Word: suburb
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Pablo Escobar Gaviria, generally acknowledged to be head of the Mafia, as the cartel is known locally, became something of a local philanthropist, building a zoo, soccer fields and an entire suburb of low-cost houses that is still called Barrio Escobar. In the manner of feudal serfs, residents in Barrio Escobar refer to their benefactor with cap-doffing deference and slip the Spanish honorific Don in front of his name...
Less than ten miles to the south, in the suburb of Paranaque, stand the stately mansions of the Plazas of Dignity. It is a serene place, which should come as no surprise, since all the residents are dead. The plazas are part of Manila Memorial Park, a cemetery for the privileged. While President Corazon Aquino's late husband Benigno, assassinated in 1983, rests in a simple tomb, other graves are grandiose: white sepulchers within marble pavilions, furnished with altars and windowed with stained glass. Some even provide bathrooms and beds for mourners...
Peasants tell an entirely different story. To them, the drug lords are Robin Hoods, providing housing, roads and money. Pablo Escobar-Gaviria, the acknowledged head of the Medellin cartel, has built soccer fields, a zoo and an entire suburb of low-cost housing. The cartel even fields political candidates. A case in point: Cartel Member Carlos Lehder-Rivas is running for a state legislative seat in this month's elections. Never mind that Lehder is in a Jacksonville jail while on trial for drug trafficking...
...come down. The Hungarian capital will be the host for the 1988 world championships -- and a quad perhaps? -- just four weeks after the Olympic Games. Then both Brians intend to retire from amateur skating. Is there life after 6.0s? Orser already co- owns a restaurant in a Toronto suburb and is planning a second this year. Boitano (surprise! surprise!) also wants to go into the food business. His dream is to open an Italian restaurant in San Francisco, some place where he can satisfy his constant craving for pasta. Both Brians will have ample offers to build professional-skating...
...fittingly, never better than when describing a road and vehicles in combat on it. He is almost as good at evoking places, whether a sterile office complex, a blind-pig saloon in a ghetto, a shack in a Michigan version of Dogpatch or a patio in a smug suburb. His ear for diverse patois seems impeccable, and so does the inner mechanism that tells him when an unlikely escape can be plausible or when violence must instead turn into calamity. Downriver (Houghton Mifflin; 210 pages; $15.95) offsets those virtues with a plot that, like other recent work of his, relies...