Word: brutally
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...life in El Salvador (pop. 4.8 million). On one side are the leftist terrorist groups that seek to provoke a Nicaragua-style insurrection. On the other are the hit teams obedient to the country's ultraconservative elite. Standing helpless in the middle, unable to control either the notoriously brutal 12,000-man security forces or intransigent foes on the left and right, is the civilian-military junta that ousted President Carlos Humberto Romero only last month...
...Brutal as last week's floggings may have been, they were more humane than those carried out when Zia first imposed Islamic justice. Among other things, the government has replaced cat-o'-nine-tail with the relatively less lethal Malacca canes. Prisoners sometimes died when beaten with the multilash whips. Now the worst that they suffer are scars that they may carry for the rest of their lives...
...plea had little impact. First to ignore it were the notoriously brutal Treasury Police, who killed 18 people in a savage attack on striking workers at four large factories in the capital. Leftist terrorists cut loose with an orgy of violent protest, blowing up three power plants and burning seven buses. The 75,000-member Popular Revolutionary Bloc, the largest of El Salvador's leftist movements, denounced the new junta as merely a "change of face" and planned a mass demonstration in San Salvador. While giving permission for the demonstration, the new junta warned that it would use force...
From one side came King Joseph's knights; from the other, the Green Meanies. And in the middle, when they met, there was great excitement and crashes that sounded like thunder. And from the top-most bench, surrounded by many brutal and ugly Hanover maidens, sat Lady Grizzelda, crying for St. John. And one by one on the field, the knights fell from their horses. The rushes were so great that lances would splinter when they crashed with a shield. And blood streamed from everywhere, as the knights swung their swords with such violence that they cut through the armor...
Gordimer's prose, brutal in its precision and sensuousness, conveys Rosa's struggle with an immediacy that makes detachment impossible. She bombards us with images harsh and lush; passion for the country whose policies she hates scorches the pages, evoking South Africa's beauty, sordidness and terror. She moves from the overripe living room of an apartheid apologist to the stinking hut in a black township, from the lucid vigor of South Africa to the luxury of the Rivieva. Her prose mimics the near-cryptic, emotionally loaded economy of poetry, with all its symbolic richness. Reading this book is almost...