

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