Word: paraiso
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...teams of divers from the U.S. and South America struggled last week to plug a hole in the Argentine ship Bahia Paraiso, which had sunk and was leaking 3,000 gal. of fuel a day, squadrons of scientists rushed in to assess the damage caused by Antarctica's first major oil spill. "This is the worst ecological disaster for Antarctica, period," says James Barnes, general counsel to the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition. It is sure to stoke the already heated debate over the future of development, tourism and mining in Antarctica...
...calamity began on Jan. 28, when the captain of the Bahia Paraiso, a naval resupply ship that doubles as a tourist boat, sailed through waters identified on charts as having "dangerous ledges and pinnacles." The ship was shaken by a "terrible jolt," says passenger Nadia Le Bon. "I thought we hit an iceberg." Instead, the ship had struck Full Astern Reef, which ripped a 30-ft. gash through its double hull and into the engine room. With the ship listing and the smell of gasoline thick in the air, the 314 passengers and crew members were rescued unharmed by scientists...
...Peter Wilkniss, head of the National Science Foundation's polar programs: "We are witnessing the dawn of the commercial age in Antarctica." Thousands of tourists are flocking to the once inaccessible continent. Throughout the 1984-85 season, only 400 people visited Antarctica, but in the week before the Bahia Paraiso hit the reef, more than 500 visitors passed through Palmer Station alone. And Antarctic tourists are doing more than sailing to research centers for short visits and lecture tours. In 1988, 35 adventurers paid $35,000 each to set foot on the South Pole, and this year another group...
...There was total confusion," a survivor said later. "It was dark and the wounded were screaming, and we didn't know what was happening." At about 2 a.m., the first mortar fire crashed into the Salvadoran army's garrison at El Paraiso, just 36 miles from the capital of San Salvador. In a daring and well- planned attack last week, leftist guerrillas of the Popular Liberation Forces killed at least 69 government soldiers, as well as a U.S. military adviser, Staff Sergeant Gregory Fronius, 27, of Greensburg, Pa. He was the first American to die in combat during El Salvador...
Nonetheless, the Paraiso attack, in which the guerrillas lost only ten of their men, was both a setback to President Jose Napoleon Duarte's Christian Democratic government and a reminder to the U.S. that shoring up democracies in Central America is neither cheap nor painless. Drawing further attention to the price of the U.S. involvement in the Salvadoran war, the CIA announced last week that one of its employees had been killed in a helicopter crash in the eastern part of the country. Though the CIA did not identify him, the dead man was believed to be Richard Krobock...