Colombian Army investigated for role in 2005 Colombia Peace Community massacre

The wounds from this horrific event were still fresh when we visited in October 2006, and the community was still very much under attack by the armed forces, be they paramilitary, guerrilla, or official army.

The Congress is still considering aid to Colombia and whether to sign a so-called "free trade" agreement with Colombia.

Reuters is reporting that "Colombia plans to buy new helicopters and aircraft and send more troops to counter rebels after approving a $3.7 billion, four-year investment plan to upgrade its military...to consolidate a U.S.-backed crackdown on Marxist rebels. Washington has funneled around $4 billion in mainly military aid to Colombia since 2000, helping key ally President Alvaro Uribe battle the drug trade that partly fuels Latin America's oldest guerrilla war." '

This is bullshit, of course, but it's official bullshit. Taken in the context of the clip below, it doesn't quite add up, now does it? But then, we're not terribly concerned about making good policy sense when the terms "drug war" or "terrorism" come up.

Apparently for now most of this "surge" will be funded by a proposed tax on the wealthy and on companies, but at the same time the Bush administration wants to approve another $3.9 billion over seven years for Colombia. Currently Colombia receives the most US foreign aid of any country outside the middle east. Fortunately for the Colombian populace in the countryside, the people who suffer the most whenever the civil war flares up or moves to a new front, Democrats in Congress are not buying this wholesale due to the recent paramilitary scandal that has put eight Uribe politicians and a former police chief in jail for ties to the Ps. Demobilization hasn't turned out to be all it was cracked up to be...

clipped from www.amnestyusa.org

Amnesty International Welcomes Advances in Investigations Into 2005 Colombia Peace Community Massacre

The Colombian army soldiers who are under investigation reportedly belong to the Alacrán Company of the Counter-Guerrilla Battalion No. 33 of the XVII Brigade. The massacre reportedly occurred in the context of a large military operation in the area.

Amnesty International welcomes news that Colombia's Office of the Attorney General is investigating 69 army soldiers for the killings on February 21, 2005, of eight members of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, including community leader, Luis Eduardo Guerra, two children aged 11 and 6, and an 18-month-old infant.

More than 160 members of the Peace Community have been killed or "disappeared" with impunity in the last 10 years. In light of the killings, Amnesty International said the announcement of the investigation into the massacre could represent an important step forward in seeking redress for some of the victims.

To my Reader

I think part of my share of the bounty is just lost. And I kind of like that.

clipped from blindcopy.blogspot.com

The real reason why no one reads your (my) blog.

Ever wonder why the traffic to your blog is so terrible? I too am concerned about increasing my readership, so I decided to gather some information to help me decipher why my traffic sucks.

What I found wasn’t encouraging.

Consider the following facts:

There are approximately 6.5 billion people in the world.

Only 16%of the world’s population (1 billion people) have internet access.

16% of the world’s population is illiterate, which leaves only 840 million readers.

Of that, only 20% of the world’s population speaks English, leaving 168 million readers.

Only 30% of internet users read blogs, leaving 50 million readers.

50 million people, sounds like a lot right? Wrong!

Technorati is currently tracking around 50 million blogs.

That’s pretty simple math, 50 million blogs for 50 million readers.

Therefore, with an average of only 1 reader per blog, then who’s reading your blog?

That’s right, just you. Depressing, ain’t it?

we love our "news!"

3/5 of the most e-mailed stories of the day from the AJC are sports-related. I'm just saying.

1 of the 5 is celebrity gossip, and one is traffic-related -- not surprisingly since all of a sudden "traffic" and "congestion" are top news-getters in Atlanta nearly every day.

• Georgia player's mom killed; fiancé arrested
• Kerney set to become a free agent
• Traffic problems expected Saturday
• Former NBA Star Dennis Johnson Dies
• Blogger Sued Over Topless Aniston Photo

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Have you ever noticed how everything is clearer under water? I wish my shower could last all day. It's where I get my best ideas, feel most creative, can accomplish any and everything. Then I turn off the spigot, and the energy turns off with it. Spirals down the drain. My only consolation is that the plumbing in this old shack is horrid. It's all probably still in there, somewhere.

