Mr. Arafat, his wife and a coterie of close advisors, were personally pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars each year in tax transfers and kickbacks from state-controlled monopoly import contracts on virtually every basic commodity needed in Gaza and the West Bank.
The 1980 map of Latin America was largely one of authoritarian, often military governments, generally controlled by small oligarchies, with hyper-cyclical, commodity-based economies, nearly all plagued by huge debt and hyper-inflation.