World Notes DIPLOMACY

Forgive George Shultz if he is eager to get home. After the Secretary of State flew to La Paz last week, suspected drug lords detonated a bomb as his motorcade drove into the Bolivian capital. The dynamite blast missed Shultz's armored Cadillac but shattered the windows of several cars, including the one carrying his wife Helena. Unintimidated, Shultz delivered a speech that praised the government's new anticocaine measures.

Shultz proceeded to Quito, Ecuador, to attend the inauguration of incoming President Rodrigo Borja. But there he found that left-wing politicians had installed a blatantly anti-U.S. mural in the meeting hall of the Ecuadorian Congress, where the swearing-in ceremony was to take place. Among the mural's features: a skull wearing a Nazi-like helmet emblazoned with the initials CIA. Shultz showed up anyway. "As to the insult to the United States," he said, getting in the last word, "I don't appreciate it."