Midterms are next week, thus the extremely rare blog post. Yesterday the army finally cleared "Private Presley's" crap from the driveway. What passes for a big day in my life...

This week I'm mildly obsessed with personality types according to the Jung-based Myers-Briggs test. Slim there picked up a book we're both reading called "Do What You Are" that is supposed to help you pick a fulfilling career based on your type. I think over time I've gone back and forth between and INFP ("the idealist") and an ENFP ("the inspirer") -- it's pretty revealing stuff for reeking slightly of pop pysch. What are you? Take the test here.

article of my week

"Refugees Find Hostility and Hope on Soccer Field" -- amazing story. Nice to see it's the top e-mailed story of the week for the Times, as well. Clarkston soccer team made up entirely of refugee kids. Below, a few excerpts.

About Clarkston:
"From 1996 to 2001, more than 19,000 refugees from around the world resettled in Georgia, many in Clarkston and surrounding DeKalb County, to the dismay of many longtime residents."

About the coach:
"Coach Mufleh’s car is also an equipment locker, and her work continues off the field. “You suddenly have a family of 120,” she says.

Upon hearing of the low wages the refugee women were earning, Ms. Mufleh thought she could do better. She started a house and office cleaning company called Fresh Start, to employ refugee women. The starting salary is $10 an hour, nearly double the minimum wage and more than the women were earning as maids in downtown hotels. She guarantees a 50-cent raise every year, and now employs six refugee women. "

About the kids:
"In 1997, in the midst of Liberia’s 14 years of civil war, rebels led by Charles Taylor showed up one night at the Ziatys’ house in Monrovia. Jeremiah’s father was a low-level worker in a government payroll office. The rebels thought he had money. When they learned he did not, they killed him in the family’s living room."

"“What makes us work as a team is we all want to win bad — we want to be the best team around,” Qendrim says. “It’s like they’re all from my own country,” he adds of his teammates. “They’re my brothers.”"

About the field:
"Ms. Mufleh and Ms. Ediger, the team manager, spend the holiday vacation visiting the players’ families. On Dec. 26, Ms. Mufleh receives a fax on Town of Clarkston letterhead."

"Effectively immediately, the fax informs her, the Fugees soccer team is no longer welcome to play at Milam Park. The city is handing the field to a youth sports coordinator who plans to run a youth baseball and football program."

Are you a Cultural Creative?

About 50 million Americans are. Go here to find out.

I learned of this demographic subgroup reading "The State of Non-Profit America." Salamon states

Cultural Creatives differ from both "Modern" and Traditionalists," the other two dominant population groups in America, by virtue of their preference for holistic thinking, their cosmopolitanism, their social activism, and the insistence on find a better balance between work and personal values than the Moderns seem to have found. Although they have yet to develop a full self-consciousness, Cultural Creatives are powerfully attracted to the mission orientation of the non-profit sector and could well help to resolve some of the sector's human resource challenges.

Demographer Paul Ray, who coined the term, has this to say on his website:

While Cultural Creatives are a subculture, they lack one critical ingredient in their lives: awareness of themselves as a whole people. We call them the Cultural Creatives precisely because they are already creating a new culture. If they could see how promising this creativity is for all of us, if they could know how large their numbers are, many things might follow. These optimistic, altruistic millions might be willing to speak more frankly in public settings and act more directly in shaping a new way of life for our time and the time ahead. They might lead the way toward an Integral Culture.

The same site has a nice list of books/websites on the subject of "living lightly."

MARTA-dreaming

Gwinnett, which approved MARTA in theory but refused to pay for it back in the 1970s, may get another chance. As a new convert to the Gwinnett concept, forgive me for getting excited about this! Article in today's AJC here.

Other asides:
On the train home tonight, a large group of mostly bleached blondes discussed how much their kids love riding MARTA (they like to bounce, said one.) I thought the ringleader was going to etch the window glass with her enormous rock.

