Word: bolivia
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Both Bolivians and foreigners-analyzing the problems of making a workable economic and political unit out of landlocked, geographically fractured, 68% illiterate Bolivia-have for a century been prone, in moments of desperation, to wry variations of the we-give-up suggestion that the country and its headaches should be divided among its neighbors. This rueful jest, repeated by a U.S. official in La Paz and quoted in TIME's March 2 issue, was turned last week into the spark for three days of anti-U.S. violence...
...Imperialism's Vile Claw." The day Bolivia's 670 copies of TIME arrived by air, they were taken by special order straight to the palace of President Hernán Siles Zuazo, whose ambassador in Peru, getting the magazine a day earlier, had alerted him. Siles made the story the topic of a six-hour Cabinet session, then issued a statement blasting the remark as "damaging to the national honor" and "absolutely inadmissable." The statement gave the Bolivian public to understand that the remark had been put forth as a serious proposal...
...Down with the Yankee Octupus." "Death Before Living as Slaves!" read the banners carried by students in the clouds of La Paz (alt. 11,900 ft.), capital of mineral-rich, dirt-poor, coup-prone Bolivia (pop. 3,300,000). The angry crowd was demonstrating against an article in magamogul Henry Luce's Time (circ. 2,300,000), quoting an unidentified American embassy official as having said that the only solution to Bolivia's problems was to "abolish Bolivia and let its neighbors divide the country and its problems among themselves...
Response to the article (the quotation about "abolishing Bolivia" appeared only in the local Latin American edition) was swift and violent: La Paz got annoyed, students got riled up, President Hernan Siles Zuazo (in the drab, grey palace where he is guarded constantly by an unmanned machine gun) got worried, 10,000 copies of Time got burned, the American embassy got attacked. Summoned from Secretary Dulles' cloud chamber at Walter Reed Army Hospital, temporarisecretary Chris Herter, a genially proper Bostonian, expressed hope that "a magazine would not be permitted to disturb the traditionally good relations that have existed between...
Even President Siles sighs: "But for your recession, Bolivia would be going through the happiest period of its history." Then he looks around at his office's portraits of two recent Presidents, one a despairing suicide and one hanged by a mob, and adds morosely: "The man sitting here always feels the rope around his neck...