Half an hour ago at around 21:10 local time a tremor shook, or rather gently wiggled, most of Cali for twenty seconds or so. Can’t find any news reports about it yet, but I expect it’s a continued regional aftershock of the much larger earthquake last month in Peru.

Today’s word for the day is “zancudo.”

Zancudo is the Spanish word for the stripey tiger mosquito, the one that carries dengue. The news today here in Cali is that the dengue previously confined to the fringes of the metropolitian area is now making serious inroads into the city itself. The health department has trucks spraying in the streets against zancudos and is conducting house-to-house inspections.

Will it make any difference? Some, probably. It’s another reminder, though, that Cali sits lower in the mountains than Medellín and Bogotá, which are spared at least this particular plague.

A massive blackout plunged most of Colombia into darkness today, halting trading on the Bogota stock exchange and turning congested city traffic into gridlock.

The blackout is blamed on a fault at a hydroelectric power plant near the southern city of Pasto. It remains unclear whether the fault was accidental or caused by the FARC, who have a heavy guerrilla presence in the region.

The blackout affected all the major cities of Colombia from the Ecuadorian border to Cartagena on the Caribbean coast. The eastern border region of Colombia was not affected, as electricity there is imported from a hydro scheme in western Venezuela.

The power went out roughly around 10am local time. Although official reports claim power was restored by 12noon, power even now remains sporadic throughout the country, as power is restored city by city, neighborhood by neighborhood.

For more coverage, see the Associated Press or Reuters. For some especially bad reporting, see the BBC, who report the outage affected only southern Colombia.

It’s not fair. How come I never hear the bombs when they go off?

Yesterday the talk of the town was the bomb Sunday night that ripped the face off the main Cali police station, less than a kilometer from my house. The car bomb destroyed many surrounding businesses and killed a bunch of cops and an unlucky taxi driver who happened to be driving by.

Of course, the bombers were obviously FARC. The question is why they chose Easter Sunday late at night to blow up a bomb in Cali.

Either it’s because they wanted to make the point that they can still blow shit up when they want to, but didn’t want to kill any civilians in the process (you can’t have a revolution without a sympathetic civilian populace); or, it’s because the only time they felt they could get away with it without getting caught was on a quiet off-night like Easter Sunday night.

I’m just bummed I didn’t hear it go off. Everyone was saying the windows were rattling and the plaster was falling from the ceiling. I must have slept right through it.

Update: There’s Spanish language coverage of the event here, also a good photo of the destroyed building here.

It was the Monday of a long weekend when I got the email. “this IS AN EMERGENCY,” it said. “Many lives are at risk… THIS IS NOT A JOKE.” It was a message from my younger brother. He wanted my phone number. I gave it to him.

The phone rang about half an hour later. My brother was in Colombia, in a small mountain town, and had gone to his Colombian girlfriend’s farm for a couple of days, an idyll interrupted when three men showed up claiming to be FARC and demanding fifty million pesos ($25,000) to let them leave town alive.

I had known my brother was travelling in South America and had intended to come to Colombia, but I didn’t know when he was going to arrive.

He was very insistent I tell no one, and that we find a way to convince my father to pay the ransom money. After we hung up my first call was to my girlfriend here in Cali. I told her I couldn’t talk over the phone — my brother was convinced all our phone calls were being tapped — so I asked her to get dressed and come over right away. It was already late.

What do I do, I asked her? Well, she said, there’s risks either way. Many times you pay the FARC a ransom and they kill the hostage anyway. Sometimes you pay the ransom and they sell the hostage to a different guerrilla group, who also demands a ransom. Simply giving them what they wanted was not necessarily the best solution to the problem.

What would you do if you were me, I asked her. I’d call GAULA, she said. GAULA, she explained, was the Colombia anti-kidnapping and extortion squad. There were more kidnappings in Colombia than anywhere else in the world, so GAULA, she argued, were some of the best people in the world to handle this sort of situation.

