Word: western
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...committee in Mao Zedong's home province of Hunan, and that copies were circulating more than three months after the massacre in Tiananmen Square. Youth League officials in Beijing claimed not to know anything about the tract's origins, but they said the case was "under investigation." Said a Western diplomat: "The language is strongly reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution." If the booklet is genuine, he added, "it tends to confirm the view that a lot of attacks that appear to be aimed at ((ousted Communist Party leader)) Zhao Ziyang are in fact directed against Deng himself...
...skies over western Brazil will soon be dark both day and night. Dark from - the smoke of thousands of fires, as farmers and cattle ranchers engage in their annual rite of destruction: clearing land for crops and livestock by burning the rain forests of the Amazon. Unusually heavy rains have slowed down the burning this year, but the dry season could come at any time, and then the fires will reach a peak. Last year the smoke grew so thick that Porto Velho, the capital of the state of Rondonia, was forced to close its airport for days...
...most of the roughly 8,000 families that heeded the government's call between 1970 and 1974, the dream turned into a bitter disappointment. The soil, unlike the rich sod in the Western U.S., was so poor that crop yields began to deteriorate badly after three or four years. Most settlers eventually gave up and left...
...other huge project, Polonoroeste, the government is trying to develop the sprawling western state of Rondonia. The program, backed by subsidies and built around a highway through the state called BR-364, was designed to relieve population pressures in southern Brazil. But Polonoroeste has made Rondonia the area where rain-forest destruction is most rapid, and the focal point of the fight to save the Amazon...
...similar debacle could occur in the western state of Acre. It is still virtually pristine, having lost only 4% of its forests, but the rate of deforestation is increasing sharply as cattle ranchers expand their domain. Development in Acre has sparked a series of bloody confrontations between ranchers and rubber tappers, who want to preserve the forests so they can save their traditional livelihood of harvesting latex and Brazil nuts. It was this conflict that killed Mendes...