Which brings me to another observation. When did it become practically obligatory to give a girl a diamond if you wanted her to make you coffee (or vice-versa, in my particular case) for the next several decades? There's a definite generation gap. With mine and the thiry-somethings I know, they all sport shiny left ring fingers, and the hand-talkers pose a definite risk to their conversation partners.

Now that I've (somewhat ambivalently regarding the ring, full-heartedly as far as what it represents) joined this club (with a conflict-free ring, way to go Slim!), I've taken to noticing other womens' entries. Because make no mistake, it is a contest. The way my gal pal grabbed my hand and clutched it to her chest the first time she saw it (her own is more overwhelming) said it all. It's like those decoder rings that came in cereal boxes when we were kids -- they are keys to hidden, mysterious worlds, and it didn't matter how much granola you have to eat to get one, it's all about the ring. For some people anyway.

For the Colombian women I knew, especially displaced Colombian women, the ring was more of a barrier wrapped up in an access code. It was the key to a club they did not belong to. These women had lost everything, often including their husbands. Yet somehow they were still able to listen to my happy shiny story and smile. Maybe that's what every bit of metal and stone wrapped around the fourth finger says: ask me how it happened, and I'll glow.

Reason # 2 why I'm ring-obsessed: this week I'm picking up vestiges of a much sadder story, to be sold on ebay. I wonder who would buy a failed attempt at happily ever after? ... Maybe someone who knows that the attempt to lasso some kind of forever happy is capable of dissolvin in a moment, only to solidify once more with a look. And that behind every look, each touch, all the stray words and silent deeds is the choice to love and be loved.

quit dreaming and get a life

In "Mixed response on rail funds," in the AJC last week, passenger rail advocacy group GARP describes its modest proposal for commuter rail: $62 million to fund the Lovejoy line, $38 million to take it to Griffin, and $10 million to start work on the Athens<-->Atlanta segment.

According to GARP, at $62 million, these lines of rail would cost less than two miles of a six-lane highway.

But when the group sent its proposal to our elected officials in the state legislature, they got this reply from state Rep. Don Lakly (R-Fayette County). "Please don't tell me how many folks will use public transportation; they just will not. Quit dreaming and get a life!"

It's good to see Southern civility is alive and well down at the Capitol.

With apologies to Willie -- to all the cats I've loved before

To all the cats I've loved before
Who traveled in and out my door
I'm glad they came along
I dedicate this song
To all the cats I've loved before

To all the cats I've loved before
The winds of change are always blowing
And every time I try to stay
The winds of change continue blowing
And they just carry me away

To all the cats who shared the foot of my bed
Who now are someone else's cats, or dead
I'm glad they came along
I dedicate this song
To all the cats we've loved before

I must be getting old -- I always want to start blogging with a mini weather update -- it's foggy today, with chances of missing kitties. I can't believe I left the garage door open all night! My bike was still there when I got up this morning, but Fats was gone.

The stricken feeling I got made me realize I sometimes pretend to be sorry about things, like putting the knives pointy side up in the dishwasher, but this was the real thing. Fats, aka Kiki (after that annoying WestEnder whose screechy voice and clawing ways reminded me of the new kitty), had been afraid to crawl out from the tiny corner in the garage between a cardboard box and a tire all week. Two days ago I started trying to get Kiki to venture outside the garage. Last night I guess he did.

I had picked him up from the WE house Sunday, at the X's request. I had three cats when I left for Colombia last January. Only Kiki was left when I got back. Sammy disappeared a few weeks after Max died a horrible death at the jaws of some neighborhood dog gang. I was more shaken by it than I'd expected, cried about it for weeks.

Poor Sammy...they were pals, hanging out together for seven years since we brought them home from the shelter. Their little animal personalities developed with each other as the foil -- Sammy was always the timid one, while Max was funny and outgoing. Sammy was always my favorite -- his skittish ways and pitiful mews were so endearing.

