Word: chaco
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...1800s, when the country needed farm hands to help bring in its beef and wheat crops. Before long, thousands of Italians-giddy with romantic tales of the Argentine pampas-were hurrying across the Atlantic. In the mid-1800s, some 200 Italian families set up a silk-spinning industry in Chaco province; later they began a cotton industry. When Argentina constructed a new Congress building, it was an Italian architect who designed it, an Italian company that built it. And who became the incarnation of the Argentine tango and Argentine Gaucho? None other than the handsome young Italian boy Rudolph Valentino...
...Plainclothes cops still lounge near opposition homes. Cells are still packed with political prisoners. The army, so far, backs Stroessner resolutely. Some 300.000 Paraguayans-one-sixth of the population-live in exile; hundreds of others waste away in concentration camps that he maintains in the "Green Hell" of the Chaco jungle...
Died. Carlos Saavedra Lamas, 80, aristocratic, stiff-collared Argentine diplomat, only South American to win the Nobel Peace Prize (in 1936, for his work in ending the three-year-old Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay); of influenza; in Buenos Aires...
...Asuncion. But nine miles from Asuncion sat the 2,000-man cavalry, fiercely opposed to any liberalizing. Siding with the cavalry was the 600-man navy, with two gunboats (one under repair), seven admirals. A third army group -the 1,500-man 5th Military Region headquartered in the storied Chaco area-wanted Stroessner to restore a measure of freedom. Supporting these liberals was the 400-man air force (five DC-38, one PBY Catalina, two vintage trainers...
...troops are not entirely happy. Younger officers are disgruntled because their careers are slowed by the superabundance of brass at the top; e.g., Paraguay's two-gunboat navy has seven admirals. Early this month Stroessner arrested several junior army officers and transferred others to a searing Chaco outpost. It may be lonely to be South America's last dictator, but Stroessner does not intend to be blown over by breezes from a distant Caribbean island...