Word: frontier
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...years later, the Soviets had smashed all the way to the Polish frontier; the Americans had pushed northward to the gates of Rome; fleets of Allied bombers were steadily pulverizing all the major cities of Germany. But Hitler's battle-hardened force of 7 million men still dominated an empire extending 1,300 miles from the Atlantic to the Dnieper, and his scientists were on the verge of unsheathing their promised victory weapons, the long-range V-1 buzz bomb...
Near Dong Dang, a Vietnamese hamlet less than a mile from the Chinese border, scores of small, one-person artillery shelters have been dug into the lush hillsides. On one rise, a Soviet-made anti-aircraft missile points at the mountains beyond the frontier. The border area is dotted with gun emplacements and camouflaged trucks, and swarms with bare-chested Vietnamese troops. In the middle of a nearby road, two 6-ft.-deep craters mark the points where Chinese artillery shells exploded earlier this month...
Dong Dang is only one of many villages on both sides of the border that have felt the effects of the most serious clashes between China and Viet Nam. Ever since 1979, when hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops rushed across the frontier, low-level skirmishes between the Communist adversaries have been a springtime ritual. Although wildly conflicting reports from Hanoi and Peking have obscured the real extent of this year's fighting, the sheer volume of the competing claims and counterclaims appears to confirm that the situation has seriously deteriorated. Only last week, the Vietnamese claimed they...
...Kandell does note feuds of another sort that are commonplace in certain areas of the new frontier. In Brazil the encouragement given by the government to settlers in the agricultural regions newly carved out of jungle has had the unexpected side effect of creating large numbers of poor squatter settlements, where would-be settlers wait to receive land. In Paraguay, the sudden influx of large numbers of settlers to the region around the Itaipu dam has caused many Paraguayans to become concerned over the security of the border...
...biggest conflict in the new frontier has occurred in Bolivia's sparsely settled Beni region, where the number one export is cocaine. The millions of dollars the fad drug of the 80's has brought to the impoverished nation gives the growers an important role in the national economy. So important, Kandell reports, that the last government which cooperated with Drug Enforcement Administration officials from the United States was quickly removed from office by the military...