Word: colombia
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...long ago, Colombia was held up as a showcase of the Alianza - relatively rich in resources, increasingly mature in politics, full of hopeful plans for the future. The Andean country is now approaching what Colombians gloomily call "zero hour...
Under President Guillermo Leon Valencia's do-nothing, three-year-old government, the cost of living has risen 60%, Colombia's chronic trade deficit has doubled, business confidence has evaporated and unemployment is soaring. Politically, the ruling Liberal-Conservative National Front is splintering, and Congress is all but immobilized. Last week, with new elections only nine months away, Valencia finally decided that something ought to be done. Invoking emergency powers, he named a new Cabinet and decreed a series of reforms to pull the economy back from the brink...
Overtures to Washington. The reforms-suggested last December by the Agency for International Development, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the International Monetary Fund-are aimed at preserving Colombia's fading foreign exchange, estimated at $109 million last week. They provide for: 1) preferential exchange rates ranging from 9 to 13.5 pesos per $1 (free rate: 19 pesos per $1) on imported raw materials; 2) a $33 million issue of economic development bonds; 3) a 15% income tax increase for the current year, plus another 5% surcharge for the forced purchase of government bonds...
...recently as five years ago, a birth-control conference would have been unthinkable in South America. Yet there it was last week, in Colombia's rising industrial city of Cali, and on hand for the discussions were 70 edu cators, sociologists, medical men, government welfare workers, demographers and Catholic priests from 20 countries. "The problem of our time," said former Colombian President Alberto Lleras Camargo, "is that through new drugs we have managed to control death. But we have not been able to control the giving of new life. And the result is a grave crisis of overcrowding, unemployment...
...past few months, but with a record crop forecast for next season, traders predict that the recovery will be short-lived. Though it can ill afford the expense, the Brazilian government expects to buy up half of this year's crop in an effort to prop prices. Colombia, dependent on coffee for 70% of its exports, has resorted to bartering for goods that it lacks the dollars...