Word: colombia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...town military post, where editors were ordered to bring all copy. Since the same move shut two other Medellin papers, Rojas Pinilla, who has blotted out all of Bogotá's oldest and best dailies, briefly achieved the unsavory distinction of silencing all of Colombia's best-known papers. After thinking it over, the Medellin dailies doggedly submitted to the awkward censorship and reappeared. But their prospects were gloomy under Rojas Pinilla, who seemed to be bucking for renown as Latin America's stubbornest tyrant...
...through the floor. Main reason for the softening of the State Department's longtime opposition to international coffee-price props is that coffee is, after all, Latin America's No. 1 export. It accounts for 97% of El Salvador's exports to the U.S., 90% of Colombia's, more than 80% of Brazil's and Guatemala's, lesser but still important percentages for half a dozen other countries. A steep price fall might bring on dangerous economic and political crises, with tempting opportunities for local strongmen or Communist mischiefmakers...
Since last August, when he shut down Colombia's leading newspaper, El Tiempo, Strongman-President Gustavo Rojas Pinilla has been carrying on a clumsy feud with the country's traditionally free-swinging press. Last week Rojas discovered that he had stumbled again. His latest press-muzzling maneuver, an attempt to fine two of the country's largest Liberal dailies (El Espectador and El Correo) into oppositionless silence, had backfired. Rojas found himself faced by a "Freedom of the Press Fund," supported by public subscription, to pay the penalties, should he decide to levy similar fines...
...Espectador was fined $2,500 for asking editorially whether it was true that 2,000 political prisoners were being held under inhuman conditions in the steaming plains of eastern Colombia; El Correo, published in Medellin, was rapped with an equal fine for an article regarded as disrespectful to constituted authority and the armed forces...
...Colombia is already a sizable oil producer, getting some 12% of its export earnings from sales of 32 million bbls. of crude a year. But over the years the risky Colombian oilfields have been good places to lose money as well as to make it, and hopeful 1950 oil decrees have attracted little new interest. Ecopetrol itself was created not as a nationalistic gesture but because a U.S. company handed back a concession that had expired, and no other foreign firm wanted to take over...