Word: exocet
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cafe fronting Rio's Copacabana, a French bureaucrat from Aerospatiale, sipping Campari and soda on the rocks, extols the virtues of the Exocet missile to a cadre of entranced Brazilian admirals. In a Persian Gulf capital, a U.S. military attache prepares a top-secret memo listing the weaknesses of the host country's armed forces. In the lobby of a Zurich hotel, a trader who arranges sales of slightly used rifles and mortars ?a "bedroom dealer" in the jargon of the trade?haggles softly with the representative of a Third World guerrilla movement...
...materiel to some 80 nations, ranging from submarines for the navies of Spain, Portugal, Pakistan and South Africa to daggers for Tunisian commando units. The best-selling French items: various models of the Mirage supersonic fighters, the agile and swift AMX tanks, Alouette helicopters and radar-guided Exocet antiship missiles...
...Sidewinder air-to-air missile (12,000), CH-47 Chinook helicopter (309), F-4 Phantom fighter-bomber (1,100), C-130 Hercules transport (230), F-5 fighter-bomber (1,500), A-4 Skyhawk attack fighter (460) and TOW anti-tank missile (12,500); France's Exocet antiship missile (about 800 sold), AMX-30 battle tank (1,000) and Mirage III fighter-bomber (700); Israel's Gabriel antiship missile...
...other. "What I like doing," admitted a European arms salesman visiting Colombia, "is selling one weapon here in Bogota and then going off to Caracas to sell them the antidote." The most successful modern practitioners of this ploy seem to be the fleet-footed French, who first sold the Exocet antiship missile to Peru's leftist dictatorship in 1973, then leaked the news to neighboring Chile, whose rightist leaders became so jittery that they too bought the missile...
...attributed as much to the steady flow of French weaponry to breakaway Biafra as to the fighting spirit of the Ibos. In Latin America, France has sold arms to nine nations (including 106 Mirage 5s to Argentina and 111 Mirage mcs to Brazil). Currently it is offering its Exocet antiship missile to both the left-wing military dictatorship of Peru and the right-wing military dictatorship of Chile...