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 or- dered the sea to turn back. Just three years ago, the list of crises in Latin America went little further than Nicaragua and El Salvador. Today, it seems infinite. 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. Peru is abruptly a front-page concern; 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. If the skeptics are right, and Garcia proves to be more bombast than substance, then Peru will en- gage Washington's crisis managers before too long. In the middle distance are the simmering crises in Pinochet's Chile and Seaga's Jamaica; the new "demo- cratic" Guatemala and the prospect of more IMF-in- spired riots in the Dominican Republic; Mexico, rid- dled with corruption, electoral fraud and now a savage earthquake. And after the National Guard's uncere- monious 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. Also around the corner, if still a little ways off, is po- tentially the most dramatic Latin American crisis of them all. Ironically, it will not be the State Department that picks this one up, since the country in question is not even an independent nation. It is what the promo- tional brochures are fond of calling "Puerto Rico, U.S.A." 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 posses- sions. Among their targets was the left-wing journal Pensamiento Critico, which had its typesetting equip- ment confiscated, along with the rollers from its print- ing press, and journalist Coqui Santaliz of the daily newspaper El Reportero. This piece of grand theater involved not only the FBI, but also the U.S. 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). It was os- tensibly about catching terrorists: to be precise, mem- bers of the clandestine Macheteros group accused of a $7 million Wells Fargo robbery in Connecticut in 1983. 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 inde- pendence and not anything else." 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 independ- ence movement. 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. investors flocking. The pro-statehood movement has run out of steam after last year's elec- tion defeat amid the continuing scandal of the 1978 Cerro Maravilla murders, when police shot two young independentistas. And opposition to Puerto Rico's key military role in U.S. Central America policy has given rise to the most broadly based mass opposition in many years. After the August 30 raids, Attorney General Ed Meese joined FBI Director William Webster at a Washington press conference, to announce that the ac- tion was "a signal to terrorists and their supporters that our response to their cowardly acts of violence will be decisive." If the currently weak independence move- ment 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 "interna- tional terrorism." S PEAKING OF WHICH, WE FEEL IT OUR duty to present more compelling evidence of the co- ordinated Soviet bloc campaign to subvert the Western hemisphere. Clearly Nicaragua is just the tip of the iceberg. On September 24, East German Deputy Foreign Minister Bernhard Neuebauer arrived in Ecuador to re- view "bilateral cooperation in the political, economic and technological sectors." Within 24 hours, the Soviet Am- bassador in Mexico, Rostilav Sergeyev, announced a cyn- ical ploy to exploit the country's devasting earthquake as a pretext for extending Soviet influence. Twenty-two tons of seaborne cargo, listed as "medicine, clothes and surgi- cal supplies and equipment" are scheduled to arrive, along with a "mobile hospital." East German officials, meanwhile, said they would dispatch 16 tons of "humanitarian aid." 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 be- tween the two countries." Administration officials should clearly be on their guard in the wake of this coordinated string of September events. At the very least, Blackbird spy planes should monitor the crates of so-called "medi- cal supplies" being delivered to Mexico. If that fails, then the president should surely stand ready to declare a na- tional emergency and an all-out trade embargo of Mexico, Ecuador and Brazil.