Baby Kitty (I clearly didn't name this one) showed up one Halloween night, then disappeared after hopping into the back of X's truck one afternoon and leaping out right before he merged onto the highway, nothing but a kitty-shaped streak in the rear-view mirror.


But I've lost a lot of cats in my day. First Mustard, then Custard, then Pepper and Salt. Kitcat disappeared, his brother Milky Way lived a long life before expiring recently, and the mother of them all, Dora (for the way she always seemed to be on the doorstep when your hands were full of groceries). I dunno, maybe I'm all catted out.

Life in Lilburn

It's been a while since I had anything blog-worthy to say, if ever I did (never send your blog to your brothers). Then this morning my reflection in the mirror asked me what I'm waiting for -- if I want to write, I should write. The past two weeks are a blur, but I feel like my head is finally spinning back around, slowing down as it settles in.

Life in Lilburn...idyllic, yet isolated. It's the United Nations out here, without the interpreters and infighting. Our ice cream truck man (yes, there is an ice cream truck man, Virginia) wears the garb of the Nation of Islam as he passes out the melting treats to kids from India and Mexico, while their black, white, and mixed neighbors look on. Growing up in a very segregated DeKalb neighborhood, moving to an even more segregated West End Atlanta neighborhood, it's hard for me to believe.

And none of this was planned. White flight hit Gwinnett and turned out, in my eyes at least, to be a blessing. Not even a blessing in disguise, just one wearing an outfit that was unexpected, even exotic, to the white southerners who lived here before. Today Gwinnett is "Georgia’s largest and most diverse public school system with more than 100 different languages spoken in our schools..." Gwinnett promoters can brag that their school system "consistently outperforms our peer systems in the state and ranks among the best school systems in the nation in achievement." (Link to full article)
What created this human splatter, this array of languages, dress, and yummy food? Most of Atlanta ranks among the country's worst for residential segregation. It's changed so much since I was a kid, but it's still huge. Out here (I always call it that -- Slim loves it), out here, the housing is cheap and schools are good. Sure, people spend too much time in their cars and no one walks anywhere, but I'm starting to understand why people choose to live "out here" and to be less judgmental about that decision.

But given how much Gwinnett has changed, there's no reason why "out here" has to remain so isolated. We live three miles from the nearest bus stop. No one in the metro area should live three miles away from the nearest bus! I just got my bike back from my sister, but would never even consider riding down Lawrenceville Highway. So I have to use the sidewalks -- illegal, yes, but potentially lifesaving as well. And every time I ride the bus I hear people complaining about how long it takes them to get downtown. It's 25 minutes in a car with no traffic (which happens once a week, on Sundays) but about two hours by bike to Gwinnett County transit bus stop to Doraville MARTA station to Five Points, or an hour and a half by bike to the Indian Trail park and ride to Gwinnett County Express Bus to Five Points.

My bike, how I love it...

If Gwinnett were to approve the MARTA sales tax (or another funding mechanism), it could finally get the train station and quick access to metro area public transportation this diverse, thriving metro county deserves.

Recent article in AJC -- "Another look at MARTA rail: Board representative asks for feasibility study on bringing system to county" By PAUL DONSKY, , BEN SMITH

A group of Gwinnett County leaders is pushing for an extension of MARTA's rapid rail line to the booming area, 16 years after county voters soundly rejected a plan to join the regional transit system. Officials with the Gwinnett Village Community Improvement District, which spans the Norcross and Lilburn areas, say the issue deserves to be revisited because the county has changed dramatically since the last MARTA referendum in 1990. Gwinnett's population has more than doubled, and its traffic problems now rival the nation's worst bottlenecks.

Public comments on the article here. The first comment (and a fairly typical one) reads:

By Stephen W December 6, 2006 05:19 PM | YES! Please bring MARTA into lower Gwinnett’s booming areas!

It’s time to move past the old racist arguments that it will bring crime. Anyone who’s actually been on a MARTA train will tell you that riders aren’t loaded down with stolen DVD players and Plasma TVs —Yes Gwinnett, let’s move into the 21st Century and say YES to this one!

image of Gwinnett County Courthouse, by architect Edmund Lind, from the GA Encyclopedia

la despedida

Colombia called. Said they'd call back, no message.

