Word: aridity
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...arid Sonora state, just south of the U.S. border, Mexico's Agriculture Minister Gilberto Flores Muñoz stood in the hot sun one day last week, read aloud a decree that expropriated a huge chunk of U.S. -owned property - the 400,000-acre Cananea Ranch. As thousands of peasants, swirling on the dry. sandy earth, shouted "Sonora for the Sonorans!". he raised the Mexican flag over the last of the great Mexican latifundios (big estates) and took it from the family of Texan William C. Greene, which had owned it for 58 years. The Sonora Legislature declared...
Cactus-grey Cananea Ranch escaped land reform until last week because it is unlit for farming; arid most of the year, it is used for grazing at the ratio of ten acres per head of cattle. Reformer Cárdenas himself said it should never be divided, and even President Ruiz Cortines did not plan to expropriate. He negotiated first to buy the ranch for $2,160,000. But when hassles among the Greene heirs threatened to delay the closing for years, the President dispatched the Agriculture Minister with an expropriation decree and ended the matter with a few legalisms...
Gruesome in spirit, comic in detail, this triangle is doomed to ruin by Joe Morgan's philosophical code. He is stuck with the arid belief that his "values" are valuable simply because he believes in them, while his mad friend does not care what values he upholds; in fact, he has none. Joe talks everyone to death in the interests of honesty, and the spirit of togetherness is symbolized by the fact that husband and lover are made aware that they both use the same brand of contraceptive...
Other lines save enough on wages arid low taxes to use up-to-the-minute equipment. To fly fine 325-m.p.h. Super-H Constellations, Real's chief pilots get $900 a month, only about half what a U.S. captain makes for the same job. Nicaragua's tiny Lanica line recently put a pair of turboprop Viscounts on its Miami-Lima service...
After hundreds of thousands of years of this, the climate grew drier. Tanganyika's lowlands turned arid. The upland lake shrank, but it did not disappear. Up from the hungry plains trooped the animals, and soon ancient men moved in with them. For centuries they lived on the beaches, chipped their razor-sharp weapons and fed on the animals. When the rains came again, animals and men trooped back to the plains. This alternation seems to have happened four times; then the lake went dry. The shaggy men, the giant hippos, the giant pigs and the antlered giraffes abandoned...