Word: colombia
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Alberto Lleras Camargo, 51, the journalist-statesman leader of Colombia's Liberal Party, stepped before a radio microphone last week and agreed to serve as the nonpartisan President of his deeply troubled country. Colombia's backlands have been bloodied by a no-quarter guerrilla war between Conservatives and Liberals that has taken more than 100,000 lives in the past ten years; now its economy is strained by heavy overseas indebtedness. And the military junta that has been in charge since the fall of Dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla last May has been waiting with thinning patience...
Candidate Lleras thus becomes the unexpected holder of delicately balanced power under his own post-Rojas plan for joint Liberal-Conservative control of Colombia. In the original deal, backed by the junta, political posts throughout the nation were to be split fifty-fifty between Liberals and Conservatives for a cooling-off period of twelve years; the first President would be a Conservative, the next a Liberal, and so on. Hopes were that the truce would cancel out the traditional inter-party hatreds that underlie the rural civil war; at the end of twelve years normal two-party politics could take...
Improvise & Stabilize. To make up dollar losses, Latin American nations are improvising desperately. Responding to Red smiles, Chile is exporting copper wire to Communist China, and Colombia is considering sending coffee to the U.S.S.R. in hopes that Russians can be lured away from tea. Imports from the U.S. are being cut back. But everywhere the demand is growing for U.S. help, specifically for price floors...
Died. Javier Pereira, longtime (according to him: since 1789) aboriginal resident of Colombia, generally considered the oldest man on earth; in Monteria, Colombia. Physicians at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, where he was taken for examination in 1956, said that the little (4 ft. 4 in., 75 Ibs.) cigar-smoking Indian might "possibly [have been] more than 150 years old." During his only trip away from home, Pereira made passes at an airline stewardess, socked reporters and others who annoyed him. After the trip, the government of Colombia issued a Pereira postage stamp with the motto...
...prestigious Lleras Camargo slate of Liberals won all of that party's 50% share of 80 Senate and 148 Chamber of Deputies seats. The total vote-1,800,000 for all Liberals, v. 1,400,000 for all Conservatives-clearly showed Lleras' party to be Colombia's biggest. In the intra-Conservative election, Laureano Gómez' chief opponent was moderate-minded Guillermo Len Valencia, who played a bold role last May in dethroning Military Dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (the man who toppled Gómez in 1953). Of the Conservatives' 40 Senate seats...