Photos from the massive going away blast:

Ellie, don't kill me for posting this - it's so cute! And I asked David's permission...

Goodnight

I wrote an (*ahem) beautiful post about my people here and what a lovely last day it's been in Bogota, but it got deleted somehow. Given what passes for sleep for me lately, that's not a big surprise.

I probably dragged out what I wanted to say anyway. Just this: home is where the people you love live, and you can have more than one. My home in Atlanta is where Slim sleeps, waiting patiently for me as he has all year, but Bogota will whisper softly to me in the night from time to time, so long as the people I came to know and love live here. I miss you all already. Goodnight!

ow. it hurts to leave.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): "Connections are made slowly; sometimes they grow underground," writes Marge Piercy in her book *Circles in the Water.* "You cannot tell always by looking what is happening. More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet." Piercy advises us to use this strategy in our own lives. "Penetrate quietly as the earthworm. Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden. Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar. Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in, a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside, but to us interconnected with burrows and lairs." It so happens, Taurus, that this is the perfect astrological oracle for you, beginning now and throughout 2007.

(Brezsny's horoscopes)

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I started out quietly, sitting and watching, waiting for Colombia to show itself to me. Today I have a Colombia-shaped stain on my shirt, embedded in the fibers, odorless except for a faint whiff of cut grass and sweetly rotting fruit, but soft to the touch, and warm, so warm. I wonder if it will launder out.

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"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." -Max Planck, Nobel Prize-winning physicist

most emailed articles

I'm going to start a new recurring item: most emailed article of the day, on the theory that this says something about the current preoccupations, interests, and fears of the online news reading population.

Today's most emailed article from the Atlanta Journal and Constitution is, tellingly, in the business section: "Low-key, laid-back Jekyll Island targeted by developers." I found this out by emailing it myself, and after getting a little worked up by the article itself, I was somewhat comforted by the realization that others were interested in what was happening, or what will happen, as well. Hard to say what direction the interest goes in this case -- our *great state has been selling off state parks for years (see Stone Mountain, never a bastion of democracy, now a private sugary "historic" park).

If you grew up in Georgia, you probably have fond memories of a school trip to Jekyll Island's 4-H club, the way I do. I could never forget the Great Blue Herons that sprung, startled and wild from their nesting place above a swamp pond, or the look in our instructor's eyes when he told us that the sight was growing rarer and rarer. I can still taste the prickly pear's surprisingly sweet purple flesh, and feel the sting of the spines I hadn't removed in my haste to get to the fruit they protect.

Prickly pears...one of nature's secret delights. Removing the spines is laborious, something only a child has the time or interest to undertake. But the juicy interior's flavor clings to your tongue, leaving its taste in your mouth long after the buds have faded. It's not for everyone, but it's accessible to all who care to explore it.

I wish Jekyll had spines like that.

Eat. Words.

www.lacucaracha.com

I hate to do this, I really do. I ran across a column by David Brooks in the Times from two years ago that made me reconsider my passionate *ahem, dislike of his column. I'm a big girl, fully able to admit when she's been not 100% correct (known in the reality-based community as being "wrong"), so today I'm going to quote from and link to...gasp...a column by David Brooks, my second least-favorite New York Times columnist. Any guesses on the first?

The title, "The American Dream", comes from a Samuel Huntington (a good nemesis if anyone out there is looking for one) quote from one of his later broadsides against modern-day America: "There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English." Get this guy a time capsule, he's crumbling before our eyes.

You have to give Huntington a break -- remember he was stopped illegally and then felt up by that racist cop in Los Angeles, and ever since has been struggling with feelings of anger towards...wait, I think that was "Crash." Huntington, on the other hand, has no excuse for the pseudo-academic nonsense he's been spouting for the past twenty years. Maybe he's truly concerned with the demise of his "Anglo-Protestant society." I just don't know where it ever existed in the first place. The only truly American art forms are jazz and hip-hop, and Eminem and Michael Bolton not withstanding, neither is exactly a bedrock of Anglo-Protestant influence.

