A Few Red Ghosts

The right-wing government of Bolivia announced last week that 119 people attached to the Soviet embassy in La Paz were being asked to leave the country. What were so many Russians doing in La Paz in the first place? Well, some technicians had been giving the Bolivians advice on oil and mining, and one man had been serving as conductor of the national symphony orchestra. But what else? Bolivian officials unmistakably implied that the Russians had also been financing leftist terrorist activity. The matter, said Foreign Minister Mario Gutierrez was "a question of sovereignty."

The Soviet embassy had been allowed to grow indiscriminately during the left-wing regime of President Juan Jose Torres, who was overthrown last August in a coup led by his successor, Hugo Banzer Suarez. But not quite as indiscriminately, it seems, as the Bolivians thought. At week's end, the Soviets insisted that the embassy's total head count, including families, came to only 92. "A few Red ghosts will have to be invented," one Russian diplomat concluded, "if we are to comply with the government's request."

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