Word: nicaragua
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Fifty years ago the inhabitants of the town of Ocotal in the mountains of northern Nicaragua witnessed an armed encounter between a detachment of U.S. Marines and a band of Nicaraguan insurgents under the leadership of General Augusto C. Sandino. The Marines formed part of an occupation force dispatched to this Central American nation by President Calvin Coolidge in order to put an end to civil disturbances and the threat these posed to U.S. property and strategic interests. Sandino, a military commander, had refused to accept the political settlement imposed on Nicaragua by the U.S. He vowed to continue...
...clearly defined terrorist organizations active in the world today. Some, like West Germany's Red Army Faction or Italy's Red Brigades, nihilistically seek to destroy the societies that shelter them, and give little coherent thought to ultimate goals. Others, like the Sandinista guerrillas of Nicaragua or the Islamic Marxists of Iran, have specific targets-overthrowing regimes they regard as corrupt and oppressive. Still others, like the Proves of the Irish Republican Army, regard themselves as the vanguard of regional independence movements...
...Honduras, for example, malaria cases rose from 7,503 in 1974 to 30,289 in 1975 and 48,804 in 1976. El Salvador, poorest and most densely populated of the Central American republics, was stricken with a rise from 66,691 cases in 1974 to 83,290 in 1976. Nicaragua and Guatemala have also reported significant numbers of new cases...
...muddy, mosquito-filled tropical jungle of Panama, then a province of Colombia. Any canal across Central America would have eliminated the 7,000-mile journey around Cape Horn for ships navigating between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. At the time, most U.S. engineers favored a canal at sunny Nicaragua. The crossing there would have been 131 miles longer than at the 50-mile Isthmus of Panama. But almost all of the extra miles would have required no digging, since a Nicaraguan canal would feed into Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan River...
...first accomplishment was convincing the U.S. Senate?and Ohio's powerful Republican Mark Hanna?that the Panama route was superior to the Nicaraguan. His chief argument: Nicaragua was prey to volcanic eruptions. On the morning of a crucial Senate vote, Bunau-Varilla sent every Senator a Nicaraguan five-peso stamp picturing an erupting volcano that could have been Mount Momo-tombo, near the proposed canal line. The Senate switched to Panama on June 19, 1902. Soon afterward, Roosevelt and Secretary of State John Hay began to press Colombia to agree to a treaty. Their offer: $10 million in gold, plus...