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Even so, the atmosphere remained quite tense; no one had forgotten that one of the embassy invaders had been killed in the vicious original Shootout. After gaining his freedom, Austria's Selzer warned that his colleagues were in "an extremely dangerous situation." At week's end the panel-truck negotiations continued, but the siege appeared to be settling in for a prolonged terrorist live-in.
Diplomats everywhere were all too aware that the Bogotá drama was only the latest in a long string of recent embassy seizures around the world. So far this year in Latin America alone, terrorists have stormed—and subsequently vacated, in one way or another—eight embassies, in El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, Mexico and Peru. In El Salvador alone, six embassies have been raided in the past ten months—and six others have closed down because of the high risk. Last month leftist guerrillas invaded the Spanish embassy in San Salvador and, systematically for ten days, traded hostages for freed political prisoners.
The U.S., as a pet target of leftist discontent, has been disproportionately victimized, even aside from Tehran. The State Department lists 254 significant terrorist attacks against U.S. diplomatic installations or individuals in the past decade. Five U.S. ambassadors have been killed in the past eleven years: the most recent was Ambassador to Afghanistan Adolph Dubs, who died a year ago when Soviet-advised Afghan police stormed the hotel room where he was being held captive by Muslim rebels. The most endangered envoys of all, however, are the Turks. Since 1973 ten Turkish diplomats or members of their families have been assassinated, despite some of the most elaborate security precautions of any diplomatic corps in the West. The killings have been claimed by Armenian separatists; many Turkish officials suspect that the real villains are Greek Cypriot terrorists.
Terror on embassy row is taking its toll on the morale of many career diplomats. "This has really become a very, very dangerous profession," says former U.S. Under Secretary of State Joseph Sisco. "Working for the foreign service is as hazardous as being a policeman," says a functionary at the Quai d'Orsay in Paris. "Why is it that everybody is outraged when a gendarme is killed, but hardly anybody notices when an embassy employee is shot in Madagascar?"