So we called GAULA. Unfortunately, we didn’t know where my brother was. He had called me from a land line, but I didn’t have caller ID, so it was impossible to know where he was calling from. I did have the IP address from his email but, as we were to discover later, that didn’t help much at all. Come into the office in Cali tomorrow between 7am and 7:30am, said the man on the phone.

I didn’t sleep too well that night. My brother and I are not exactly close — we’d seen each other in Buenos Aires last year for the first time in more than a dozen years — and I hadn’t had a single email from him since. Still, he was my younger brother, and I was responsible for him. My father didn’t know Colombia as I do nor does he speak Spanish, putting the onus squarely on me to get him out, alive.

The next morning my girlfriend and I rocked up to the police station and made it past several sentries to the GAULA office. The office itself, far from suggesting burly men with guns who rescue hostages, was replete with blue cubicles punctuated by the occasional meeting table. It could have been the head office of a grocery store in Boise.

Two men eventually greeted us and sat down. What was my brother’s financial situation, they wanted to know. What did he do for a living. Well, he was a poor backpacker who I thought had done some English teaching work in BA. They looked at each other significantly. Are you sure this isn’t a hoax? We deal with a lot of fake kidnappings, self-kidnappings, stuff like that. You say you don’t know your brother really well. Is it possible this is some sort of a joke?

I think about this. The thought had, in fact, crossed my mind. Was it simply a ruse to burn my dad for twenty-five grand? But then, the kid was definitely scared. No one can act that well. He was definitely afraid for his life.

No, I said. It is possible, yes, but I consider it highly unlikely. I gave them my USB key, which contained a downloaded copy of my brother’s email, with all the routing headers showing. This was passed off to a Colombian geek to process. Meanwhile, we stared at the opposite cubicle wall, and my girlfriend and I gossipped about the various boob jobs and outfits on the women in the office.

Finally the word comes back: the email was sent from an email cafe so remote that it was routed through a satellite link. Only one company offered that service in Colombia. They were a private company based in Bogota, and it would take eight days for them to process the government’s request.

My brother had been told he had only five days left to live. (more…)

So I’m walking down the street the other day on the way back from the supermarket, and I see this guy leaning on a short wall in the driveway in front of a small apartment building. He has his right leg perfectly straight, and the left leg is bent to support his weight against the wall.

Then I do a double take. Mid-thigh on his right leg is the unmistakeable hand grip of an M-16. He has the gun draped down his leg, so that the black of the gun blends into the dark blue of his jeans. He’s got his hand on the trigger, but the gun is rotated out and down against the outside of his thigh.

He notes me doing my double take, but never makes eye contact or turns his head. I’m a gringo in shorts with two big grocery bags: I am correctly assessed as Not A Threat. He watches me out of the corner of his eye as I walk past and turn the corner to my house, just a few blocks away.

It is generally not a good idea to linger for long when you encounter a professional bodyguard in Colombia. Bodyguards are there to protect someone from attack; you don’t want to be in the accidental crossfire. Locals will make a point of crossing the street and walking fast if they see a professional bodyguard.

Venezuelan women are supposed to be famous for their beauty. More Venezuelans than any other nationality have won the Miss Universe pageant. And yeah, there are some serious hotties about the place, especially in Mérida.

But what I noticed most was the camel toe. Tight stretch lycra pants in the Caribbean heat? You betcha. Even old fat women in jeans I found myself staring — how can one nation have so much camel toe? Do Venezuelans simply have larger pudenda than other people?

Thinking about it now, that could be the case. Venezuelans are also bigger cunts than normal.

Take El Presidente, Sr. Chavez. Definitely a big cunt. The longer I spent in Venezuela, the more I realized that he is the perfect embodiment of Venezuela — rude, fat, and ugly.

