Word: central
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Blandon outlined a series of deals and double-deals involving Central American conflicts. In 1985, he said, Noriega met twice in Panama City with Lieut. Colonel Oliver North, a principal figure in the Iran-contra affair. North asked Noriega, Blandon said, to train contra rebels in Panama at a time when the U.S. was forbidden by law to do so. Noriega agreed, Blandon said, though he was at the same time selling arms to Marxist insurgents in El Salvador. North could not be reached for comment...
Between them, Blandon and Rodriguez detailed a drug-trafficking operation that has spread corruption throughout Central and South America. The latest victim is Honduras, where top army officials are said to have developed close ties with drug dealers. The U.S. fears that the drug lords will undermine Honduras' status as a staging area for the contra war and a future democratic bulwark against Sandinista expansion...
...glittering enclave of restaurants, shops and theaters in Westwood Village, on Los Angeles' affluent West Side, seems a world away from the mean streets of South Central Los Angeles, where gang warfare took more than 100 innocent lives last year. But the ghetto violence occasionally spills beyond its borders. Last month Karen Toshima, a 27-year-old graphic artist, was caught in * the cross fire of rival drug gangs and died on the sidewalk outside a fancy restaurant. The Los Angeles establishment reacted with horror. Newspapers and television headlined the story for days. Police patrols in Westwood tripled...
Across town, ten days later, Alma Lee Washington was sitting in her wheelchair in the doorway of her rundown two-bedroom house in South Central Los Angeles when hoodlums driving by opened fire with a .45-cal. handgun. Washington, 67, was killed by a bullet that struck her in the right eye. Yet her slaying got scant attention. Footage of the grieving family was not the top story on the evening news. The Los Angeles Herald Examiner buried her death in a small note. The Los Angeles Times, which had been splashing the Westwood shoot-out across...
...more equal than others. Black and Hispanic leaders angrily contrasted the uproar over Toshima's killing to the indifference about violence in their neighborhoods. "There is a deep feeling in the community that the philosophy of the police department is to 'let them kill each other' in South Central L.A.," says State Assemblywoman Maxine Waters. "The black community has known for years that a problem is not a problem until it hits the white community...