el cuarteto de nos

El Cuarteto de Nos is in heavy rotation chez H&L. They're a band that Leo "discovered" a few years after his cousin Javier recommended them.

Cuarteto is the oldest active Uruguayan band and has gained praise by transcending local culture through universal themes and engaging everyday pathos in a humorous light.

Here are some of our favorite songs ...

Ya No Sé Qué Hacer Conmigo

Ya tuve que ir obligado a misa, ya toque en el piano "Para Elisa"
ya aprendí a falsear mi sonrisa, ya caminé por la cornisa.
Ya cambié de lugar mi cama, ya hice comedia ya hice drama
fui concreto y me fui por las ramas, ya me hice el bueno y tuve mala fama.

Ya fui ético, y fui errático, ya fui escéptico y fui fanático
ya fui abúlico, fui metódico, ya fui impúdico y fui caótico.
Ya leí Arthur Conan Doyle, ya me pasé de nafta a gas oil.
Ya leí a Bretón y a Moliere, ya dormí en colchon y en somier.
Ya me cambié el pelo de color, ya estuve en contra y estuve a favor
lo que me daba placer ahora me da dolor, ya estuve al otro lado del mostrador.

Y oigo una voz que dice sin razón
"Vos siempre cambiando, ya no cambiás más"
y yo estoy cada vez más igual
Ya no se que hacer conmigo.

Ya me ahogué en un vaso de agua , ya planté café en Nicaragua
ya me fui a probar suerte a USA, ya jugué a la ruleta rusa.
Ya creí en los marcianos, ya fui ovo lacto vegetariano.
Sano, fui quieto y fui gitano, ya estuve tranqui y estuve hasta las manos.
Hice el curso de mitología pero de mi los dioses se reían.
orfebrería lo salvé raspando y ritmología aqui la estoy aplicando.

Ya probé, ya fumé, ya tomé, ya dejé, ya firmé, ya viajé, ya pegé.
Ya sufrí, ya eludí, ya huí, ya asumí, ya me fuí, ya volví, ya fingí, ya mentí.
Y entre tantas falsedades muchas de mis mentiras ya son verdades
hice fácil adversidades, y me compliqué en las nimiedades.

Y oigo una voz que dice con razón
"Vos siempre cambiando, ya no cambiás más"
y yo estoy cada vez más igual
Ya no se que hacer conmigo.

Ya me hice un lifting me puse un piercing, fui a ver al Dream Team y no hubo feeling
me tatué al Che en una nalga, arriba de mami para que no se salga.
Ya me reí y me importó un bledo de cosas y gente que ahora me dan miedo.
Ayuné por causas al pedo, ya me empaché con pollo al spiedo.

Ya fui psicólogo, fui al teólogo, fui al astrólogo, fui al enólogo
ya fui alcoholico y fui lambeta, ya fui anonimo y ya hice dieta.
Ya lancé piedras y escupitajos, al lugar donde ahora trabajo
y mi legajo cuenta a destajo, que me porté bien y que armé relajo.

Y oigo una voz que dice sin razón
"Vos siempre cambiando, ya no cambiás más"
y yo estoy cada vez más igual
Ya no se que hacer conmigo. (bis)

Nada Es Gratis En La Vida (Note: Not a music video, it's a series of Argentine photos laced with social commentary and futbol, but the song quality is pretty decent.)

Mamá compró y se le rompió
El forro del que naci yo
La plata no pudo juntar
Y el embarazo cancelar

Ella invirtió en mi educación
Pero con una condición
Porque le tuve que jurar
Que de vieja no la iba a internar

Dificil de creer
Dificil de explicar
Dijo un troyano ojo con un griego que trae regalos
Sea con dinero o no
Siempre se paga un favor
Y si veo que algo es facil
Yo dudo enseguida

Pague antes o despues
La cuenta va a aparecer
Y esta claro de que nada es gratis en la vida

Papá pago una mina en un bar
Cuando me llevo a debutar
Y por curarme se endeudó
De la peste que me contagió

Sí sí ya se
Esperma done
Pero pobrecito el destinatario
Yo tengo alzheimer hereditario

Y como el jefe comento
Despues que mi sueldo aumento
Si la limosna es de cuatía
Hasta el santo desconfía

Sea con dinero o no
Siempre se paga un favor
Y si veo que algo es facil
Yo dudo enseguida

Pague antes o despues
La cuenta va a aparecer
Y esta claro de que nada es gratis en la vida

Si sera asi que lo jodi
Al diablo cuando le vendi
Mi alma que no vale un billete
Se la canjee por un clarete

Ni honorario ni voluntario
Soy un sicario y cobro salario
Y no pidan solidaridad
Que yo no hago caridad

No es gratis mi salud
Ni gratis sera mi ataud
Si es que no pide su tajada
Es que no vale nada

Sea con dinero o no
Siempre se paga un favor
Y si veo que algo es facil
Yo dudo enseguida

Pague antes o despues
La cuenta va a aparecer
Y esta claro de que nada es gratis en la vida

... nada es gratis en la vida
... nada es gratis en la vida
... nada es gratis en la vida
... nada es gratis en la vida

Hoy Estoy Raro

Hoy estoy raro, y no entiendo por qué,
Si nada extraño me tuvo a maltraer.
Hoy estoy raro, no sé lo que hacer.

Será que hoy me puse a recordar
los días de mi infancia cuando siempre estaba mal
hijo único de la casualidad
mi padre era hippie y mi madre era punk

Ah, capaz...fue por esa niñera
que para que no llorara ponía en mi mamadera
valium, y salio un día con sus amigos
y volvió con esa manga de drogados,
y acelerados, en un rito satánico
después de torturar a mi hamster cocinaron.
Fue un infierno, me lo hicieron probar.
¡Y no era tierno!

Depende, ahí yo era un jopende,
como dijo mi tío que es un tipo que me entiende:
el que no sufre no aprende,
y ahí me bajó un diente de una patada
y me robó la plata que el ratón dejó bajo mi almohada.
Todos se reían cuando arrastraba la erre.
Mi abuela me pedía que si moría no la entierre
y que subiera más:
"Quizás, quizás, quizás"

Hoy estoy raro, y no entiendo por qué
si nada extraño me tuvo a maltraer
Hoy estoy raro no se lo que hacer.
Sentarme a esperar, que se me pase y chau

Y ta, capaz, fue que quede marcado
por ser hijo de padres divorciados.
¡Qué tarado!, no lo había pensado,
pero si fuera así todos seriamos traumados.

Y yo a media luz, ponía un blues
y la abuela a Jesús le pedía que Gardel
no fuera de Toulousse.
Yo pinchaba con su cruz, los granos de pus
por mi alergia al mousse.

Achus!!! Será que fui a cenar
con la novia de mi padre,
que me invitó pero me hizo lavar las cacerolas,
y al ver que mi hermana desfilaba medio en bolas
me dijo: Mirá, las modelos son todas trolas.

Y se enfurece,
¡justo ella!, que cuando toma se emputece.
Me tuve que rajar cuando después del cuarto vino
me empezó a toquetear
y se rió y le vino...hipo

Y me contó como anticipo
que va a dejar al viejo por el tipo
que le pagó la lipo.
Será por eso que estoy sensible,
la vida es impredecible.

Hoy estoy raro, y no entiendo por qué,
si nada extraño me tuvo a maltraer.
Hoy estoy raro no se lo que hacer.
Sentarme a esperar, que se me pase y chau

Capaz que no le hizo gracia
al de la farmacia
cuando dije que yo defiendo a muerte a la eutanasia.
Decía que si todos se morían se fundía,
y me tiró con un frasco de homeopatía.

