Word: checkpoint
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador to obtain beans not subject to tariff agreements. The coffee, available at bargain rates, was ostensibly for domestic consumption or export to nontariff nations. To move the contraband through Central America, Bilbeisi's agents, financed by B.C.C.I. letters of credit, paid bribes to truckers, checkpoint officials and port officials. The coffee was marked for delivery to Jordan or Syria but was routed through Miami or New Orleans, where it was secretly off-loaded. Former U.S. shipping agents who testified before the Florida grand jury told TIME they accepted $4.5 million in bribes from Bilbeisi...
Life is even more chaotic at the border checkpoint up the road, where a crush of vehicles and humanity begins and stretches back into Iraq for miles. With maddening slowness, Iranian troops let a sprinkling of refugees through the checkpoint, taking care not to let them pass before the campsites are ready. Perhaps they could be settled faster, but so far the Iranians have been left to do the job almost entirely by themselves. Commitments from Western countries to help the more than 1 million Kurds at the border have just started to pick up beyond the initial trickle according...
...Iranian troops carefully search each vehicle for weapons -- Tehran insists that Kurdish fighters will find no haven in Iran -- as well as articles offensive to strict Islamic sensibilities. Pop-music tapes, for example, are forbidden, as is immodest dress. One woman, about to drive her Volkswagen up to the checkpoint, frantically tied a scarf over her hair but still stood out in a short skirt and knitted leggings. She managed to get through the checkpoint, but not before giving away her collection of tapes...
...that a ground war has begun, everybody will miss the tedium of endless nights under flimsy tents. Thompson thought about that after he drove through a military checkpoint manned by a young British soldier. The soldier's expression, menacing at first, gave way to a huge smile when he recognized a Phil Collins song playing on Thompson's tape deck. "There was this important, shared touch of home that's rare here," Thompson wrote. "I drove away and started crying. I thought, this kid, who should be home raising hell with his friends, could soon be in the middle...
During his detention at an Iraqi checkpoint, Basa shared a cell with three other Kuwaitis. Two of the three were tortured while Basa was forced to watch. "They wanted names, resistance leaders, people they could go after," he says. "One fellow had his genitals prodded with an electric rod. After that he was made to sit on a broken Pepsi bottle. Then, working very slowly, they ripped the fingernails off his right hand. He broke, of course. Who wouldn't? He gave them some names. And then they killed him. A single shot between the eyes...