Word: velasco
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...part, General Juan Velasco Alvarado, the leader of the Peruvian junta, professes that he cannot comprehend why the U.S. is so upset. The seizure was legal under Peruvian law, he explains. Furthermore, according to the junta's charge, IPC still owes some $690 million for oil it "illegally" extracted. To the junta's way of thinking, it is Peru that should be angry. The U.S., says General Velasco, "is a just country. I cannot believe that the amendment will be applied...
...Velasco, reported Valdés, was finally beginning to realize that the U.S. actually intended to invoke the amendment and that the two countries were on a collision course. With 350,000 sugar workers immediately dependent on exports to the U.S., Peru's previously adamant president was now open to negotiation...
Disintegrating Relations. Valdés' message, relayed to Washington from Santiago, contained four face-saving provisos for the sovereignty-conscious Peruvian junta. Velasco would receive a U.S. emissary, but that representative must be 1) a high-level personage, 2) President Nixon's special representative, 3) armed with discretionary powers to negotiate broadly, and 4) willing to come to Lima. The Administration has been increasingly concerned over its disintegrating hemispheric relations; at his press conference two weeks ago, President Nixon ruefully admitted that imposing the Hickenlooper Amendment would have an anti-American domino effect all over South America. Therefore...
Peruvians received the President's representative cordially and prepared to get down to serious negotiations this week to head off the Hickenlooper deadline of April 9. To demonstrate good faith, moreover, Velasco held his first press conference and made a point of answering questions from U.S. correspondents...
...Willy-Nilly. "We want to converse," the retired general said somewhat nervously, standing in khaki army uniform behind his desk. Velasco praised the U.S. as "a just nation" and suggested that "immoral companies" were the real barrier keeping the two countries apart. How would the spread be resolved, he was asked, between the $120 million that the IPC is asking for its expropriated properties and the $54 million that Peru up to now has been prepared to pay? "Courtappointed appraisers will decide what the property is worth." Was the $690 million that Peru insists it is owed by IPC subject...