Word: colombia
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...Colombia last week underwent one major disaster and was saved from another. In rapid succession, two earthquakes rolled across the country, turning buildings into rubble in country towns, shaking up the terrified capital of Bogotá and causing 83 deaths and millions of dollars in damage. It was the country's worst earthquake in half a century. But it was hardly worse than the disaster that formed when the week began: almost certain financial collapse. Coffee is Colombia's life (it accounts for 70% of all foreign exchange), and a 10% drop in world coffee prices...
Nationalistic Fires. A 5-ft. 2-in. one time professor of finance, Lleras has proved in less than seven months in office to be one of the scrappiest Presidents in Colombia's modern history. Many of his troubles were inherited from the lackluster government of past President León Guillermo Valencia, but Lleras, unlike his predecessor, is not afraid to take a stand. When Communist-led students went on strike across the country shortly after he took over last August, he threatened to bar them from graduation and, ignoring the country's sacred tradition of campus autonomy...
Lleras' biggest battle, however, has been to keep Colombia's economy going in the face of price drops not only of coffee but also of Colombia's banana, sugar and cotton exports. In November, the IMF, the World Bank and AID agreed to grant a stand-by loan that would give Colombia time to diversify and lessen its dependence on coffee. But there was a catch: Colombia had to devalue its peso, a move that would be highly unpopular. Lleras flatly refused, stirred up nationalistic fires in Colombians by informing them that "the governing of the nation...
...took him from counselor of the first U.S. embassy in Soviet Russia in 1934 (among his subordinates: George F. Kennan, Charles Bohlen) to chargé d'affaires in Vienna, where he was one of the first to warn of Hitler's Anschluss, and on to ambassadorships in Colombia, Portugal, Iran and Panama, where in 1952 he negotiated a revision of the 1903 Canal Treaty to give Panama greater benefits from the waterway; of pneumonia; in Washington...
...providing 38 permanent economic advisers to the governments of Pakistan, Argentina, Colombia, Liberia, Malaysia, and Greece. And it is reaching the limits of its capacity. "The DAS can undertake additional field projects in the near future only at the risk of reducing the quality of advisers overstraining its management capacity, and minimizing opportunities to absorb and disseminate the experience gained in the field," Gustav F. Papenak, Director of the DAS, explains...