Word: rios
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...distribution of an abortion pill because of worldwide boycott threats by right-to-life forces, the action touched off an international furor. Prochoice advocates promptly labeled the ban on the pill, called RU 486, a blow to women's rights. More than 1,000 physicians attending a meeting in Rio de Janeiro signed petitions urging that the company, Roussel Uclaf, reinstate the pill. The outcry apparently worked. By week's end, under an unprecedented order from French Minister of Health Claude Evin, the drug company, which is partly owned by the government, abruptly reversed its decision...
West of Del Rio, Texas grows dryer by the mile. Tumbleweed bounces across the road and windmills draw up precious water for cattle. On the horizon, dust-shrouded hills appear, blue and mysterious-looking from afar. Roadrunners, heads down and tails up, sprint across the highway. River and road separate here as the Rio Grande, cutting through deep limestone canyons, makes a wide arc that has given this bulge of Texas the nickname Big Bend. Driving south through Alpine and Marfa, I see the border again at Presidio...
...ramble through history ends as I arrive in El Paso, directly across the border from Ciudad Juarez (the two cities' combined population exceeds 1.5 million). But for the narrow concrete channel that guides the Rio Grande through the urban sprawl, it would be difficult to pick out the boundary. There is synergy everywhere, from the maquiladoras on the Mexican side, where American manufacturers pay less than $1 an hour to a largely grateful work force, to the shops lining El Paso's Bridge Street, where Spanish is the vernacular...
Perhaps it is more than just images. In Las Cruces, N. Mex., where the road west finally abandons the Rio Grande, I talk with historian Louis Sadler. "Americans have never really had to deal with fixed borders," he says. "Europeans have had centuries of experience, but until recently in the U.S. there was always room for expansion. I think we are still working out how to deal with borders and other cultures." Farther west in Tucson, Dr. Michael Meyer, director of the Latin America Center at the University of Arizona, points out the inordinate influence of American culture. "I doubt...
More than 2,000 miles from the mouth of the Rio Grande, a marble obelisk with the number 258 marks the Pacific boundary of the frontier. On the U.S. side of the wire-mesh fence, this one corroded by the sea air, sanitation workers are emptying trash cans set about the neatly cut lawns of a small park. On the Mexican side of the fence an eroded gully is filled with garbage. What was once the Playa Azul restaurant is drunkenly toppling sideways, its concrete supports undermined...