Along Embassy Lane

PLEASE UNDERSTAND—it is not pleasant to be cooped up for weeks inside an embassy,” said Commander Rojas, the man at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who is in charge of all press information on exiles…. “This is Dante’s Inferno,’’ a friend told me over the phone from the French Embassy, where she had exiled herself with her four children. (Exiles are, by the way, strictly forbidden to make telephone calls.)… “It’s really nice here,” said a 19-year-old Mirista over the phone to his girl friend, who had seen him across the Mexican Embassy’s railings and thought he had gained too much weight.

But whether hellish, sad, or entertaining, life certainly became lively for the diplomatic corps and their unexpected guests on September 11, the day of the coup. Argentina’s Embassy, with its 1,500 or so square yards, is large, but not mammoth enough to house the nearly 700 exiles it had at one point. Diplomatic parties had to be held elsewhere; curtains and upholstery will have to be replaced; the lovely garden was totally destroyed. The downtown chancellery of one Western European embassy, although it has little extra space during office hours and has only one shower (cold water), at one point sheltered 58 exiles—to the disgust of most of the employees, who do not share the socialist leanings of their ambassador. Panama and West Germany, among others, rented separate houses to contain the avalanche, and all the embassies have had to hire an array of exasperated cooks and maids.

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Nena Ossa

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PLEASE UNDERSTAND—it is not pleasant to be cooped up for weeks inside an embassy,” said Commander Rojas, the man at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who is in charge of all press information on exiles…. “This is Dante’s Inferno,’’ a friend told me over the phone from the French Embassy, where she had exiled herself with her four children. (Exiles are, by the way, strictly forbidden to make telephone calls.)… “It’s really nice here,” said a 19-year-old Mirista over the phone to his girl friend, who had seen him across the Mexican Embassy’s railings and thought he had gained too much weight.

But whether hellish, sad, or entertaining, life certainly became lively for the diplomatic corps and their unexpected guests on September 11, the day of the coup. Argentina’s Embassy, with its 1,500 or so square yards, is large, but not mammoth enough to house the nearly 700 exiles it had at one point. Diplomatic parties had to be held elsewhere; curtains and upholstery will have to be replaced; the lovely garden was totally destroyed. The downtown chancellery of one Western European embassy, although it has little extra space during office hours and has only one shower (cold water), at one point sheltered 58 exiles—to the disgust of most of the employees, who do not share the socialist leanings of their ambassador. Panama and West Germany, among others, rented separate houses to contain the avalanche, and all the embassies have had to hire an array of exasperated cooks and maids.