Secrets lost and found

I have too much to do. I'm leaving in ten days. You'll probably be seeing a lot of blog entries in the next ten days. Related events?

Two things I came across/was led to tonight:

One, a Book: LONDON: CITY OF DISAPPEARANCES edited by Iain Sinclair. Review here. I don't know about the book, but the review, by Peter Ackroyd, makes me feel mysterious, lost, and a tiny bit shiveringly, delightfully, decrepit:

The city is built upon lost things. It is constructed in a literal sense on the ruins and debris of the past; it towers above forgotten underground rivers and discarded tunnels. It is built upon old graveyards and burial pits.

...The city devours its former incarnations, leaving not a wrack or wraith behind. It buries its dead, and forgets where they lie. That is the source of its strength and its power. The living will in any case soon enough pass into darkness. The city itself will always rise again. It will be renewed when those who read these words have utterly disappeared and been forgotten.

There are stories here of other lost people — not dead but forgotten, relics of a past London culture that faded in the way that everything in the city fades. It is, also, a city of failure and disappointment that are the same thing as absence. That is why many wish to lose themselves within it.

I want to lose myself in it, I do!

Two, an Admission: "Colombian senator acknowledges singing loyalty pledge to paramilitary groups"-- and he wasn't the only one:

BOGOTA, Colombia: A pro-government senator revealed Sunday that he and dozens of other politicians, some of them now members of the government, signed a loyalty pledge in 2001 to right-wing paramilitary warlords.

They were supposedly forced to sign the document at a meeting they were "ordered" to attend. Who knows. It's possible they were not willing accomplices, but at least one senator is accused by Colombia's Supreme Court of "murder for his role in 'organizing, promoting, arming and financing' a paramilitary massacre of 20 people in 2000."

The senator who admitted signing the agreement also stated that some of those implicated in the scandal may claim status as paramilitary members to take advantage of the lighter sentences and greater protection this status provides since the hopelessly, even offensively, misnamed Law of Justice and Peace passed in 2005.

Passed by many of the same members of Congress who now stand to benefit from its measures.

Decried as incredibly lenient by human rights activists, legal observers, and families of the paramilitaries' victims. As Amnesty International points out, the law offers greatly reduced sentences, no extradition (to the US - this is huge for the armed groups, who are often involved in drug trafficking as well), short (in a vast understatement) investigation times that in practice in a country with a 99% impunity rate will only result in fewer crimes being prosecuted, in short, a multitude of ills.

A year later, we know that many of those called "reinsertados" in Colombia are once again involved in illegal armed activities. A demobilization process with no teeth resulted in, surprise, a justice that was swallowed whole and a peace that is indigestible.