Word: braziller
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...years later, the capital in the wilderness still needs a heroic effort to become a success. A respectable 60% of the federal Deputies now live in town, and Brasilia's population of 500,000 makes it Brazil's tenth-largest city. But many recalcitrant bureaucrats continue to ignore the lofty imperative of former President Juscelino Kubitschek, who conceived the idea of Brasilia: "We must march to the west, turn our backs to the sea, and stop staring at the ocean -as if thinking of departing...
Frontier Flavor. What Kubitschek could not achieve by evangelism, Brazil's military regime seems determined to accomplish by edict. In marking the tenth anniversary of the capital last month, President Emilio Garrastazu Medici decreed that Cabinet Ministers must henceforth conduct their business only in Brasilia. The Rio-based foreign diplomatic colony will have to follow suit by 1972. The move does offer one compensation to diplomats, though: Brasilia, with its limited escape routes, should discourage political kidnapings...
...youngest of a mere handful of world capitals that have been designed and built from scratch (Pakistan's Islamabad is still unfinished), Brasilia was intended to be much more than Brazil's seat of government. Kubitschek envisioned it as the hub of a 5,000-mile highway network that would open the vast interior and draw people away from the coastal cities where, he complained, Brazilians "cling like crabs to the crowded shorelines...
There were additional alternatives, but the choice was not simple. If the astronauts could successfully fire the service module's powerful engine behind the moon, they would splash down in the Atlantic off the coast of Brazil in only 38 hours. Again Mission Control decided not to risk firing a possibly damaged engine. If, on the other hand, the 26-ton service module were jettisoned after rounding the moon, a long burn of the small Aquarius descent engine would impart about the same velocity to the lightened spacecraft, setting it down in the South Atlantic in less than 40 hours...
...Ambassador John Gordon Mein was gunned down on a Guatemala City street nearly two years ago as he tried to escape an ambush. Indeed, even as Guatemalans were searching for Von Spreti, U.S. Consul Curtis C. Cutter barely escaped from a similar bushwhacking in Porto Alegre, Brazil. When four masked men blocked his station wagon with a Volkswagen, Cutter gunned the motor and rammed his way out of the ambush. The would-be kidnapers raked Cutter's wagon with machine-gun fire, but his only injury was a bullet in the right shoulder...