A lot of Western liberals idealize Chavez, more out of desperation at the brokenness of the American capitalist system than anything else. (Actually going to Venezuela will, by the way, rapidly cure you of any lingering fantasies you have about Chavez.)

Chavez says he is a socialist or a communist or some such rot. If only he were. Chavez is just as bad as the long string of dictators who have ruled Venezuela for the last fifty years. The only difference is that instead of being an American puppet, he has gained wild popularity by sticking his finger in George Bush’s eye.

Now, like most people, I enjoy watching him stick a finger in George Bush’s eye, and even think George Bush deserves having a finger poked in his eye, but that does not make what Chavez is doing to the people of Venezuela a good or noble thing, and it definitely doesn’t make it socialism.

Let me tell you what I saw when I was in Venezuela. I was there in November 2006, just before Chavez was “re-elected”. Do you know how these elections work? Voting in Venezuela under Chavez is not anonymous. If you don’t vote for Chavez, and you work for the government, you are going to lose your job. Your children won’t go to a good school. Maybe your property will be “re-distributed” and taken away from you.

I personally met several nurses and teachers who were fired from their government jobs because they signed the referendum against Chavez. Little old ladies in hushed tones would reach a hand across the aisle on a long bus journey, touch my elbow and whisper earnestly in bad English (so that no one else could understand) how much they hate Chavez, how he is destroying their country, how they all want to get out.

Why is Chavez such a big cunt? Why is Venezuela a country of camel toe? I think it’s the oil. The combination of that lazy Latin-Caribbean lifestyle and the insta-riches of Texas Tea has completely gone to these people’s heads, and they are ga-ga corrupted with the power oil brings.

Maybe the petroleum beneath the surface of the earth increases the gravitational pull within the borders of Venezuela, causing pudenda to sag and bloat. Or perhaps the petroleum has entered the food chain, causing an enlargement of the entire country’s female genitalia.

Whatever it is, just remember: the United States gave Venezuela baseball, the word “full”, and taught them how to be assholes. If you don’t like them the way they are now, you can only ask yourself who they learned it from.

Update:

Is it any coincidence that the most common word in Venezuela is “cuño” (”cunt”)?

Friday night in Cali, Colombia, and I’m having a quiet one with a few
beers and some cable TV. I live just a few blocks away from La Sexta,
the strip of dance clubs that’s ground zero for nightlife here in the
“World Capital of Salsa”.

It’s 11:30 at night, just as the clubs are starting to pack ‘em in,
when suddenly:

BOOM.

Louder than thunder, coming from just those few blocks away. The lights
go out. The TV flickers and dies. I’m left with half a beer in a totally
dark room and suddenly, growing in the distance, the sounds of sirens
approaching.

They’ve finally done it, I thought. The bloody FARC just blew up a
nightclub. There’s bodies strewn all over the street, bottles of
aguardiente and rum suddenly forgotten in the stampede to get out in the
open before another one blows.

I suck on my beer. Now’s my chance, I thought. Maybe this is the story
that will finally get me that foreign correspondent gig, something in
the pages of the Guardian or CNN or a byline with AP or Reuters. It
might even get air time — I could see myself now with that little
microphone attached to my shirt collar, trying to sound grave and
sufficiently baritone for an international news audience. All I had to
do was get up, put on some shoes (there would no doubt be broken glass,
and I was wearing flip flops), walk about 500 meters with a camera and
notebook and start collecting anguish-infused quotes from people with
limbs blown off.

I sat on the sofa and slowly, meditatively drained my beer. I listened
in the darkness. The sirens were getting louder. What if another bomb
were to go off? Do I really want shrapnel implanting itself in my fine,
northern european features? How badly do I really want to see blown up
bodies, anyway?

I put the empty beer bottle on the floor next to the couch, got up off
my duff, and trundled off to bed.

The next morning the power was still off. Over breakfast one of my
roommates exclaimed, “Bloody incompetent morons. Did that f—ing
transformer blow again?”