But back to Brooks, whose columns I normally enjoy ripping apart. In this one, though, he really gets it right. I think in light of the national debate over immigration policies, it's worth re-reading.

We are bound together because we Americans share a common conception of the future. History is not cyclical for us. Progress does not come incrementally, but can be achieved in daring leaps. That mentality burbles out of Hispanic neighborhoods, as any visitor can see.

Huntington is right that Mexican-Americans lag at school. But that's in part because we've failed them. Our integration machinery is broken. But if we close our borders to new immigration, you can kiss goodbye the new energy, new tastes and new strivers who want to lunge into the future.

That's the real threat to the American creed.

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wrenched

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. —Martin Luther King, Jr.

I believe that, but it's clear that not everyone does. Take the guy who shook his head angrily, not even willing to respond to my "excuse me, sir, but I think I'm lost" last week at the state government complex. And maybe it's not even true, but I choose this belief in the hope that it matters what we believe, hoping these choices make our lives richer, sweeter, and just generally more like ice cream (with apologies to Simply Wait).

I say goodbye to this country, to this year of my life, in one week. More than anything else, I feel wrenched. Knowing you're going to be in a place for such a finite yet intermediate period of time, at my age, you don't settle in too hard. You buy a bed, but maybe not the most comfortable one. You need curtains, so you pick up some cloth in the 75% off bin at a fabric store. You make friends, but keep most of them at a distance.

So it's almost a relief to realize you did live here, after all. For me the realization set in when I had an aha! moment last weekend. It was Saturday morning, too early after a late night waiting for the incredibly resonant club across the street to close. Just like every Saturday morning, I was awakened by a man selling something, that much was always clear, but just what I could never tell. The informal economy is huge in Bogota; since there are so few formal sector jobs to be had, people buy things in bulk or make crafts and sell them on the street, usually developing a sing-song jangle to advertise their wares. This Saturday, I crossed what felt like a significant signpost, just as I'm preparing to leave: I finally understood what this man was selling. Now I can buy "bolsas para la basura" (how embarrassing for me that it turned out to be so simple) any weekend morning I want.

Wrenched is the best word I can think of to describe this feeling. Twisted and turned til I don't stick here anymore, from one culture back to another. This morning a friend's English students interviewed me for a class project. They all wanted to know how my initial impressions of Colombia changed after I got here. All I remember is being terribly apprehensive | oh my god, did Macondo just open? It's after midnight on a schoolnight! I take it all back, I can't wait to split. Menea, menea... | and really having no idea what to expect. I knew it wasn't like the depictions in Hollywood movies (one has Bogota surrounded completely by jungle) but I didn't have anything concrete to replace those images I'd deleted.

Next week, I go back to something recognizable, but equally opaque in some ways. Exciting, cause it feels like anything could happen. Nerve-wracking, because it feels like anything could happen. And all I'm taking back with me is the belief I started out with, possibly lifted from a late-night made for tv movie, that we're all connected somehow. An inescapable network of mutuality. That and the ice cream. I'll always have the ice cream.

Jingly jangly

I just figured it out. Why everything Christmas is so damn appealing to me right now: I don't have a job. While this puts a bit of a chink in my gift-buying routine, it also means this: I don't have an office.

Which means this: I don't have co-workers.

Which means this: No office party.

Read what The Cynical Girl has to say about that.

Unless, unless! I put in an appearance at Slim's (former co-workers being worlds less annoying than current ones) and I'm guessing no one asks me to make a copy in the middle of carving the turkey this year. But I exaggerate. Wildly.

No discussion of what to do for the office party, as if we were allowed to exercise judgment and do a single thing different from the year before. Meetings of the DOJ "kitty committee," as we were reluctantly known, a forced labor arrangement that involved purchasing large quantities of bagels, then putting up with the snotty attorney who simply must have her favorite flavor, and with the right kind of cream cheese, or she's destroyed...where was I? Oh yes, the "kitty committee" meetings are designed to maximize your migraine: three hours later, "now about the decorations - what did we do last year? Did we have lights or candles, I can't remember..."

