Jingle This Bitch
This coming summer, I'll be breaking one of my supposedly incontrovertible rules: Fuck South America, And All Such Noise. Look at any country down there, and you'll find a group of people who have at one point in time hacked dozens of pregnant women to death with machetes. Those same people will have a body count numbering in the hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands. They'll have tried to assassinate presidential candidates with varying degrees of success. They'll have crawled into bed with the rampant drug trade. They'll have added directly to unimaginable poverty, in places where when the unemployment rate drops, they mean it's moved from 53% to 52%. These horrifying, terrible people, absolute incarnations of evil on the face of the world, these are the people that the current government administration have slaughtered wholesale to take power.
And yet, this summer, I am visiting Colombia. A country that has, among other things, the two oldest still active political parties in the Americas, the Western Hemisphere's longest running armed conflict, a forgotten indigenous population, the only "lisping s" dialect of Spanish outside of Spain itself, and an economy that has been described as the "most aggressively expanding mid-level economy on Earth" (and that's even if you only count the legitimate enterprises). From the late 1970s to 2002, the city of Medellin's leading cause of death was heart disease. Nothing surprising there, until you remember that the specific heart disease was an ounce of hot lead punched right through that heart. That's right, they were the only place in the world that the leading cause of death was gun-related homicide. The most common profession in town was assassin. No joke. Really. There were tens of thousands of people who would murder another person for money, for roughly the equivalent of modern-day $45 American. And I haven't really talked about the Biblical clusterfuck that is the Colombian cocaine trade. Or it's rocky political climate. For fuck's sake until July 5, 1991 the country still adhered to the NAPOLEONIC CODE. That's right, Napoleon! This country brought us John Leguizamo for Christ's sake, it is not God's country. In fact, the only thing that country has brought us in the past 450 years that is universally heart-warming is the singer Shakira's ass.
Why am I going, do you ask? Well, I know some people down in Bogota, and some other people in Cali, which are about the two safe places for white people to visit. I speak the language. In fact, I learned Spanish from Colombians. A massive history, Colombia has been a nation for longer than the USA. Well, not in it's current form anyway, Venezuela, Panama, and Ecuador all used to be lumped into one nation with Colombia called New Granada. There is a huge culture down there. Hell, the popular television show Ugly Betty is a translation of the long-running, award winning Colombian telenovela Betty la Fea. These people perfected the salsa, rumba, and cumbia, which are among the most sexy things a person can do that doesn't involve nakedness. Oh and coffee. The fucking coffee. I wouldn't kill a man for a cup of genuine Colombian brew, but I'd sure think about it. All told, I'm 98% certain that I'm in like flint. I know the people, the culture, the politics. I know what to talk about, I know what not to talk about. I know how to do all of those things in their language. I know where to go, I know where to avoid. As far as tourists go, I can go to a hostile nation and make it back unkidnapped. Hell I even know that kidnapping is less of a problem in Colombia because a lieutenant in the Medellin Cartel named Jorge Ochoa formed a death squad called Muerte a Sequestradores (Death to Kidnappers), because someone kidnapped his daughter back in '87. Why did he do that? Because he said ransom was for white people. They killed about 1500 kidnappers over the course of about 3 days, and his daughter was safely returned to him. That's how much I know about those people, I grew up on these stories.
Why am I worried? Because I'm not the only one going. I think as many as 6 other people might end up going along with me. White people. White American people. A group not known for their cultural sensitivity, or their ability to shut the fuck up. I offer no exaggeration when I state that if they piss off the wrong person, we'll end up in an Amazonian mass grave without our hands, feet, or heads (they take those with them to frustrate efforts to identify remains). That's the good option. The other one involves years of being held as a hostage by guerrillas desperately hoping for a ransom from an American government that refuses to negotiate with terrorists. Eventually, assuming we don't die from the rigors of being force-marched through the Amazon while being continuously tortured (not because the guerrillas care about any information a tourist might have, they just get bored after 10 months in the jungle), the Colombian Army will find and "liberate" us. 7 times out of 10, the Colombian Army will kill some or all of the hostages, and blame it on the guerrillas, just to make sure that their friends in the CIA see the body count and remain appropriately furious with the guerrillas, and so don't cut off foreign aid payments. After all, what is Washington going to say about a night-time firefight in overgrown jungle 3000 miles away? How are we going to know who shot our citizens? The guerrillas have the same weapons the Army does. This is not really high on my list of way to go out.