O en una de esas,
como decía el peyote estoy mal de la cabeza.
Pero no, el doctor que me curó me juró
que la herida del frascazo en la nuca ya cicatrizó.

Será ese copetín que tomé en el cafetín,
picando un salamín, escuchando led zepellin
o fue esa moza, con pinta de viciosa
que de babosa echó en mi vaso alguna cosa

¡Qué pedazo de guaso!
Si rompió el vaso
cuando mi faso
le quemó el brazo,
y por mi torpeza
dejó el barril gigante de cerveza mal cerrado
y el bar quedó inundado.
Qué acertado,
pensar que yo me quise levantar a la nami
hablando del tsunami,
y baldeando me dijo: "¿Viste? Volvé por donde viniste,
el cielo no existe".

Hoy estoy raro, y no entiendo por qué
si nada extraño me tuvo a maltraer.
Hoy estoy raro no se lo que hacer.
Sentarme a esperar, que se me pase y chau.

Pobre Papá

Papito tiene que ir a trabajar
no quiere
papá no quiere ir
pero tiene que ir igual
papito dice si es lo q papi adora
papito no nació para las 8 horas

Papá no quiere trabajar
pero lo obligan
papito prefiere quedarse panza arriba
papito quiere una vida mas relajada
papá quiere quedarse en casa
y no hacer nada

Pobre papá (Pobre papá)
Pobre papá (Pobre papá)
a él no le gusta trabajar
Pobre papito (pobre papito)
pobrecito papa (Pobre papá)
nunca lo dejan descansar

Papito no quiere trabajar tan seguido
papá preferiría ser un mantenido
papá piensa que un día manda todo al carajo
pero no encara eso porque es mucho trabajo

Pobre papá (Pobre papá)
Pobre papá (Pobre papá)
A él no le gusta trabajar
Pobre papito (pobre papito)
Pobrecito papa (Pobre papá)
nunca lo dejan descansar

Siempre pensé que trabajar
no era moderno
si el trabajo es salud,
que trabajen los enfermos
si el trabajo es salud,
que trabajen los enfermos.

beef, it's what's for dinner (and breakfast, and lunch, and ...)

James sent this to us this morning, with "I think I'll like Uruguay" in the subject line.

Leo said there were protestors about the wood, vegetarian protestors, and probably some folks protesting the price of meat. I will say this -- I loved the asados we enjoyed down South.

Uruguay hosts biggest BBQ, grills 12 tons of beef
Sun Apr 13, 2008 7:59pm
MONTEVIDEO (Reuters) - More than a thousand barbecue fanatics in Uruguay grilled up 12 metric tonnes (26,400 lbs) of beef on Sunday, setting a new Guinness world record while promoting the country's succulent top export.

Army personnel set up a grill nearly 1 mile long and firefighters lit six tonnes of charcoal to kick off the gargantuan cookout.

Some 1,250 people grilled the beef and about 20,000 spectators cried with joy when a Guinness judge confirmed the barbecue record had been broken.

"I'm very proud to be Uruguayan. We have the best beef and now we have the world's biggest barbecue," said one of the volunteer cooks, sporting an apron and chef's hat.

The South American country bested a Mexican grilling record from 2006 by a resounding 4 tonnes.

The barbecue was organized by the National Meats Institute, or INAC in Spanish, which tracks beef sales abroad.

Beef exports raked in $817 million last year for Uruguay, a laid-back country of some 3.2 million people squeezed between larger neighbors Argentina and Brazil, also major cattle producers.

"Uruguay is very small, it's not known for other events so we have to use these kinds of gimmicks so people find out where Uruguay is and what it has to offer," said INAC's vice president, Fernando Perez Abella.

(Reporting by Conrado Hornos; writing by Hilary Burke, editing by Todd Eastham)

uruguayo como el mate

You can take the boy out of Uruguay, but you can't take Uruguay out of the boy ... as passionate as Leo is about his soccer team (Nacional), his murgas (think singing meets political theatre meets social commentary meets toilet humor), and his asados (amazing barbecues including beef, chicken, chorizo, and some offal), he's not a habitual mate drinker. This shot, taken in Montevideo last February, is of him mateando with me and his cousin before a tablado (murga performance during carnaval) began.

Carnaval at Club Malvín - Mateando

While there last year, it became clear just how ubiquitous mate is. Young people, old people, men, women, children ... everyone carries a thermos under one arm, a mate (the traditional gourd from which it is sipped), a bombilla (the metal straw/strainer through which the unbagged tea is sipped) around at all times. We were at the beach on a hot sunny day, and old men and little girls were drinking the steaming tea in the middle of summer.

I tried mate while in Uruguay. Leo's aunt passed me the mate and, after drinking, my face made it clear that I didn't enjoy the bitter drink. The next time the mate was passed my way, Leo took a photo of my response. His cousin Javier (who wasn't at that gathering) later correctly commented that it was obvious that that wasn't the first time I tried it -- my face wasn't sufficiently twisted.

The mate face

Mate isn't a new concept to me. My mother has bombillas, and large, traditional Paraguayan tereré (containers made from cow's horns) as decorations in her home. Paraguayans, Uruguayans, Argentines, Brazilians, some Bolivians and Chileans, and (oddly enough) Syrians and Lebanese) all drink mate, although the Paraguayans prefer theirs cold, much to the horror of Uruguayans.

The infusion called mate is prepared by steeping dry leaves (and twigs) of yerba mate in hot water, rather than in boiling water like black tea. It is a slightly less potent stimulant than coffee and much gentler on the stomach. Drinking mate with friends from a shared hollow gourd (also called a mate in Spanish, or cabaça or cuia in Portuguese) with a metal straw (a bombilla in Spanish, bomba or canudo in Portuguese) is an extremely common social practice in Argentina,[3][4] Uruguay, Paraguay, southern Chile, eastern Bolivia and Brazil [5] and also Syria and Lebanon.

The flavor of brewed yerba mate is strongly vegetal, herbal, and grassy, reminiscent of some varieties of green tea. Many consider the flavor to be very agreeable, but it is generally bitter if steeped in boiling water, so it is made using hot but not boiling water. Unlike most teas, it does not become bitter and astringent when steeped for extended periods, and the leaves may be infused several times. Additionally, one can purchase flavored mate in many varieties
...
In Paraguay, yerba mate is also drunk as a cold beverage. Usually drunk out of a cows horn in the countryside, tereré as it is known in the Guaraní language, is served with cold or iced water. Medicinal herbs, known as "yuyos", are mixed in a mortar and pestle and added to the water for taste or medicinal reasons.

I recently saw this ad, by Canarias, one of the biggest name brands in yerba mate, and thought it was excellent. The second one also captures scenes from Montevideo and the ubiquity that is mate. That led me to many other user-generated videos on how to make mate. The last one included below was the best.

poesia diaria

I was lucky enough to meet and speak with Virginia Giannoni when her installation of tributes to the disappeared was exhibited in San Diego a few years back. I'm very pleased to learn that the concept made it to publication as a new book, entitled "Poesia Diaria" (Everyday Poetry), with the help of Gustavo Santaolalla.

The Associated Press: 'Everyday Poetry' Honors Dirty War Dead
By BILL CORMIER – Dec 26, 2007

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — Thousands of dissidents silenced under Argentina's military dictatorship — tortured, executed and made to "disappear" in the so-called Dirty War against dissent — are gaining new voice through poetry.

A new book, "Poesia Diaria" ("Everyday Poetry"), tells the victims' story through the memories and verse of families who lost sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, husbands and wives. It comes as Argentines re-examine their country's dark past and push for trials of those who committed human rights abuses during the 1976-1983 junta.

For years, newspapers in this South American nation have published small notices, called "recordatorios" in Spanish, on the anniversaries of disappearances: poems and messages to the dead that Virginia Giannoni, the book's editor, said chilled her to the bone.

