Word: standoffs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...tension, the scene became like something from a TV situation comedy, with the rebels enjoying a feast of hotel food and the U.S. soldiers resolutely glowering from behind their barricades. Neither side made an attempt to threaten the other. It was, said one of the advisers, a "Mexican standoff," during which they talked to the rebels periodically. "At times it was friendly, at times tense," said another American. Finally, the Auxiliary Bishop of San Salvador, Gregorio Rosa Chavez, mediated the release of the occupants of the hotel and the escape of the rebels. The U.S. soldiers, though, refused to leave...
...barricaded Americans told reporters they had been talking with the rebels at one point early in the standoff. The Americans said they had fired no shots and would not fire unless fired upon...
Instead, it appeared a standoff was continuing--and would continue through the night--inside the El Salvador Sheraton Hotel's VIP Tower, more than 17 hours after rebels surprised the government with their assault in an upper-class neighborhood of this capital...
After this amicable standoff, and graduation, the friends part company. Later, though, the narrator finds himself thinking more and more about Saul's fascination with so-called primitive people. He wonders, in particular, about evidence that the besieged Machiguengas, dispersed into small groups by enemies and harsh conditions, retain their sense of community through a storyteller who travels wherever listeners can be found, recounting tribal legends, history and gossip. Such a person, the determined writer concludes, amounts to "tangible proof that storytelling can be something more than mere entertainment...
Carver compares the standoff between the casinos and the city to the "British army in Belfast," but a metaphor from neocolonial Africa might be more apt. For in a city headed by its first black mayor, with a gambling economy run largely by white accountants and business school graduates, most of the civic tensions are circumscribed by race. Two years ago, a suggestion by Carver that the city's black administrator be replaced by "the best municipal manager" was met at city hall with charges of "Ku Klux Klan" tactics...