And yet, this summer, I am visiting Colombia. A country that has, among other things, the two oldest still active political parties in the Americas, the Western Hemisphere's longest running armed conflict, a forgotten indigenous population, the only "lisping s" dialect of Spanish outside of Spain itself, and an economy that has been described as the "most aggressively expanding mid-level economy on Earth" (and that's even if you only count the legitimate enterprises). From the late 1970s to 2002, the city of Medellin's leading cause of death was heart disease. Nothing surprising there, until you remember that the specific heart disease was an ounce of hot lead punched right through that heart. That's right, they were the only place in the world that the leading cause of death was gun-related homicide. The most common profession in town was assassin. No joke. Really. There were tens of thousands of people who would murder another person for money, for roughly the equivalent of modern-day $45 American. And I haven't really talked about the Biblical clusterfuck that is the Colombian cocaine trade. Or it's rocky political climate. For fuck's sake until July 5, 1991 the country still adhered to the NAPOLEONIC CODE. That's right, Napoleon! This country brought us John Leguizamo for Christ's sake, it is not God's country. In fact, the only thing that country has brought us in the past 450 years that is universally heart-warming is the singer Shakira's ass.
Why am I going, do you ask? Well, I know some people down in Bogota, and some other people in Cali, which are about the two safe places for white people to visit. I speak the language. In fact, I learned Spanish from Colombians. A massive history, Colombia has been a nation for longer than the USA. Well, not in it's current form anyway, Venezuela, Panama, and Ecuador all used to be lumped into one nation with Colombia called New Granada. There is a huge culture down there. Hell, the popular television show Ugly Betty is a translation of the long-running, award winning Colombian telenovela Betty la Fea. These people perfected the salsa, rumba, and cumbia, which are among the most sexy things a person can do that doesn't involve nakedness. Oh and coffee. The fucking coffee. I wouldn't kill a man for a cup of genuine Colombian brew, but I'd sure think about it. All told, I'm 98% certain that I'm in like flint. I know the people, the culture, the politics. I know what to talk about, I know what not to talk about. I know how to do all of those things in their language. I know where to go, I know where to avoid. As far as tourists go, I can go to a hostile nation and make it back unkidnapped. Hell I even know that kidnapping is less of a problem in Colombia because a lieutenant in the Medellin Cartel named Jorge Ochoa formed a death squad called Muerte a Sequestradores (Death to Kidnappers), because someone kidnapped his daughter back in '87. Why did he do that? Because he said ransom was for white people. They killed about 1500 kidnappers over the course of about 3 days, and his daughter was safely returned to him. That's how much I know about those people, I grew up on these stories.
Why am I worried? Because I'm not the only one going. I think as many as 6 other people might end up going along with me. White people. White American people. A group not known for their cultural sensitivity, or their ability to shut the fuck up. I offer no exaggeration when I state that if they piss off the wrong person, we'll end up in an Amazonian mass grave without our hands, feet, or heads (they take those with them to frustrate efforts to identify remains). That's the good option. The other one involves years of being held as a hostage by guerrillas desperately hoping for a ransom from an American government that refuses to negotiate with terrorists. Eventually, assuming we don't die from the rigors of being force-marched through the Amazon while being continuously tortured (not because the guerrillas care about any information a tourist might have, they just get bored after 10 months in the jungle), the Colombian Army will find and "liberate" us. 7 times out of 10, the Colombian Army will kill some or all of the hostages, and blame it on the guerrillas, just to make sure that their friends in the CIA see the body count and remain appropriately furious with the guerrillas, and so don't cut off foreign aid payments. After all, what is Washington going to say about a night-time firefight in overgrown jungle 3000 miles away? How are we going to know who shot our citizens? The guerrillas have the same weapons the Army does. This is not really high on my list of way to go out.