Sometimes it rains and I love you.
Sometimes it’s sunny and I love you.
The prison is sometimes.
I love you always.
DANGER IN THE ANDES
The fox was on his way back from the heavens when parrots pecked through the rope he was sliding down.
The fox fell onto the high peaks of the Andes and burst apart. The quinoa in his belly, stolen from celestial banquets, sprayed everywhere.
Thus the food of the gods came to be planted in this world.
Ever since, quinoa lives in the highest lands, where it alone can withstand the dryness and the cold.
The world market ignored this useless Indian feed until two researchers at Colorado State University learned that the tiny wholesome grain, which grows where nothing else will, is not fattening and builds resistance to several diseases. And in 1994, they obtained U.S. patent number 5304718 for it.
The farmers were furious. Quinoa’s patent-holders assured them they would not use their legal rights to stop them from growing it or to charge them a fee, but the farmers, indigenous Bolivians, responded:
“We don’t need some professor from the United States to come here and donate to us what is ours.”
Four years later, the scandal was such that Colorado State University had to give up the patent.
DANGER ON AIR
Radio Paiwas was born in the heart of Nicaragua on the eve of the twenty-first century.
The early morning program attracts the largest audience. The Messenger Witch, heard by thousands of women, frightens thousands of men.
The witch introduces women to friends they have never met, including one named Pap Smear and an old lady named Constitution. And she talks to them about their rights, “zero tolerance for violence in the street, in the home, and in bed too,” and she asks them:
“How did it go last night? How did he treat you? Did it feel good or was it a little forced?”
And when men rape or beat women, she names names. At night, the witch flies house to house on her broom, and before dawn she rubs her crystal ball. Then she reveals on-air the secrets she has learned:
“Angel? You’re out there, I can see you. Beating your wife, are you? That’s awful, you scumbag!”
The radio receives and broadcasts the complaints the police ignore. The police are busy chasing cow thieves, and a cow is worth more than a woman.
BARBIE GOES TO WAR
There are more than a billion Barbies. Only the Chinese outnumber them.
The most beloved woman on the planet would never let us down. In the war of good against evil, Barbie enlisted, saluted, and marched off to Iraq.
She arrived at the front wearing made-to-measure land, sea, and air uniforms reviewed and approved by the Pentagon.
Barbie is accustomed to changing professions, hairdos, and clothes. She has been a singer, an athlete, a paleontologist, an orthodontist, an astronaut, a firewoman, a ballerina, and who knows what else. Every new job entails a new look and a complete new wardrobe that every girl in the world is obliged to buy.
In February 2004, Barbie wanted to change boyfriends too. For nearly half a century she had been going steady with Ken, whose nose is the only protuberance on his body, when an Australian surfer seduced her and invited her to commit the sin of plastic.
Mattel, the manufacturer, announced an official separation.
It was a catastrophe. Sales plummeted. Barbie could change occupations and outfits, but she had no right to set a bad example.
Mattel announced an official reconciliation.
ROBOCOP’S CHILDREN GO TO WAR
In the year 2005, the Pentagon disclosed that its dream of an army of automatons is coming true.
According to spokesman Gordon Johnson, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been tremendously valuable for the robots’ progress. Now robots equipped with night vision and automatic weapons are able to locate and destroy enemy emplacements with practically no margin of error.
No trace of humanity diminishes their optimum efficiency:
“They don’t get hungry, they’re not afraid, they don’t forget their orders,” Johnson said. “They don’t care if the guy next to them has just been shot.”
CAMOUFLAGED WARS
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Colombia suffered through a thousand-day war.
In the middle of the twentieth century, the war lasted three thousand days.
At the outset of the twenty-first century, the days of the war have become too numerous to count.
But this war, fatal for Colombia, is not so fatal for Colombia’s owners:
the war feeds fear, and fear turns injustice into an inescapable fate;
the war feeds poverty, and poverty supplies hands that will work for little or nothing;
the war drives peasants off their land, which then gets sold for little or nothing;
the war lines the pockets of arms smugglers and kidnappers, and grants sanctuary to drug traffickers for whom cocaine remains a venture in which Americans up north invest their noses and Colombians invest their dead;
the war murders so many labor activists that trade unions organize more funerals than strikes, and they stop bothering companies like Chiquita Brands, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Del Monte, or Drummond Limited; and the war murders those who point out the causes of the war, making the war as inexplicable as it is inevitable.
The experts, known as violentologists, say Colombia is a country in love with death.
It is in the genes, they say.
A WOMAN ON THE BANKS OF A RIVER
It rains death.
In the deathmill, Colombians die by bullet or by knife,
by machete or by club,
by noose or by fire,
by falling bomb or by buried mine.