"To find such intimate letters published in a public space is so jarring," Giannoni said. "Many of these are beautiful texts that give voice to deep feelings. They express a need not only to remember family members, friends and colleagues who have been made to 'disappear' but to bear witness to their lives."

Giannoni first created a traveling wall of "death tributes" that toured San Diego, Toronto, Medellin, Colombia, and other cities. She then collected in "Poesia Diaria" about 200 of the more than 1,500 poems that had been published in newspapers.

Most are just a few lines saved from yellowed newsprint and old photocopies. Some recall the victims as children or moments together. Others retell their kidnappings or express longing to be reunited.

Still other tributes express anger at the junta, such as one penned by the parents of Juan Jacinto Burgos, who was kidnapped in 1976: "Trapped and murdered ... your voice silenced/ Murdered in a cowardly fashion while held captive somewhere/ We will never forget your martyred body/ We will never forgive the atrocious crimes of the military dictatorship."

"Assassin are you still free?" wonders the family of Fernando Brodsky, who disappeared inside a torture center. "Is your conscience still in need of relief?"

Nearly 13,000 people are officially listed as dead or missing from the junta's so-called Dirty War against dissent, though human rights groups put the toll at nearly 30,000 victims.

Despite renewed prosecutions under President Nestor Kirchner that have led to a handful of convictions, the Dirty War era and the unknown fates of thousands remain open wounds.

"I always think about my sister, always, always," said Cristina Diturbide, who says her younger sister Marta was abducted Nov. 22, 1976, and who visited a recent "Poesia Diaria" exhibition.

"It's a wound that will never close," Diturbide said. "I now have my own home, my work, my children, but her absence is very real."

The book aims to voice that grief and help heal those wounds, said Argentine composer Gustavo Santaolalla, winner of two Academy Awards for best original score for music he wrote for "Brokeback Mountain" and "Babel." With the backing of the famous human rights group Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Santaolalla brought the book to press through his publishing group Retina Editores.

"This was one of the greatest experiences of my life: meeting the Mothers and seeing how they could transform some of the most horrendous things that can happen in your life — such as losing a child, brother, sister or father — into super-positive energy that has to do with life, not death," he told The Associated Press in an interview.

Nora Cortinez of the Mothers said the missing would be glad to be honored this way. "Our children wouldn't have wanted marble or bronze plaques," she said.

The book, which came out in mid-September, contains English versions of most of the poems, and Santaolalla said future editions could add more verses as well as French, German and Italian translations.

Meanwhile a related Web site, http://www.poesiadiaria.com.ar, collects more than 500 tributes and invites multilingual volunteers to translate the "fragments of stolen love" into English and French. Giannoni said U.S. high school students who made some translations reported learning about Argentine history in a way they will never forget.

Argentine singer and human rights activist Leon Grieco, who collaborates frequently with the Mothers, said "Poesia Diaria" takes the public behind the faded pictures they have carried in their weekly marches for decades.

"We all know the photographs but not the stories behind them," Grieco said. "This book brings us a little closer to the disappeared through the poetry of those who knew them."

who needs lanes?

This story reminded me of Leo's cousin Javier in Uruguay. Last February, I gave the poor guy a complex by asking him about the rules of the road.

We were in Montevideo, and Javier was carting us around the city in his Citroen. We invariably returned to the Rambla, the multi-lane riverfront road that connects beaches and other cities along the Rio de la Plata. I noticed that all the cars would stop neatly in their designated lanes at red lights. As soon as the light became green, the Uruguayan drivers appeared to completely ignore the lane markings, with most driving such that the lines ran down the exact center of the automobile. To my American eyes, it was chaotic and unsafe. But from the air, traffic must have looked like a living organism, constantly arranging and rearranging as vehicles merged, jostled for space, and eventually left the road.

However, the pattern was so consistent that after a few days I asked about it. Javier laughed, characterized traffic as an ola (ocean wave), with groups speeding along or slowing as light after light became green or red as we approached. The more I think about it, the more apt Javier's word choice becomes: an ola is liquid in motion, a stream constantly ebbing and flowing, with very little that separates the mass and its force.

I suspect Javier wanted to reassure me, however. He starting driving in his lane (between the lines), becoming a danger to himself, his passengers, and the other motorists. After a few drivers shook their fists at him and shouted all manner of compliments about his mother, he resumed his place in the organic traffic pattern, with our car all over the road, one more vehicle in flux and constant motion.

As his passenger, I was grateful that he decided that it was easier (and safer) to go along to get along. And I marvelled at how everyone around him adjusted slightly based on the needs of those around them. In a sense, that was another snapshot that illustrates yet again how much of the world is cognizant of the society around it and interacting and changing accordingly, while we as Americans are individuals with physical space buffering us (ostensibly, for our own safety and that of others), such that we change and interact less with others when reaching our destination.

Modern Love: Our Joy Knows No Bounds, or Lanes
December 30, 2007
By ELLEN GRAF
MY Chinese friend Yuzhi invited herself over for a serious talk. Her English is poor, and she struggled to convey her message, but she was concerned: she had noticed I was lonely.

Her brother in China, Zhong-Hua, was lonely, too. Maybe he and I would like each other? She offered to send me to China to find out. “But if you don’t like him, is O.K.,” she said. Her vocabulary exhausted, she drew a huge breath and said, “O.K., all done.”

I was both stunned by her offer and strangely open to it. At 46, I had been burned to ash by divorce and had crawled back toward life, sometimes on hands and knees. The common wisdom is that people, in seeking love, risk losing themselves, but I did not fear this loss. And I thought that not choosing for myself might work better than choosing. I didn’t wonder about what my perfect person would be like. I was way beyond that kind of amusement.

Four months later, I found myself in the Beijing airport amid a surge of people politely pushing, shuffling and nudging past one another. This was unlike an American crowd, where you feel harried, even accosted. There, I sailed comfortably through a sea of introverts.

I saw one solid figure standing absolutely still. A multitude pressed and swayed around him. He held red roses, and beads of moisture clung to his resolute jaw. He wore an expression of contained expectancy. The temperature was 99 degrees.

I immediately felt calm in his presence. Our courtship had already occurred in the form of our shared anticipation, though we hadn’t communicated, hadn’t even exchanged pictures. But his being open to me, sight unseen, meant a lot. We had tried so hard in previous marriages, only to fail. So I traveled to him with an eager heart, and he welcomed me with the same.

During our three weeks together, the absence of spoken words let things be themselves. I felt the air tingling and warm with a companionship sheltered from discourse.

At our first dinner he placed each delicacy on my plate and watched without making eye contact or smiling. Of the locusts and sea slug he gave me just a little, and nodded once encouragingly to say, “Try.” He saw I loved shrimp and piled more onto the plate. Out of necessity, the first phrase I learned in Chinese was “I am full.”

When he asked, “Do you want marry?” I said yes. I was surprised, actually, that he could say the words; he must have practiced and practiced. Later we had a simple ceremony, and I returned to the United States to wait 18 months for him to be granted a visa. During this time we communicated as best we could by phone and letters. His voice was balm to my nerves, and the monthly rice-paper letters were always from “the brootom” of his heart.

In return, translating with a dictionary, I sometimes wrote characters that had been out of popular use in China for centuries. When I asked after his father, it probably sounded something like, “I prithee, how fareth the honorable ancestor?”

He had to devote many hours over several days to write one short letter in English, so I told him to write in Chinese and I would find someone to translate. In one letter he wrote:

“In my imagination I see your slim figure buffeted by icy gusts of wind, and I want to cross the street and stand next to you. I long to shield you from the cold. But I am across the world, not across the street. We must both be patient. I will come and be with you forever.”

