Word: arid
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...returned from trips behind the Iron or Bamboo Curtain, bubbling about the beauties of Communism, but she turned out to be a tough, uncompromising anti-Communist when she ran up against Red subversion in India. A case in point was the poverty-stricken state of Kerala in India's arid southwest. The Communists had won elections for state officers and had been in power for 27 months when Indira popped in for a visit in 1959. She was horrified. What seems to have upset her most were new schoolbooks that depicted Lenin and Mao Tse-tung, instead of Mahatma Gandhi...
Near Badajoz, on the bitter western plateau that the Spaniards named Extremadura because life there was so extremely hard, irrigation has transformed into 5,000 gardens of vegetables and cotton the chalky arid land whose owners were half starved a decade ago. In her new white stucco farmhouse, a wife pauses under a gaudy framed print of Jesus to explain why she has not yet bought a television set: "The neighbors would come in every night and track up my floor...
...people, the politicians unwisely did what they could for themselves. Dahomey's first President built a $3,000,000 palace; the Upper Volta's Yaméogo built himself a sumtuous country retreat with a swimming pool, while farmers still desperately seek water holes on the arid plains to keep their cattle from thirsting to death...
Largely because so much of Latin America is mountainous, arid or tropical, less than 5% (v. 16% in the U.S.) of its more than 7,700,000 sq. mi. of land is under cultivation. Experts also cite antique farming methods. In Venezuela, primitive farms produce an average of two bushels of corn per acre, compared with 67 bushels on modern U.S. farms. Traditionally, holders of large estates do not cultivate more than necessary to earn an income suitable to their social status. But, as Bolivia and Mexico have discovered, land-reform programs that carve up productive estates into family-sized...
...shadow of a hanged man last week lay across the arid Anatolian plateau. It was that of Adnan Menderes, who was overthrown as Turkey's Premier in 1960, tried by the state, and sentenced to death. Menderes' peasant-based Democratic Party was banned, and the triumphant Republicans of wizened old Ismet Inönü took over. But Menderes' popularity, it seems, has only ripened with time. Barely a fortnight before the nation's general elections, his unofficial successor, Suleyman Demirel, 41, stands a chance of winning the lion's share...