In the jungle of Urabá, on the banks of the Perancho River or the Peranchito, in her home made of sticks and palm leaves, a woman named Eligia fans herself to chase off the mosquitoes and the heat, and the fear as well. And while her fan flutters, she says out loud:
“Wouldn’t it be great to die a natural death?”
LIED-ABOUT WARS
Advertising campaigns, marketing schemes. The target is public opinion. Wars are sold the same way cars are, by lying.
In August 1964, President Lyndon Johnson accused the Vietnamese of attacking two U.S. warships in the Tonkin Gulf.
Then the president invaded Vietnam, sending planes and troops. He was acclaimed by journalists and by politicians, and his popularity sky-rocketed. The Democrats in power and the Republicans out of power became a single party united against Communist aggression.
After the war had slaughtered Vietnamese in vast numbers, most of them women and children, Johnson’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, confessed that the Tonkin Gulf attack had never occurred.
The dead did not revive.
In March 2003, President George W. Bush accused Iraq of being on the verge of destroying the world with its weapons of mass destruction, “the most lethal weapons ever devised.”
Then the president invaded Iraq, sending planes and troops. He was acclaimed by journalists and by politicians, and his popularity sky-rocketed. The Republicans in power and the Democrats out of power became a single party united against terrorist aggression.
After the war had slaughtered Iraqis in vast numbers, most of them women and children, Bush confessed that the weapons of mass destruction never existed. “The most lethal weapons ever devised” were his own speeches.
In the following elections, he won a second term.
In my childhood, my mother used to tell me that a lie has no feet. She was misinformed.
ORIGIN OF THE EMBRACE
Thousands of years before its devastation, Iraq gave birth to the first love poem in world literature:
What I tell you
Let the weaver weave into song.
The song, in Sumerian, told of the encounter of a goddess and a shepherd.
That nigh
t, the goddess Ianna loved as if she were mortal. Dumuzi the shepherd was immortal as long as the night lasted.
LYING WARS
The war in Iraq grew out of the need to correct an error made by Geography when she put the West’s oil under the East’s sand. But no war is honest enough to confess:
“I kill to steal.”
“The devil’s shit,” as oil is called by its victims, has caused many wars and will certainly cause many more.
In Sudan, for instance, a huge number of people lost their lives between the final years of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first, in an oil war that disguised itself as an ethnic and religious conflict. Derricks and drills, pipes and pipelines sprouted as if by magic in villages turned to ashes and in fields of ruined crops. In the Darfur region, where the butchery continues, the people, all Muslim, began to hate each other when they discovered there might be oil under their feet.
The killing in the hills of Rwanda also claimed to be an ethnic and religious war, even though killers and killed were all Catholics. Hatred, a colonial legacy, stemmed from the time when Belgium decreed that those who raised cattle were Tutsis and those who grew crops were Hutus, and that the Tutsi minority ought to dominate the Hutu majority.
In recent years, another multitude lost their lives in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the service of foreign companies fighting over coltan. That rare mineral is an essential ingredient in cell phones, computers, microchips, and batteries, all of which are staples of the mass media. The media, however, forgot to mention coltan in their scant coverage of the war.
VORACIOUS WARS
In 1975, the king of Morocco invaded the homeland of the Saharan people and expelled the majority of the population.
Today Western Sahara is the last colony in Africa.
Morocco denies it the right to determine its own future, and thus admits to having stolen a country it has no intention of returning.
The Saharans, “children of the clouds,” pursuers of rain, have been handed a life sentence of constant anguish and perpetual nostalgia. In the desert, independence is harder to come by than water.
A thousand and one times, the United Nations has spoken out against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian homeland.
In 1948, the founding of the state of Israel led to the expulsion of eight hundred thousand people. The Palestinians took with them the keys to their homes, as had the Jews kicked out of Spain centuries before. The Jews were never able to return to Spain. The Palestinians were never able to return to Palestine.
Those who stayed behind were condemned to live humiliated in territories that are nibbled away at daily by relentless incursions.
Susan Abdallah, a Palestinian, knows the recipe for making a terrorist:
Deprive him of food and water.
Surround his home with the machinery of war.
Attack him with all means at all times, especially at night.
Demolish his home, uproot his farmland, kill his loved ones.
Congratulations: you have created an army of suicide bombers.
WORLD-KILLING WARS
In the middle of the seventeenth century, Irish bishop James Ussher revealed that the world began in the year 404 before Christ, between dusk on Saturday, October 22, and nightfall the following day.
Regarding the end of the world, we don’t have such precise information. For sure, we fear its demise is not far off, given the feverish pace at which its murderers labor. The technological advances of the twenty-first century will no doubt equal the progress of the previous twenty thousand years of human history, but no one knows on which planet they will be celebrated. Shakespeare foretold it: “’Tis the times’ plague when madmen lead the blind.”
