The cartoonist recoiled when Mr. Mecham, in describing the reactions of a group of visiting Japanese businessmen, said their "eyes got round" when they heard how many golf courses the state had.

An attack on visiting American businessmen and the assassination of a prominent dissident here have caused fresh unease among critics of the Government, who say they fear a campaign of violence by conservative forces.

The previous Government, seeking to put a legitimate face on apartheid, coined words that defied their literal meanings, like homelands for places of exile, Immorality Act for a law prohibiting certain marriages and honorary whites for visiting Japanese businessmen.

The Russian leader, who arrived here on Thursday evening from his whirlwind tour of the American grain belt, spent a heady day visiting politicians, businessmen and just ordinary people and winning applause almost everywhere he went.

Clark was domiciled in a frame house in the outskirts of Bogotá, a safe house the CIA had set up a decade earlier, officially owned by a corporate front and generally rented out commercially to visiting American businessmen.

Anyone with hard currency - almost exclusively visiting Indian businessmen and their families, as well as the stray European backpacker or two - is encouraged to try his luck and leave behind as much of that hard currency as possible.

Up to five million people a year visit the county and non-Amish businessmen have erected vast souvenir palaces, replica farms, wax museums, cafeterias and gift shops to soak up the $350 million that the visitors are happy to spend each year.

Jack and Charlie's chief scam, in which they collaborate with two aspiring actresses posing as prostitutes, involves shaking down visiting Asian businessmen by dressing up as policemen and bursting into their hotel rooms.

Or the French intelligence services stealing American business secrets by planting moles in American companies and bugging the hotel rooms of visiting American businessmen?

Most nights Diamond Jim's piano bar is host to a mix of tourists, visiting businessmen and regulars who are all invited to sing pop tunes together in the elbow-to-elbow crush of the Victorian-style lounge.