Taking Note
THESE DAYS, CRYSTAL-BALL GAZERS IN the State Department must feel a little like the old Danish King Canute, who stood on the beach and ordered the sea to turn back. Just three years ago, the...
...The Puerto Rican model is crumbling in so many ways at once that it is hard to know exactly what prompted the FBI to launch its attack on the independence movement...
...Mexico, riddled with corruption, electoral fraud and now a savage earthquake...
...Peru is abruptly a front-page concern...
...Just three years ago, the list of crises in Latin America went little further than Nicaragua and El Salvador...
...N THE PRE-DAWN OF AUGUST 30, SOME 200 federal agents carried out an island-wide sweep, breaking into homes, making 11 arrests and seizing huge quantities of documents and personal possessions...
...The ruling Popular Democratic Party, which backs the island's current "Commonwealth" status, will see its central economic pillar collapse if the Reagan tax plan goes ahead with its threat to phase out Section 936 of the Internal Revenue Code, which brought U.S...
...If the skeptics are right, and Garcia proves to be more bombast than substance, then Peru will engage Washington's crisis managers before too long...
...its new social democratic president Alan Garcia is capping his debt repayments, purging generals, cocaine barons and police chiefs, and mounting a precocious challenge against Fidel Castro for the rhetorical leadership of the continent...
...After the August 30 raids, Attorney General Ed Meese joined FBI Director William Webster at a Washington press conference, to announce that the action was "a signal to terrorists and their supporters that our response to their cowardly acts of violence will be decisive...
...It is what the promotional brochures are fond of calling "Puerto Rico, U.S.A...
...On September 24, East German Deputy Foreign Minister Bernhard Neuebauer arrived in Ecuador to review "bilateral cooperation in the political, economic and technological sectors...
...investors flocking...
...Today, it seems infinite...
...Clearly Nicaragua is just the tip of the iceberg...
...But for independentista leader Rub6n Berrios and many other observers, the issue was clear-cut: "It was an attack on the movement and the concept of independence and not anything else...
...This piece of grand theater involved not only the FBI, but also the U.S...
...Central America policy has given rise to the most broadly based mass opposition in many years...
...Ironically, it will not be the State Department that picks this one up, since the country in question is not even an independent nation...
...military and the Office of the Attorney General (though not the Puerto Rican police or the island's governor, Rafael Hernandez Colon, who were not informed of the raids in advance...
...Among their targets was the left-wing journal Pensamiento Critico, which had its typesetting equipment confiscated, along with the rollers from its printing press, and journalist Coqui Santaliz of the daily newspaper El Reportero...
...Also around the corner, if still a little ways off, is potentially the most dramatic Latin American crisis of them all...
...Within 24 hours, the Soviet Ambassador in Mexico, Rostilav Sergeyev, announced a cynical ploy to exploit the country's devasting earthquake as a pretext for extending Soviet influence...
...As if all this were not enough, the next day, September 26, Brazil confirmed that Foreign Minister Olavo Setubal would be paying a two-day official visit to Moscow on December 9-10, to "promote commercial relations between the two countries...
...In the middle distance are the simmering crises in Pinochet's Chile and Seaga's Jamaica...
...Administration officials should clearly be on their guard in the wake of this coordinated string of September events...
...Twenty-two tons of seaborne cargo, listed as "medicine, clothes and surgical supplies and equipment" are scheduled to arrive, along with a "mobile hospital...
...The debt crisis, which looks set to enter a new phase after a spell on the back burner, will affect all of the continent's major countries in unforeseeable ways...
...It was ostensibly about catching terrorists: to be precise, members of the clandestine Macheteros group accused of a $7 million Wells Fargo robbery in Connecticut in 1983...
...And after the National Guard's unceremonious dumping of President Nicolis Ardito Barletta last month, add Panama to the list of headaches that may erupt into full-blown crises within the next five years...
...And opposition to Puerto Rico's key military role in U.S...
...If the currently weak independence movement profits from any future Puerto Rican crisis, the Reagan Administration will be set to lay the blame for the island's ills at the door of our old friend "international terrorism...
...S PEAKING OF WHICH, WE FEEL IT OUR duty to present more compelling evidence of the coordinated Soviet bloc campaign to subvert the Western hemisphere...
...East German officials, meanwhile, said they would dispatch 16 tons of "humanitarian aid...
...the new "democratic" Guatemala and the prospect of more IMF-inspired riots in the Dominican Republic...
...The pro-statehood movement has run out of steam after last year's election defeat amid the continuing scandal of the 1978 Cerro Maravilla murders, when police shot two young independentistas...
...If that fails, then the president should surely stand ready to declare a national emergency and an all-out trade embargo of Mexico, Ecuador and Brazil...
...At the very least, Blackbird spy planes should monitor the crates of so-called "medical supplies" being delivered to Mexico...
Vol. 19 • September 1985 • No. 5