Machines built to help us live are helping us die.
Breathing and walking are forbidden in our great cities. Chemical bombardments melt the polar icecaps and the mountain snows. A California travel agency sells goodbye-glacier tours to Greenland. The sea eats away the shore and fishermen’s nets catch jellyfish instead of cod. Natural forests, riots of diversity, are turned into industrial forests or into deserts where not even the stones multiply. Since the beginning of this century, drought has put a hundred million peasant farmers in twenty countries at God’s mercy. “Nature has grown very tired,” wrote Spanish monk Luis Alfonso de Carvallo. That was in 1695. If only he could see us now.
When it isn’t drought, it’s flood. Year after year the number of never-ending floods, hurricanes, and cyclones grows. They call them natural disasters, as if nature were the aggressor and not the victim. World-killing disasters, poor-killing disasters: in Guatemala they say natural disasters are like old cowboy movies, because only the Indians die.
Why do the stars tremble? Perhaps they sense that soon we shall invade other heavenly bodies.
THE GIANT AT TULE
In the year 1586, Spanish priest Josep de Acosta caught sight of it in the town of Tule, three leagues from Oaxaca. “A bolt of lightning wounded this tree from the crown through its heart to the base. Before it was hit by lightning, they say it offered shade for a thousand men.”
And in 1630, Bernabé Cobo wrote that the tree had three doors wide enough to ride through on horseback.
It is still there. It was born before Christ, and it is still there. The oldest and largest living thing in the world. In the dense foliage of its branches, thousands of birds make their home.
This green god is doomed to solitude. No jungle is left to keep it company.
ORIGIN OF ROAD RAGE
Horses whinnied, coachmen cursed, whips whistled through the air.
The noble gentleman was in a fury. He had been waiting for what felt like centuries. His carriage was blocked by another carriage that was vainly trying to turn around amid many other carriages. He lost the little patience he had left, got out, unsheathed his sword, and sliced open the first horse he saw.
That happened one Saturday at dusk in the year 1766 at the Place des Victoires in Paris.
The noble gentleman was the Marquis de Sade.
Today’s traffic jams are even more sadistic.
RIDDLE
They are the most important members of our family.
They are gluttons, devouring gas, oil, corn, sugarcane, and anything else that comes their way.
They own our time: bathing them, feeding and sheltering them, talking about them, and opening the way for them.
They reproduce faster than we do, and are ten times as numerous as they were half a century ago.
They kill more people than do wars, but no one condemns the murders, least of all the newspapers and television channels that live off their advertisements.
They steal our streets. They steal our air.
They laugh when they hear us say: “I drive.”
BRIEF HISTORY OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION
Be fruitful and multiply, we said, and machines were fruitful and they multiplied.
They promised they would work for us.
Now we work for them.
The machines we invented to produce more food now produce more hunger.
The weapons we invented to defend ourselves now kill us.
The cars we invented to transport us now paralyze us.
The cities we invented so we could meet each other now keep us apart.
The mass media we invented so we could communicate now neither hear nor see us.
We are the machines of our machines.
They claim innocence.
And they are right.
BHOPAL
In the middle of the night, people woke up to a nightmare: the air was on fire.
The year was 1984, and in the city of Bhopal, India, a Union Carbide Corporation factory exploded.
None of the security systems worked. Or better put: profitability sacrificed safety by imposing drastic cost reductions.
A crime termed an accident killed many thousands, and left many more ill for life.
I
n the south of the world, human life is priced according to supply. After a lot of tussling, Union Carbide paid three thousand dollars for each person killed, and a thousand for each left incurably ill. Its prestigious lawyers rejected the demands of the survivors, arguing that illiterates were incapable of understanding what their thumbprints had signed. The company did not clean up the water or the air of Bhopal, which remain contaminated, nor did it clean up the earth, which remains poisoned with mercury and lead.
Instead, Union Carbide cleaned up its image, paying millions to the priciest makeup specialists in the world.
A few years later, another chemical giant, Dow Chemical, bought the company. The company, that is, not its account book: Dow Chemical washed its hands, denied any responsibility in the matter, and sued the women protesting at its doors for disturbing the peace.
ANIMAL MEDIA
One spring night in 1986, the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl blew up.
The Soviet government decreed silence.
Many died, a multitude survived as walking bombs, but TV, radio, the newspapers heard nothing, said nothing. And at the end of three days, when they did mention it, they did not violate the gag order. No one warned that we faced a new Hiroshima. On the contrary, they insisted it had been a minor accident, nothing at all, everything under control, nobody get upset.