Narcobusiness and Guerrillas

I have finished the book NOTICES OF KIDNAPPING and it really is a great book. After reading this, and after reading other books on world affairs earlier, I think that whatever plagues the world is not suprising. It would be surprising if there were no killings, no armed conflicts, and no wars. Whatever man created, all the extensive social systems, eventually turns against him. I think that in South America whatever was created by the Spaniards and put the natural order on it's head brought the diseasters of the modern day Columbia or Bolivia. The only country which doesn't have much poverty in South America seems to be Argentina and I tend to think that it's because in Argentina there's no racial difference among it's inhabitants - the indigenous peoples who lived in the area now being Argentina were all exterminated or died from diseases brought from the Europeans. The countries in which the amount of indigenous population still existing is the greatest are the countries which suffer most political unrest. And I believe that is because the indigenous population has no rights, no land rights, it is moved from place to place whenever some natural resource is found and the concession is sold to some corporation without the Indians ever benefiting from it in any way,, it is turned into cheap labor paid very little or not paid at all. In Bolivia people protest in a rather peaceful way - the block the roads. In Peru there are parades of protesters nowadays which are announced ahead of time - there's no violence - but before there was the Shining Path which was the movement similar to the one in Colombia right now, I believe, as far as the gorrilla movement is concerned. In Colombia there's a lot of violence... Christine, the owner of the Plantation House in Salento, told me how the campesinos-farmers who work on big plantations (which are mostly owned by whites) were getting no pay, were abused or killed in many cases, and who in turn started attacking the ranchers out of desperation. The ranchers then asked the government for protection and the paramilitary groups were formed to protect the big landowners. That is the beginning of the gorilla movement, and the hardship of the people who have nothing to do with any movement but get cought in the cross-fire... The narcotrafficers come from slums around the big cities - they are the people who came from the poor countryside as they cannot compete with the rich landowners and become citydwellers. For many young people from the shantytowns making money by belonging to the drugsmuggling groups was the only money they could ever make. They treated Pablo Escobar as a smart businessman who laughted at all this high class of intellectuals who came to their position only by family connections. The patrician families, the descendents of conquistadores, have been running the S. American countries since they came. The colonization of South America has never ended. In North America it was quick: the indigenous people were all killed off within a short period of time and the white conquistadores spreaded out evenly throughout the land they counquered. In South America not so many people from Europe emigrated and the ones who did grouped around the cities they built and from there controlled the rest of the population. The ones who are the descendands of the newcomers live in superb conditions and the rest lives in slums. Like in the US everybody is equal according to the law except the Indians. The journalists who were abducted by the Extraditibles (in the 80s and 90s Extradictables was a group of people involved in narcobusiness who wanted to surrender but on condition that the Colombian government would not extradict them to the US where they would be on trial for offenses commited in the US as well and would get much severe sentences) were all people belonging to these patrician families. The members of these families very often don't understand the situation in their own country - they don't see the injustice because they are sheltered from it from the day they are born. One of the women who was abducted praised herself for going into the jungle to find out what the gorrilla movement was about... I thought: sweetie you don't have to go the jungle to know what it's about... you just make the connections, also to things which happened long long time ago because nothing comes out of nothing. I was talking to Michael about it also and he said the same thing Ryszard Kapuscinski said about Africa: there cannot be peace in a continent in which the borders are unnatural. What was before 180 nations is now distributed into a few countries - people who have not much in common except their skin color are forced to be loyal to a country instead of being loyal to their clan, as has been their tradition for millenia. It just all come to the notion of colonization. I have been thinking a lot about it when I was reading the different books on countires which were colonized but now I am able to see up-close how it works and what it does... One of the churches in Cartagena is dedicated to The Slave of the Slaves - a priest who was begging for money so that he could give them to the slaves brought on ships to Cartagena from Africa. There's also a museum of the holy inquisition with all the torture equpiment the father's sick minds could invent... This city has seen a lot of the very dark in the human history...

It seems the next boat to Panama is going to leave next week and I don't feel like waiting for it and I decided to go by air tomorrow. I have spent six days here and I am ready to move. Also the heat is really killing me. It's hard to sleep... I will be in touch from Panama.