Finally the day arrived when I was waiting at the Albany airport for him. It was winter. As soon as I took him into my house, he deftly made himself at home. At the wood stove he removed his business pants and stood there in his baggy quilted long underwear. “Very comfortable,” he said, one of the few phrases he knew at the time.

After our meal, he rummaged in the bathroom until he found the mop, bucket and Murphy Oil Soap. He proceeded to scrub in silence all the floors, upstairs and down. Then he went out on the snowy porch in his black business shoes and long underwear, looked up at the starry sky and had a smoke.

As is common in China, there were no random smiles, no effort at small talk, no hand squeezing or gentle pats. My husband would no sooner pat my hand or kiss my cheek than pat his own hand or kiss his image in the mirror. I had to feel the air to know if everything was O.K. or not. I decided it was O.K. and went to bed, leaving him in the snow. When he came to bed he held me as if I were something long lost and precious that might not live until morning.

The first task was to find him work. A friend kindly hired Zhong-Hua to help on a painting job. Great, I thought. But back home he had been a businessman, and I didn’t know that many post-Mao urban Chinese have complicated feelings of shame about performing paid manual labor. He gamely went along, but it was a disaster that ended with the friend pressing $200 into his hand and saying he didn’t need a helper the next day.

I also didn’t know that as a child, Zhong-Hua had endured hard labor far more grueling than house painting. He had worked side by side with village farmers, standing bare-legged in icy water for hours, scooping out silt for fertilizer. His parents, ravaged by poverty and famine, often did little more for him than count his head as he safely returned at night. For his first 19 years, my husband endured such hardship and deprivation that by adulthood he had cultivated an internal equilibrium that was not easily upset.

I had long sought a peace unaffected by the weather outside.

Soon another friend gave him a job at his natural foods store. Zhong-Hua had no driver’s license, so the owner went miles out of his way to pick him up and take him home at night. But how long would that last? I needed to teach him how to drive. In China he had driven a motorcycle, but not a car. How different could it be?

First of all, the center line had no significance to him. And I had to instruct him that the car on the main road has the right of way and a red light means “stop.”

Accelerating through an intersection, he said, “I don’t think so.”

“Yes, that’s the law!”

“In China, who can go, just go. Is O.K. Big road, small road, left turn, right turn — this doesn’t matter. Also, people drive any side of road. Which side open, which side drive.”

“What if another car is coming?”

“No problem. Just not hit other car is O.K.”

“Watch out! That guy is passing you on the right. You should be in the slow lane. Stay in your lane!”

I was gasping and holding on to the ceiling, my feet braced against the dash. He said I must ride in the back because I was making him nervous and this was “very danger.” He pulled over and I got out, took a few deep breaths and repositioned myself rigidly in the back seat, pressing my mouth shut except to yelp: “Stay in your lane! Do you know what a lane is?”

I wasn’t in the habit of drinking alcohol, but for several weeks, upon each safe return, I sedated myself with Chinese wine, the kind that numbs your lips for a full hour.

Barren winter trees allowed our elderly neighbors, Dave and Flippy, to keep a watchful eye on events at our place, and often Dave would telephone to offer assistance: “Hey, I wasn’t doing anything and wondered if you want me to bring my tractor up. I can pull that car out of the ditch easy. No sense you two hurting yourselves.”

One night, returning home through a blackness laden with spring snowflakes, my husband pulled up to the kitchen door to drop me off. I was so grateful. All that practice was paying off.

He reappeared in the doorway minutes later. “Sorry!” he said, and started quaking in silent laughter, looking down and shaking his head.

“Sorry?”

“Yes! Very sorry. You see!” He pulled me out to the garage. I looked in where the car should be, but nothing was there. Then I lifted my eyes and saw the taillights going west through a gaping hole in the garage. I ran around to the back and beheld the front of the car hanging in midair over the stone embankment.

The AAA tow truck came and pulled the car back into the garage, no questions asked. We patched together the garage wall. The next time it happened, a week later, the same AAA driver arrived. “I know what to do, ma’am,” he said.

DURING that first year we used our full allotment of AAA service calls while Zhong-Hua advanced from mistakenly pouring transmission fluid into the crankcase to being able to install alternators, timing belts, electrical components and an automatic transmission. His method of repair generally requires two days of sitting in front of the problem, thinking and smoking Old Golds, before he touches anything.

But his driving troubles persist. The police trail him. Motorists shake fists at him. He can’t remember the rule about not turning left from the right lane and recently put us in the path of a Lincoln zooming up fast. Tires screamed, and Zhong-Hua was looking into quivering jowls of the red-faced driver, who jabbed at him with a meaty forefinger, then stuck his face out the window and sputtered, “You almost killed us!”

“Yes.”

“I said you almost killed us, buddy. Do you hear?”

“Yes, yes.”

“What do you have to say when I say you almost killed us?”

“Thank you very much!”

“I’m yelling at you. Why do you say thank you?”

“I don’t know. I just think thank you.”

“O.K., you’re welcome,” the guy said, before warily proceeding.

Zhong-Hua waved and thanked him again.

And so it goes. Sometimes I remember our car grinding in slow motion off the gravel shoulder and totaling itself benignly against a rotten tree stump. I see us climbing out of the tilting wreckage, distraught but unhurt, and wonder if we were gently nudged off the road and thus saved from some other horrible highway fate by the gold cupid pin my husband bought at a garage sale and wears on his jacket for good luck.

Somebody must be looking out for us. A few years ago, my life was roadworthy but lonely — it cried out for an intervention. Now every day feels like a wild car ride with Zhong-Hua: lurching and unpredictable, but rich with humor, determination and devotion.

I don’t question it. Like my husband, I just think “thank you.”

Ellen Graf lives in upstate New York.

absolut-ly awesome

Absolut's new* ad is very clever. (Leave it to a Swedish Vodka company to hire an American ad firm to use a French song in a commercial filmed in Uruguay.)

Seriously, I love the use of Charles Trenet's "Boum" and the fact that it was filmed in Montevideo (the ending is a clear aerial shot of Plaza Independencia, with Palacio Salvo photoshopped out).

It would be great if we actually solved problems this way.

Check out other ads in the campaign ... especially the "Mulit" Bollywood one.

*(okay, I have been living under a rock/ being a grad student who doesn't watch TV. I was just informed that it came out in May.)

Absolut - Protest

Gracias, Javier

the famous waiter

the famous waiter by comment dit-on

Chuck (an American econ prof blogging from Uruguay whom we do not know) recently blogged about a wacky waiter at a restaurant in Colonia:

... [we] enjoyed lunch at a small restaurant called the Viejo Barrio with a charismatic waiter who wore 6 different wacky hats during our meal

This is the waiter in question. (Our two-hour dinner there in February included several hat changes, as well.)

chiste de mercosur

La idea del Mercosur era unir el buen gusto argentino, la perseverancia uruguaya, el optimismo brasilero y la humildad paraguaya.

Desafortunadamente, al final termino haciendose con el buen gusto brasilero, la perseverancia paraguaya, el optimismo uruguayo y la humildad argentina.

The idea of Mercosur was to bring together Argentine good taste, Uruguayan perseverance, Brazilian optimism, and Paraguayan humility.

Unfortunately, in the end, it turned out as Brazilian good taste, Paraguayan perseverance, Uruguayan optimism, and Argentine humility.

retumbando

I've been interested in the disappeared since I was 11 years old.

Having spent some time Argentina and Uruguay recently, this exhibition resonates all the more...

Unresolved Chords Echo for ‘the Disappeared’
By HOLLAND COTTER
April 7, 2007
There may have been a more moving show of contemporary political art in the city this season than “The Disappeared” at El Museo del Barrio, but if so, I missed it. The title refers to a peculiarly chilling form of violence associated with political upheavals in Latin America over the last 40 years, one that is now becoming more common in Iraq.

