It sure sounds like it’s working as intended. The government is clearly establishing that it has a monopoly on violence and it will crush all competition. Any country without a long history of stable government is best going that route. 3rd world democracies just leads to a power vacuum and strong men and 3 letter agencies move in.
Both The Divide and Confessions of an Economic Hitman exhaustively document the fact that destabilization, power vacuums and strongmen are the preferred, carefully -cultivated environments of the modern world. Wallerstein and Anderson go one further and say "whattaya mean, 'modern'?" One advantage of modernity is that the faster your communications and commerce networks operate, the less inequality you can afford between the dominant and the dominated. One disadvantage of modernity is that the more stable your inequality, the harder it is to overthrow.