Attending your fiancee's office party by choice, in all seriousness, is a different beast entirely from having to attend your own. I can drink too much and insult the boss (not too far from an ordinary work day at DOJ) and no fear of being fired. Who am I kidding, his boss is great and drinking gets me all sappy and silly. Well, no fear of facing people I got ridiculous in front of the night before, anyway. Small blessings are the best kind.

So. Here in Colombia, I'm insanely attracted to every single blinking light, every hint of possible jingly bells like music (so far, nothing), every family-oriented pastiche of holiday bliss, each whiff of cinnamon in the air. It's revolting.

Christmas last year, Dad's foot on film.

I love collecting, then wrapping, gifts. It's like when I was a kid and was always bribing Kathleen to play the packing game. Putting things into boxes has a strange meditative quality for me. Maybe I can get one of those jobs wrapping other people's gifts at the mall! It's clearly a symptom of my disease that I typed that sentence, click-clacking happily away. The mall. Good lord, it's worse than I thought.

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.

Father Roy, founder SOA Watch

For some reason I felt compelled to check the AJC this morning. I haven't read it in months, so I'm not sure why today. On the front page is a link to this story about Father Roy Bourgeois, founder of SOA Watch and lifelong opponent of the US military training Latin American soldiers. I'm not often much impressed by the writing in our local rag, but this article really got to me. The reporter captures something about Father Roy that other articles I've read about the SOA watch did not. Check it out -- good Sunday reading: The protester-priest of Fort Benning.

Bourgeois is at a loss to explain how the Benning demonstrations grew from the passion of one man to an event of thousands. It is as amazing perhaps as his own transformation. A working-class boy who grew up in Lutcher, La., the son of a power company worker, he made it to college, even earned a geology degree at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. But the military provided his ticket to the world. After four years in the Navy, he volunteered for Vietnam.

The young ensign arrived in Southeast Asia in 1965, ready to serve. "I was ready to give my life," he says. But when he saw hatred in the eyes of the South Vietnamese, he was confused: "I really thought people would see us as allies. But there was another side I wasn't prepared for." In orphaned children with swollen bellies and open wounds, Bourgeois saw God. In the rice paddies surrounding Saigon, he felt his faith tugging. "That was my introduction to the victims of violence," Bourgeois says.

He had thought of a military career but decided to devote his life to healing, to being a peacemaker. After his tour, he entered a Catholic seminary. He picked the Maryknoll order — the "Marines of the missionaries: the toughest of the tough," he says. The Maryknolls sent him to Bolivia to live among the poor in the La Paz slums. He worked to start a medical clinic, day care center and education program. He watched the military take away community organizers, students and union activists.

"Men with guns were running the country," Bourgeois says he learned in the land of dictator Hugo Banzer, another graduate of the School of the Americas. Back at his hometown church, he began preaching taboo politics. He used words like exploitation to describe the fate of poor Latin Americans. Bourgeois went next to El Salvador and witnessed a war in which thousands of innocent civilians were tortured and executed by death squads that he says were extensions of the military.

"I was on fire when I came back from Salvador," he says. He knew then he could not keep silent any longer.

Atlanta!

In the Times: Atlanta among top five cities in attracting 24-35 year olds.

They are people who, demographers say, are likely to choose a location before finding a job. They like downtown living, public transportation and plenty of entertainment options. They view diversity and tolerance as marks of sophistication.

Good news for the Beltline, and for commuter rail. Of course, Charlotte is out in front of us. But have you been to Charlotte lately? I have flashbacks to my college days when I accidentally wandered into the khakied business school section of campus. Scary. When I'm in Charlotte, I feel a strange lightness inside. Then I get home to Atlanta and realize it was the soul being sucked out of me. I know, subtlety is not my strong point.