BANGKOK, Thailand -- The curiously named Caravan of the Poor, former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra's own version of Nazi brownshirts who intimidated anti-government demonstrators on the streets of Bangkok earlier this year, has evaporated in the week following Thailand's coup. Instead, smiling mothers photograph their plastic gun-toting sons who pester to be lifted onto tanks parked in the capital's streets. Newly married couples choose a backdrop of the flower-festooned armored vehicles instead of the royal palace or a historic temple to commemorate their special day on film. But the calm and the lack of combatants comes at too high a price for some in this teeming, untidy town of anywhere between 10 and 15 million people.
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