Word: colombia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Washington the Organization of American States met, listened to a Panamanian plea for help against "international pirates," sent an investigating team. While patrol boats and planes contributed by the U.S., Ecuador and Colombia scouted the Caribbean and the Panamanian coast for signs of a rumored reinforcement fleet, Invader Chief Cesar Vega met the Cuban officers and the OAS negotiators, and surrendered. Cuba was expected to ask Panama to give the invaders leniency, a quality unknown to the Castro firing squads at home...
Summoned to Congress by a Senate debate on the bloody civil war plus banditry that has scattered nearly 300,000 bodies across Colombia (pop. 13.5 million) in eleven years, Minister of Government Guillermo Amaya last week coolly proved that the flow of blood is ebbing. During the first six months of 1958, said Amaya, 3,198 people were slaughtered in backlands violence-an average of 15.2 a day.* In the past six months the death toll shrank to 841, and by March the daily killing average was down to four...
Dramatic by itself, the fall in fatalities is even more startling in light of the fact that Colombia's government is only half functioning. Forced into a 1957 alliance to overthrow Dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, the perpetually warring Liberal and Conservative parties invented a rigid agreement to divide political power equally for the next 16 years. Every political organism, from Congress to town councils, was neatly bisected. Liberal Leader Alberto Lleras Camargo last August took the first four-year stint as President, with the understanding that he would be succeeded by a Conservative...
Presidential Remodeling. The ironic upshot is that Congress bickers impotently, and President Lleras is free to rebuild Colombia. He sent peacemaking commissions into the hinterland to patch up Liberal-Conservative feuds. Where the fighting had degenerated into nonpolitical banditry, he used troops. By last week only the coffee-rich Andean department of Caldas remained to be pacified...
Lleras also rebuilt his nation's international fiscal rating, driven into shabby disrepute by Spendthrift Rojas. He choked off unneeded imports so decisively that Colombia was one of five Latin American nations to show a 1958 favorable balance of trade in spite of tumbling prices of coffee, source of more than 80% of Colombia's export income. Lleras cut the $500 million commercial debt left by Rojas to $150 million. He also held down government spending and tightened credit. Cost of living, which jumped 23% in 1957, climbed only...