Word: andean
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While Colombian and Panamanian authorities have made some headway in the fight against drugs, their counterparts in Bolivia and Peru face problems that seem almost insuperable, as underlined by last week's State Department report. For centuries, Andean natives have chewed coca leaves as freely and frequently as Americans drink coffee. Indeed, most Bolivians, including President Hernan Siles Zuazo, routinely offer visitors coca tea. This is all quite legal because there is no law in Bolivia that prohibits either the cultivation or the marketing of coca. From the law-abiding family that earns $200 for a year's harvest...
...when they heard that, at 5 a.m. last Saturday, some 60 police and army recruits had pulled up to the presidential residence in La Paz, ordered a sleeping President Hernan Siles Zuazo from his bed and bundled him off to an undisclosed location in the 12,000 ft. high Andean city...
...state visit to Brazil late last month, Peruvian President Fernando Belaunde Terry was asked when he planned to lift the state of emergency in the Andean highlands, imposed in October 1981 after repeated terrorist attacks by Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas. Replied Belaunde: "When not a drop of blood is spilled for 30 days." Last week the rebels made a gruesome response: the bloodiest attacks around the country since Sendero's emergence as a violent force in 1980. Armed with submachine guns, rifles and dynamite, the guerrillas attacked police posts, army patrols, bridges, power stations and telecommunications lines...
While the Andean country's borrowings are dwarfed by those of such neighbors as Brazil ($96 billion) and Argentina ($43.6 billion), the Bolivian action nonetheless shook moneymen. Phone calls from anxious foreigners flooded embassies, newspapers and government agencies in the capital city of La Paz. On Wall Street, prices slid further on a bond market still edgy over last month's near collapse of Chicago's Continental Illinois...
...storms smashed California beaches last winter, while Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, southern Africa and southern India all suffered from drought. "A year of natural catastrophe," says M. Peter McPherson, director of the U.S. International Development Cooperation Agency, which has provided $60 million in emergency aid to flooded Andean nations...