The Soviet Government has advanced several arguments to justify walking out of the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) negotiations on November 23 of last year and proceeding with its so-called “counterdeployments.” Each is misleading and self-serving and requires a response.

One such argument is that the introduction of the Pershing IIs and Ground-Launched Cruise Missiles (GLCMs) had the effect of upsetting an existing parity in Europe and, in fact, is the first step toward the establishment of U.S. superiority.

When, during the invasion of Grenada, Secretary of State George Schultz announced that newsmen were no longer “on our side,” he was correct. It's a far, far different world with wars far different from World War II, when our civilization was threatened and it would have been treason for a newsman to report from the “other side.” As a youth in the Pacific theatre of that war I saw my first foreign correspondent: He was uniformed and could have been a general.

It all began to change during Korea; not all newsmen were accredited in that United Nations war. When, in April, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson ordered the U.S. Marines and 82nd Airborne ashore in the Dominican Republic, some of us went ashore with the first wave of Marines. Daily we crossed the Marines’ lines to cover the rebel side of the war.

Paraguay is the least-known nation of the Americas. It comes as no surprise, then, that the thirtieth anniversary of the longest surviving modern-day head of state, General Alfredo Stroessner, should have occurred this past May with a minimum of international media coverage.

Stroessner rose to power via a military coup in May, 1954, and by July had been nominated the Colorado party candidate in a one-candidate election. The primary determinant of social and political relations in Paraguay, however, is the state of siege sustained by Stroessner since that time. The “facade of legality which the regime presents”— to borrow from a 1978 Amnesty International report—is achieved by invoking Article 79 of the 1967 Constitution, which, renewed every ninety days, provides for the declaration of a state of emergency and suspends constitutional safeguards against violations of basic civil and human rights.