HOOKED
ON COCALAND
st. mj's guide to paradise for
lost gringos
book three:
Cartagena Amable:
back in the city again craving
a paradise fix
(concl.)
" 'You
gotta pay for peace in Colombia', says
Robbie, with native brilliance. "
boy and
Colombian FARC guerrillas[1]
“Rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
[Russian-Communist-inspired 'FARC']
form a security cordon in San Vicente del Caguán
185 miles south of Bogotá, Thursday”
New York Times, January 8, 1999
for decades guerrillas and government troops
– the latter ‘aided’ by ‘paramilitaries’ –
warred
over possession of Colombian backcountry
the peace talks likewise lasted decades
(sign reads: 'Laboratory of Peace')
(note machine gun in front of security cordon)
Thou
art
not an orphan. Thou
hast a friend. Thou
art God’s orphan.
Augustine
Expositions
on the Psalms
(Psalm 145:18f)[2]
94. OFFER A HAND, AS ONE
WAS OFFERED YOU.
a sticky warm
evening. sitting at El
Torito restaurant by the sidewalk of Eighty-something St., in
the big coastal port city of
we're here with
Chalo, not at the beach with Caridad’s cousin and his friend
on crutches. we stood
the dunces up, thinking about how they treated the little
waif.
i say to
Robbie, "I don't want to pay one more street vendor to leave
me in peace!"
"You gotta pay for peace
in
Chalo tells
another version of his leaving home at 12. he was the oldest, and his
father abandoned them all. his
mother beat him every day, so he ran away. it seems more believable
than other versions. each
version is closer to the truth, maybe. or further from it. who knows?
Chalo wants to
be a dentist in the
i look at him a
second, then extend mine.
he takes it.
we shake.
little boy and soldier
(guerrilla? government? paramilitary?)
in front of a house marked with ‘ELN’ graffiti
the ELN (not FARC) were the rebel group
most active near Santisima Cruz
(although some FARC were also nearby)
‘ELN’ = Ejercito de Liberación Nacional = Army of National Liberation
(inspired
by Cuba’s Fidel Castro)
(meaning, as the Dr.
notes: that, to fully comprehend that Ibrahim's family were
Fidel-Castro-friendly
took him a mere twenty-three years)
(that whole time he was in denial)
[1]
The photo is from a slide show made available
online by the New
York Times on January 8, 1999, a day after the
president of Colombia met with FARC leaders in San Vicente
del Caguán, in the Amazon jungle 185 miles
south of Bogotá, for ‘peace talks’, hoping to
end or alleviate the decades-long grip upon Colombian
countryside (and city too at times) by armed and violent
revolutionary guerrilla forces. The Colombian Nobel
Literature prize recipient, Gabriel García Márquez, was importantly present,
offering his services at mediation, given the fact that
for years both sides of the Colombian conflict, like all
Colombians, had trusted him and treated him with almost
more reverence than they showed the pope. (The Colombians
approximate the French in truly revering and adoring their
greatest thinkers and writers.)
[2] Many of
Augustine’s sermons were copied down shorthand by scribes as
he preached on Sunday mornings in his bishopric church in
King’s Horse (Hippo Regius) during the early 400s, 40 miles
from the Mediterranean, in what is now northeastern Algeria,
not far from what was then the city of Carthage (the ruins
of which are now near Tunis, in Tunisia). In the year 429 a horde
of invading barbarians called ‘Vandals’ laid siege to Hippo
Regius and within a year, while the town was still under
siege, Augustine died; and soon thereafter the town finally
fell to the Vandals’ siege. Soon
the Roman Empire’s hold on