A man leaves for work one morning, but doesn’t come home at the end of the day, or later that night, or the next day. A week passes. Relatives suspect that the missing man, who may or may not have had risky political ties, has been arrested or kidnapped. But they don’t know by whom, or where he’s been taken, or if he’s alive or dead.

He’s one of the disappeared, “los desaparecidos,” the victim of terrorism through stealth removal. A death permits mourning, assignment of blame, a possibility of closure. Disappearance generates uncertainty, paralyzes action, leaves an open wound. If I say nothing, a survivor thinks, maybe my husband, or child, or mother, or wife will be spared, even returned. If I inquire or accuse, I may seal their fate. As often as not, fear wins out.

The 15 artists in the show are all from Latin American countries that experienced totalitarian regimes in the late 20th century, when almost every family had friends who disappeared or were themselves forced into hiding or exile. Directly or indirectly, their art is about these experiences.

Some of it is explicitly autobiographical. Nicolás Guagnini’s father, a leftist journalist in Buenos Aires, vanished in 1977, when the artist was 11, at the beginning of a period that saw the disappearance, torture and death of some 30,000 of his countrymen. Mr. Guagnini, who now lives in New York, where he is a co-founder of the artist-run Orchard gallery on the Lower East Side, has made a single sculpture about his missing parent: a cluster of upright posts on which his father’s portrait is painted in fragments so that the face comes into focus, then dissolves, as the viewer circles the piece.

A photographic installation by Marcelo Brodsky, who is also from Argentina, expands the personal into a larger history. In early family snapshots, he is a child playing with his older brother, Fernando. In a 1967 group portrait of his eighth-grade class, he has circled 13 of the 32 figures, to indicate friends who as adults would go into political exile or disappear.

Fernando appears again, and for the last time, in a 1979 picture, taken in a military prison were he was jailed as a dissident and, Mr. Brodsky believes, murdered. In the late 1990s, the artist organized a memorial for all of these people from his past. It included a public reading of their names. The reading was recorded on video; the names sound through El Museo’s galleries.

Other work in the show is less diaristic, more about the facts of violence made visible. Sara Maneiro shows enlargements of X-rayed dental remains recovered from a mass grave of protesters massacred by government troops in Venezuela.

Iván Navarro, the youngest artist here, born in 1972, contributes a ladder made from fluorescent light tubes and printed with the names of Chilean police and secret service personnel indicted for torturing or killing fellow citizens. Arturo Duclos has covered a gallery wall with the outlined form of the Chilean flag made from human bones he collected over the years from medical students and other donors.

Fernando Traverso, an activist based in Rosario, Argentina, keeps the memory of dead friends alive by surreptitiously stenciling images of bicycles on city walls. Bicycles, hard to identify and easy to hide, were the favored mode of transportation for resistance fighters. When a bike was found abandoned, it usually meant its owner had been captured. Thanks to Mr. Traverso, there are still bikes in Rosario awaiting their riders’ return.

Not all the art is so specific in its references. Juan Manuel Echavarría, from Colombia, symbolically suggests the pathology of disappearance in photographs of a weathered mannequin displayed like a body on an autopsy table. In photographs by the Uruguayan-born Ana Tiscornia, newsprint portraits are half- obscured behind what looks like a coat of yellow slime. In several small videos, Oscar Muñoz paints similar portraits with water on light-colored stone; within seconds the water dries and the faces vanish.

No single work is more complex than “From the Uruguayan Torture Series” (1983) by Luis Camnitzer, an artist born in Germany, raised in Uruguay and for the last several decades an influential teacher and writer in New York. Combining close-up photographs of his own body with handwritten sentence fragments, he evokes the sensibilities of both tormenter and victim with corrosive subtlety.

Mr. Camnitzer is one of our finest political artists, which is to say one of our finest artists. Nothing he has done demonstrates this more persuasively than this devastating exercise in psychological portraiture, which is also self-portraiture.

Portraiture is, of course, an art form expressly designed to resist oblivion. And it is the essence of this show, which opens with a floor-to-ceiling spread of monotype memorial portraits by Antonio Frasconi, born in Buenos Aires in 1919, and concludes with an extraordinary portrait project called “Identity” by a collective of Argentine artists who use that word as their name.

Collaborating with the Association of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, women who have for years publicly demonstrated against government silence on disappearances, the collective has gathered photographs of couples who had children, or were expecting children, at the time they vanished. The installation, continually being added to, has been exhibited in Buenos Aires. The hope is that if any of those children, who would now be adults, survived, they might recognize the face of a lost parent and be reunited with living family members.

Whatever its practical results may be, it gives an overpowering sense of the sheer statistical enormity of loss. You think you’ve reached the end; you turn a corner and find more. It goes on and on, face after face, out of the gallery, down the hall.

This all may seem long ago and far away to us, but every Thursday in Buenos Aires, groups of women continue to hold their protests demanding a full accounting of their children’s fates.

“The Disappeared” was organized by Laurel Reuter, founding director and chief curator of the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks. It is scheduled to travel through North and South America for three years, and has a bilingual catalog that is a work of art in itself. From Ms. Reuter’s stunning essay to the supplementary material, it is a total- immersion emotional experience.

And why is it that an on-the-road exhibition from a small museum in the Midwest is the most potent show of contemporary art, political or otherwise, in town? All I can say is that curators in our local museums should pay a visit, and ask themselves that question.

“The Disappeared” (“Los Desaparecidos”) continues through June 17 at El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue, at 104th Street, East Harlem; (212) 831-7272, elmuseo.org.

disfrutando en uruguay

We're nearing the end of our trip and have many stories to tell. For now, I'll share these images and let you make up your own narrative.

las murgas by comment dit-on	Palacio Salvo y bandera by comment dit-on
Casapueblo (Punta Ballenas) by comment dit-on	CNdeF by comment dit-on

even al jazeera's covering it

I leave for my vacation in Argentina and Uruguay next week. As a tourist headed to notoriously expensive Punta del Este (described by the NY Times as "the Hamptons of the southern hemisphere,") I see the blockade as a good thing, because less people means:

1. smaller crowds
2. lower prices

But I don't like the potential buquebus hassles that the conflict may create as Leo and I make our way from Buenos Aires to Uruguay (and back).

Oh, and the next-to-last paragraph in this story is hilarious. As Leo put it:

wow, talk about not doing your research. all [s]he had to do was find one uruguayan to talk to and this sentence would not have made it into the article.

Anyhow, here's the deal on the Argentine / Uruguayan blockade ...

Argentine blockade irks neighbours
TUESDAY, JANUARY 23, 2007
23:16 MECCA TIME, 20:16 GMT
Lucia Newman in Gualiguaychu, Argentina
A caterpillar is the only thing that can be seen moving these days on a road that leads to the bridge linking Uruguay and Argentina.

The Libertador General San Martín bridge would normally be packed with tourists and trucks, especially at this time of year which is holiday season in South America.

But for more than six weeks Argentine activists from the nearby town of Gualiguaychu have been blocking the international route to demand the dismantling of an enormous pulp mill under construction on the Uruguayan side of the Uruguay River.

The cause of the Gualeguaychu activists has attracted international coverage since they began their crusade more than a year ago to stop the Finnish pulp mill manufacturer Metsa-Botnia, from building the plant.

The Orion plant is the largest ever foreign investment in Uruguay and the government claims state of the art technology will prevent contamination. But residents of Gualiguaychu do not believe a word of it.

Tourism threat
"It's obvious to anyone that the pulp mills will contaminate our environment. I have five children and three grandchildren, I'm doing this for them," says Estela Vence who has lived in a donated bus since the road block began.

