Word: corrupt
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Between Africa, littered with the bloated carcasses of elephants, and the huge stockpiles of the Far East is a trail marked by secrecy and deceit. It is a trail traveled by ruthless poachers, cunning smugglers, corrupt and inept officials, and the barons of the trade: a handful of men who have never seen an elephant in the wild. They and their wealthy customers do not understand -- or choose not to -- the high cost of this trade. They do not see the herds mowed down by automatic assault rifles, the tusks frantically hacked from the skulls and the orphaned and wounded...
...unique serial number, which is recorded in a computer in Cambridge, England. Theoretically, that number allows nations to trace the tusk as it passes from country to country in trade. But many quotas have been ill-considered or ignored, falsified export documents have been discovered in numerous nations, and corrupt officials in collusion with traders continue to skirt the system...
...trade could not continue on such a scale without the collusion of African officials. "So many of Africa's functionaries are corrupt," says K.T. Wang, one of Hong Kong's major ivory traders. "If they get money, they say it's legal ivory. If they don't get money, they say it's poached." Over the years, senior African officials, their spouses and close friends, and wildlife authorities have been implicated in ivory scandals...
Oddly enough, some Brazilian purists fear that foreign enthusiasm for their music could corrupt it. Djavan, for one, has dismissed David Byrne's efforts as "inconsequential." Nascimento disagrees. "You're always trading ideas," he says. "It gives you life." Others are concerned that jaded outsiders will soon move on to something else. Anything is possible in the fickle pop-music world, but for now, musicians agree, it's Brazil that's got rhythm...
...oldest rule in the exercise of power is that if a nation tells the world it wants to get rid of a corrupt government, as the U.S. did in Panama, that nation had better have the means and the will to carry it through once an opportunity develops." So spoke old cold warrior Richard Helms, former director of the CIA, last week...