Word: terrorism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Drug traffickers have killed three federal judges in three months, one just befoer President Virgilio Barco declared war on the cocaine cartels in August. They have shown no sign of easing a terror campaign aimed at forcing the government to end extraditions to the United States...
...most part, however, the predominant mood was a relieved euphoria. For the millions who came through the quake without a scratch, the experience was akin to a roller-coaster ride: a few moments of terror followed by sheer exhilaration. "I've felt all the earthquakes since I've lived here, and this one was the best -- my best near death experience," declared Los Gatos bike- shop employee Ray Blair...
...distinct stages lasting a minute and five seconds, the quaking stunned the populace out of sleep into an incomprehensible terror of showering plaster, scattering bric-a-brac, breaking dishes, shifting furniture, toppling walls and collapsing roofs. Waterfront houses lurched and fell apart, hotels hopped off their foundations. In the working-class district south of Market Street, tenements turned into tangled splinters, and four hotels capsized and collapsed, trapping scores. An added blast rattled the area, as the city gas plant blew up. Thousands of chimneys plunged through roofs. Many residents drowned, trapped, in deluges from ruptured water mains. An elaborate...
...terror lies first in the surprise. An earthquake is hidden from one moment to the next, as the future is hidden, as God is hidden. The event does not announce itself as most other disasters do, as a hurricane does, or a flood, or even an erupting volcano, which is after all hard to miss as dangerous geography. A plague too arrives more slowly. That is no consolation, but at least the mind and nerves are prepared. The event proceeds in a logical continuum of developing bad news...
...snub-nosed revolver into the temple of a Viet Cong officer. Bright sunlight, Saigon: the scrawny police chief's arm, outstretched, goes by extension through the trigger finger into the V.C.'s brain. That photograph, and another in 1972 showing a naked young Vietnamese girl running in arms-outstretched terror up a road away from American napalm, outmanned the force of three U.S. Presidents and the most powerful Army in the world. The photographs were considered, quite ridiculously, to be a portrait of America's moral disgrace. Freudians spend years trying to call up the primal image-memories, turned...