Javier Villanueva, another activist, told Al Jazeera the mill will also damage the local tourist industry.

"The main vacation spot of the Uruguay River would have a smoke stack for a backdrop," he says.

"We cannot market that, we value our clean air and clean water. Who would come here from the big city to relax… for a smoke stack?"

The road block, meanwhile, is severing the main land artery between Argentina and Uruguay, preventing tens of thousands of Argentines from getting to their favourite summer getaway, the Uruguayan beaches of Punta del Este, at the height of the season.

And the Argentine government is doing nothing to stop it, claiming the demonstrations are sporadic and not disrupting construction of the mill.

Uruguay is furious claiming the blockade is not simply an inconvenience for a few holidaymakers but the strangulation of its economy.

However the World Court turned down a request by Uruguay on Tuesday, lodged in December, to force Argentina to remove blockades on the roads between the neighbouring states.

Case history
The court also urged both sides to refrain from any action that would hinder a resolution of the dispute over the multimillion-dollar mill.

"This decision... places a responsibility on the governments of both countries to try to look for a solution in dialogue," said Hector Gros Espiell, representing Uruguay.

However Tabare Vazquez, Uruguay's president, has said he will not accept any mediation, even from the king of Spain.

The case began in 2006 when Argentina took Uruguay to the World Court in The Hague, accusing it of violating a 1975 bilateral treaty by not giving enough information on the mill.

The court said on Tuesday it was not convinced the blockades risked harming the rights claimed by Uruguay under the 1975 statute and had not delayed the mill's construction.

Growing apart
A judgement on whether Uruguay had breached the 1975 treaty, under which all issues regarding the water of the river must be consulted on and agreed by both countries, is expected within two years, according to the court.

"This is a decision that satisfies us... there's no proven damage done to Uruguay," Jorge Taiana, the Argentine foreign minister, told reporters in Buenos Aires.

Reinaldo Gargano, the Uruguayan foreign minister, told local radio the court's ruling was a surprise.

"The decision says it's alright for people to sit down on deckchairs in the middle of the road and block the transit of goods, people, buses and vehicles," Gargano said.

The feud is unprecedented between two countries which have always regarded each other as family, sharing the same accent, same culture, and now similar centre-left governments.

But as activists in Gualiguaychu pledge to maintain their protest the two countries are now separated by more than just a river.

celebrating world human rights day

finochet
Originally uploaded by loucovinagre.

Today is World Human Rights Day and I really can't think of a better day to learn that Augusto Pinochet is dead.

On Sept. 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Dr. Salvador Allende. Before the coup, Chile was one of the most stable democracies in Latin America, with a long tradition of democratic civilian rule. Pinochet's regime used state-sponsored murder to quash the opposition. For 17 years, his thugs ran roughshod over the country, disappearing and torturing prominent intellectuals, dissidents, and anyone who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The [Rettig] commission’s report cited victims by name and described the ghastly circumstances of their deaths by firing squads, beatings, mutilations, drownings and electrocutions. In all, the report attributed at least 3,200 killings and disappearances to the Pinochet security forces.

Another 30,000 were tortured, but not killed. Thousands of Chileans were expelled from and fled the country to escape the regime. With the help of the United States, Pinochet and other like-minded generals in South America founded Operation Condor, to destroy Marxist opposition in Latin America. Although Pinochet was arrested in Britain, he never stood trial for the atrocities he and his goons perpetuated in Chile. That he lived in Chile with impunity is an outrage.

Something tells me that he died with the same defiant attitude. He will not be mourned by those who love human rights. Here's one take on his death:

augusto pinochet died on world human rights day. i'll call it poetic. i won't call it justice.
justice would have been if they had flayed him alive while raping him repeatedly with a red sickle-shaped dildo.

In thinking more about his death, I have to say that I don't think there can be justice for what Pinochet and other perpetrators of state-sponsored terrorism did. I like this account, written by the loved ones of someone who was disappeared in Argentina's dirty war.

Alfredo Gonzalez Detenido - Desaparecido el 4 de marzo de 1978 Gota a gota, la gota de agua perfora la piedra. Así pasará en la conciencia de los asesinos de mi hijo. - En tu cumpleaños, tu mamá y tu gran familia.

Alfredo Gonzalez Detained - Disappeared March 4, 1978 Drop by drop, the drop of water perforates the stone. That's what will happen to the conscience of my son's assassins. - On your birthday, your mother and family.

I love this tribute. It seems so zen, and is lovely in that sense. At the same time, what really does it for me is the undercurrent (forgive me) that makes it really beautiful poetry about water torture. I am many things, and I don't see myself as a violent person. I can't say that I'd intervene if someone else was seeking justified retribution. I hope it never comes to that. But my sense is that I'd just walk away and let nature (yes, violent human nature) take its course.

In the end, it's times like these when I want to believe in an afterlife, where those who committed the unspeakable are forced to account for the atrocities they visited upon humanity.

Augusto Pinochet, 91, Ex-Dictator of Chile, Dies
By JONATHAN KANDELL
December 10, 2006

Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, the brutal dictator who repressed and reshaped Chile for nearly two decades and became a notorious symbol of human rights abuse and corruption, died today at the Military Hospital of Santiago. He was 91.

Dr. Juan Ignacio Vergara, head of the medical team that had been treating him, said his condition degenerated sharply a week after he underwent an angioplasty after an acute heart attack.

General Pinochet seized power on Sept. 11, 1973, in a bloody military coup that toppled the Marxist government of President Salvador Allende. He then led the country into an era of robust economic growth. But during his rule, more than 3,200 people were executed or disappeared, and scores of thousands more were detained and tortured or exiled.

General Pinochet gave up the presidency in 1990 after promulgating a Constitution that empowered a right-wing minority in the Senate well into the new century. He held on to his post of commander in chief of the army until 1998. With that power base, he exerted considerable influence over the democratically elected governments that replaced his iron-fisted rule.

He set limits, for example, on economic policy debates with frequent warnings that he would not tolerate a return to statist measures, and he blocked virtually all attempts to prosecute members of his security forces for human rights abuses. Through intimidation and legal obstacles, General Pinochet sought to ensure his own immunity from accountability and in fact was never brought to trial. But in an astonishing turn of events nearly a decade after he stepped down, he was detained in Britain and then, on his return to Chile, forced to spend his retirement years fighting a battery of legal charges relating to human rights violations and personal corruption.

During those last years he lived in near seclusion, mostly at his home in Bucalemu, about 80 miles southwest of Santiago, scorned even by many of his former military colleagues and right-wing civilian ideologues. Many were disillusioned by revelations that he held, at the least, $28 million in secret bank accounts abroad.

“The humiliation Pinochet has gone through is probably a better outcome than any trial could have achieved,” said José Zalaquett, Chile’s foremost human rights lawyer.

General Pinochet won grudging international praise for some of the free-market policies he instituted, transforming a bankrupt economy into the most prosperous in Latin America. They included removing trade barriers, encouraging export growth, privatizing state-owned industries, creating a central bank able to control interest and exchange rates without government interference, cutting wages sharply, and privatizing the social security system. Many elements of the so-called Chilean model were widely emulated in the region.

But by the time of his death, even some of those economic victories had been called into question. The privatizing of Chile’s social security system, in particular, has come under attack as being unjust and is undergoing revision. And across Latin America, many of the countries that had adopted similar changes are reversing some of them, responding to a growing wave of popular, leftist revolt over foreign competition and unequal distribution of wealth.

General Pinochet initially led a four-man junta in the 1973 military revolt that brought him to power. President Allende, a democratically elected Socialist, was found dead after shooting himself during an assault on the presidential palace in Santiago. The coup followed many months of political unrest and economic chaos. Hyperinflation, recession, labor strife and middle-class protests had all sapped the Allende government of popular support.

