Word: os
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...restaurants draw crowds with such delicacies as imported stone crabs and tender churrasco steaks. But that façade of tranquillity conceals some unpleasant facts. According to Western diplomats, the average number of violent deaths each week has increased from 150 under former President Efraín Ríos Montt to 190. Daily newspapers display incongruously cheerful pictures of students and young professionals who have "disappeared." Earlier this month an engineering student known for his leftist sympathies was shot and wounded while at work. Kidnaped from a hospital emergency room by ten armed men, he was found four days...
...cycles, causing extreme heatings of ocean temperatures every four or five years. The El Niño of 1972, though less severe than the present one, nevertheless crippled the South American fishing industry. Although few of these episodes last longer than a year, two-year El Niños were recorded in 1877-79 and in 1940-42. Meteorologist Oswaldo Garcia notes that there are some disturbing similarities between the present El Niño and the 1877 episode, which may have contributed to flooding in California and a warm winter in the U.S., followed by an unusually hot summer...
...os Montt's support was disintegrating. The Catholic Church has been alienated by the continuing influence of the military, not to mention the born-again general's penchant for Pentecostal proselytizing. The business community has been angered by his mishandling of the economy. Meanwhile, civilian political parties were outraged by his refusal to set an early date for promised elections...
...crackdown was provoked by the taped television appearances of right-wing Politician Leonel Sisniega Otero and of Ríos Montt's former junta mate Colonel Francisco Gordillo Martínez. Maintaining that Ríos Montt had reneged on his promises as soon as he came to power, Sisniega declared that he could not call the President "a dictator, because he isn't good enough for that. He is a tyrant." Gordillo, whom Ríos Montt muscled out last year, accused the general of having tried to pay him to resign quietly. Gordillo then threatened...
Their broadcast and the brief public demonstrations that followed underscored the precariousness of Ríos Montt's authority. Acknowledging that frailty, the government swore in an electoral tribunal to prepare for constitutional assembly elections, probably to be held in July...