General Pinochet (pronounced PEE-noh-shay) soon made it clear that he had little use for political parties, banning all of them, and he also dissolved congress and scrapped the constitution. He blamed the democratic political system for allowing a coalition of Socialists and Communists to take control of the government. In a 1973 news conference, he asserted that Chile would require “an authoritarian government that has the capacity to act decisively” and would not return to the traditional political party system for a generation. It was a vow he kept.

In 1974, General Pinochet elevated himself to president, reducing the rest of the junta to a consultative role. He appointed military officers as mayors of towns and cities throughout Chile. Retired military personnel were named rectors of universities, and they carried out vast purges of faculty members suspected of left-wing or liberal sympathies.

The press was censored, and labor strikes and unions were banned. A fearsome security apparatus known as the National Intelligence Directorate, known as DINA, persecuted, tortured and killed Pinochet opponents within Chile and sometimes beyond its borders. A government-commissioned report issued in 2004 concluded that almost 28,000 people had been tortured during the general’s reign.

Military regimes were the rule rather than the exception in Latin America in the 1970s. Whether right wing, as in Argentina and Brazil, or left wing, as in Peru, military dictators came to power promising to impose economic discipline but departed, after some initial success, with the economy in disarray.

General Pinochet proved to be the exception. Though no economic expert, he had at his service a team of technocrats, who, months before the coup, put together a radical plan to overhaul the country’s battered economy. Some had studied with the Nobel Prize-winner Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago and embraced his notions of free-market forces and monetarism.

But economic transformation was slow and painful. Mistakes by the general’s economic team provoked a deep recession in the early 1980s that left more than a third of the work force without jobs. The poor survived with the help of soup lines and temporary employment in public works projects that paid less than the minimum wage.

Attempts at strikes or other forms of protest were ruthlessly put down by General Pinochet’s secret police. That repression gave the free-market policies time to take hold. Since the mid-1980s, Chile’s gross domestic product has grown an average of more than 6 percent a year, the most impressive performance in Latin America.

There were few hints in General Pinochet’s early life that he harbored either political ambitions or ideological convictions. The son of a customs inspector, he was born into lower middle-class circumstances on Nov. 25, 1915, in the Pacific port city of Valparaíso. He graduated from the military academy in Santiago in 1937 and rose steadily in the officer corps. He was already a general, and only 55, when he was given the important post of commander of the Santiago army garrison in 1971.

It was a crucial moment in President Allende’s term. Elected the year before with only 36 percent of the vote, Dr. Allende, a physician, had pressed ahead with a socialist program to nationalize mines, banks and strategic industries, split up large rural estates into communal farms, and impose price controls. The measures soon resulted in steep declines in production, shortages of consumer goods and explosive inflation. A general strike paralyzed Santiago in late 1972, and General Pinochet, as garrison commander, was called on by Dr. Allende to impose a state of emergency in the capital.

This was the first time most Chileans became aware of the tall, broad-shouldered army officer with a brush mustache on his unsmiling face. General Pinochet imposed a curfew, ordered the arrest of several hundred demonstrators on both the left and the right and announced, “I will not tolerate agents of chaos no matter what their political ideology.”

His seemingly neutral stance convinced Dr. Allende that he was an officer who could be relied on to observe the Chilean military’s century-long tradition of loyalty to civilian government. In August 1973, he appointed General Pinochet commander in chief of the army.

Less than three weeks later, the armed forces overthrew the government. The presidential palace, known as La Moneda, was bombed and strafed by the air force. Dr. Allende shot himself rather than surrender, according to his personal physician.

Aside from battles at some factories in the Santiago suburbs, there was little resistance to the overwhelming firepower of the military units that fanned out across the country. Tens of thousands of Allende sympathizers were rounded up and brutally interrogated. A majority of the killings took place in the three months, long after resistance had ended.

In most cases, prisoners from a slum or agrarian community would be executed as a means of terrorizing their neighborhoods into accepting military rule. The killings were often cynically, and falsely, justified as cases in which prisoners were shot while trying to escape.

The images that most shaped the outside world’s low opinion of the military regime were scenes of Santiago’s main sports stadium filled with prisoners, and by the public appearances of General Pinochet, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses, his face set in a scowl, his arms folded defiantly across his chest. Although a majority of executions, jailings and cases of torture took place shortly after the 1973 coup, serious human rights abuses waxed and waned over the next 17 years.

By the late 1980s, the economic prosperity General Pinochet created had lulled him into assuming that in free elections he or his chosen candidate would receive the grateful support of a majority of Chileans. But by then most were either too young to remember the Allende years or too confident about the strength of the economy to believe that only an authoritarian government could insure growth and stability.

In 1980, a new constitution backed by the Pinochet government made the armed forces “guarantors of institutionality,” giving them a nebulous role as political arbiters. It included several other limitations to full-fledged democracy. But in a 1988 plebiscite, an ample majority of Chileans voted against an attempt by General Pinochet to stay on as president for eight more years.

In presidential elections a year later, the former dictator’s candidate was handily defeated by Patricio Aylwin, a centrist Christian Democrat supported by parties of the left. In 1993, another Christian Democrat, Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, was elected president by an even greater margin.

To the delight of the Chilean business community, foreign investment, which had been stunted during the years the government was regarded with international opprobrium, poured back into the country, and Chilean products were welcomed everywhere abroad. Officials of the new Christian Democratic administration were not inclined to tinker with the roaring economic machine they inherited from the Pinochet administration.

“We may not like the government that came before us,” Alejandro Foxley, who was finance minister under Mr. Aylwin and is foreign minister today, said in a 1991 interview. “But they did many things right. We have inherited an economy that is an asset.”

With the transition to a democracy going so well, even admirers of General Pinochet hoped he would settle into a quieter period. Instead, he staged unannounced military maneuvers or placed his troops on sudden alert and gave notice that he would not tolerate attempts to prosecute his era’s human rights violators. “The day they touch one of my men, the rule of law ends,” he warned in 1991.

In a rare exception, he stood by as two subordinates were convicted of ordering the murder of Orlando Letelier, foreign minister in the Allende government. Mr. Letelier was killed by a car bomb in Washington in September 1976, along with an American colleague, Ronni Moffitt. The incident, considered the worst act of state-sponsored terrorism on American soil, strained relations between Chile and the United States for almost two decades.

The two subordinates went to prison in 1995. They were Gen. Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, the head of DINA, the notorious secret police, who was sentenced to seven years; and his second in command, Col. Pedro Espinoza, who was sentenced to six years.

Stories of corruption began swirling around members of General Pinochet’s family as well as military personnel, and he used his power as army chief to protect them. He quashed judicial and congressional investigations into the financial dealings of his elder son and of army officers who were accused of running an illegal investment banking operation. Until revelations emerged in late 2004 that he had accumulated secret accounts totaling as much as $8 million at Riggs Bank in Washington, the general himself was rarely accused of corruption and lived in Spartan style. Later, Chilean investigators found that he had as much as $28 million in secret bank accounts in a number of countries.

Through his strong-arm tactics against the democratic governments that succeeded him, General Pinochet was making the point to Chileans that if they wanted to enjoy the capitalist virtues of his former dictatorship, they had better overlook his human rights violations.

Those violations were well documented by the National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, a nonpartisan group appointed by Mr. Aylwin to investigate the killings and disappearances carried out under the general’s 17-year dictatorship. The commission’s report cited victims by name and described the ghastly circumstances of their deaths by firing squads, beatings, mutilations, drownings and electrocutions. In all, the report attributed at least 3,200 killings and disappearances to the Pinochet security forces.

Retired as dictator but still in command of the army, General Pinochet scoffed at his human rights critics. Asked about the discovery of a mass grave of his government’s victims, he was quoted in the Chilean press as joking that it was an “efficient” way of burial.

Protected by personal security squads, the general also continued an active social life. He was feted by wealthy admirers on his birthday and on the anniversary of his coup. He was often invited to speak at luncheons given by political supporters and leading businessmen. When he finally stepped down as army chief, he joined the Senate as an unelected, permanent member, apparently intending to grant himself further immunity from prosecution.

But the general did not count on the determination of some jurists abroad to bring him to justice. In October 1998, while recuperating in a London clinic from a back operation, he was arrested by the British police in response to an application from a Spanish judge, seeking the general’s extradition to Madrid to stand trial on charges of genocide, torture and kidnapping.

A 16-month legal battle ensued, ending with a decision to send him back to Chile in March 2000 because his physical and mental ailments made him unfit to stand trial. Days after his return, Ricardo Lagos, the first Socialist to be elected president since the 1973 overthrow of Mr. Allende, assumed office.

For the rest of his life, the general had to fight off lawsuits and accept the humiliation of constant news reports about widespread brutality under his rule. President Lagos allowed the hundreds of criminal complaints filed against General Pinochet to run their course in the courts. He was succeeded in March 2006 by another Socialist, Michelle Bachelet, a former political prisoner and exile. Her father, an air force general loyal to Dr. Allende, was jailed by his colleagues and died in prison after being tortured.

General Pinochet spent his final years in near seclusion, with his wife, the former María Lucía Hiriart Rodríguez, 84, with whom he had two sons, Augusto and Marco Antonio, and three daughters, Lucía, Verónica and Jacqueline. They all survive him.

In rare public remarks, he continued to insist that he enjoyed the gratitude and wide support of Chileans. But polls indicated that well over half of his compatriots believed he should have been prosecuted for his human rights crimes.

Larry Rohter and Pascale Bonnefoy contributed reporting.

torturous

Most Americans are blissfully ignorant of Latin American history. We are even more ignorant of our government's role in shaping much of Latin America's awful past. The more I've learned, the more outraged I've become.

I learned that the CIA captured Che Guevarra (who was subsequently murdered by the Bolivian Army) when writing a paper on (of all things) terrorism in Northern Ireland as an undergrad. That triggered my enrollment in Michael Monteón's "Subverting Sovereignty: U.S. Aggression in Latin America" class. It was there that I first heard about ITT and Dole and the roughshod manner in which U.S.-owned corporations dictated foreign policy. That summer, I also got my knickers in a serious twist when I studied the U.S. Army's School of the Americas (renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2001) and the thousands of killers it has trained.

So when I saw this article on Uruguay's recent notice to the U.S. government that it would no longer take part in the SOA, I was interested ...

La Escuela de las Américas, conocida como la "Universidad de los Asesinos" y cuya clausura definitiva reclama un grupo de organizaciones humanitarias norteamericanas en gira por el continente, brindó 1.068 cursos a 1.020 uruguayos desde su fundación en 1946.

Entre sus egresados se encuentran varios de los oficiales militares uruguayos denunciados por violaciones a los derechos humanos en los años de la dictadura (1973-1985), a quienes se responsabiliza por torturas, secuestros, asesinatos y desapariciones dentro y fuera del territorio nacional.

And in agreement with this characterization of the SOA's reason for existence as essentially being about training soldiers to defend the economic interests of the U.S. ...

El padre Roy Bourgeois, un sacerdote norteamericano de la católica orden Maryknoll, que lidera la organización "SOA Watch", no duda al definir la función que ha cumplido la Escuela de las Américas: "Su rol ha sido, entrenar militares para defender los intereses económicos de Estados Unidos", dice.

Leo summarized it nicely:

The Good: What having a responsible left wing government can do for a country.

The Bad: Apparently, Uruguay was not allowed to take courses anyway, because it will not ratify an agreement to exempt U.S. military from responsibility before the ICC.

The Ugly: It's nice to see that after 20 years of democracy, Uruguay was still keeping open the option to train torturers on the CIA's dime.

justicia for the desaparecidos?

30,000 people disappeared during Argentina's 1976-83 military rule in a crackdown on students, intellectuals, leftist dissidents, and innocent bystanders.

The country hasn't healed, because the perpetrators of the crimes have not been brought to justice and most of the victim’s families have never recovered the bodies of their loved ones.

But today, the Argentine court struck down amnesty laws, a bold first step toward justice:

Argentina's Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that laws granting amnesty for atrocities committed during the so-called Dirty War are unconstitutional, opening the possibility that hundreds of people could be brought back to court.

In a 7-1 vote, with one abstention, the Supreme Court struck down laws passed in 1986 forbidding charges involved in the disappearances, torture and other crimes, a court spokesman told The Associated Press.

Some 3,000 officers, about 300 of whom are still serving in the armed forces, could be called for questioning, according to human rights groups, which estimated that up to 400 of them could face new charges.

The ruling came in the case of Julio Simon, a former police officer accused in the disappearance of Jose Poblete and Gertrudis Hlaczik, and of his taking their daughter, Claudia Poblete, as his own.

desaparecidos, II

Here is another of the tributes to the desaparecidos that stuck with me:

Maria Eugenia Sanlloventi de Massolo Desaparecida el 1 de enero de 1976 Aunque los monstruos quisieron callarte Tu voz retumba cada vez más fuerte en sus oídos. 23 años de extrañarte. 23 años de soñarte. Para no olvidar, ni perdonar. - Tu seres queridos.

Maria Eugenia Sanlloventi de Massolo Disappeared January 1, 1976 Although the monsters wanted to silence you Each time, your voice resonates more loudly in their ears. 23 years missing you. 23 years dreaming of you. To not forget, nor forgive. -Your beloved beings.

por la verdad, memoria y justicia

I went to the exhibit about the desaparecidos yesterday. It was powerful, horrible, and beautiful. I stood alone, tears streaming down my face as I read the many words of tribute written by mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters on the birthdays of their loved ones. At one point, I just had to sit down.

This is one of the tributes that resonated with me:

Alfredo Gonzalez Detenido - Desaparecido el 4 de marzo de 1978 Gota a gota, la gota de agua perfora la piedra. Así pasará en la conciencia de los asesinos de mi hijo. - En tu cumpleaños, tu mamá y tu gran familia.

Alfredo Gonzalez Detained - Disappeared March 4, 1978 Drop by drop, the drop of water perforates the stone. That's what will happen to the conscience of my son's assassins. - On your birthday, your mother and family.

it still gives me goosebumps

U2, as photographed by Anton Corbijn in 1987 and later used in the With or Without You single gatefold
I was thinking more about the desaparecidos and listening to Mothers of the Disappeared off "The Joshua Tree" tonight. The album looped, and I had to stop what I was doing when I heard my favorite lines of Running to Stand Still:

You got to cry without weeping
Talk without speaking
Scream without raising your voice, you know ...

She runs through the streets
With her eyes painted red
Under a black belly of cloud in the rain
In through a doorway she brings me
White gold and pearls stolen from the sea

She is raging
She is raging and the storm blows up in her eyes
She will suffer the needle chill
She is running to stand still.

Paul Hewson, Dave Evans, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen Jr.— thank you for making my favorite album of all time.

los desaparecidos: photo exhibit and lectures

Nunca Más (Never Again) has been the cry of thousands of families in Argentina, Chile, and other Latin American countries that suffered under military dictatorships during the 1970s and 1980s. In Chile some 3,000 people were murdered, tortured, or disappeared.

In Argentina, the numbers are much higher: 30,000 desaparecidos — students, young workers and intellectuals, as well as bystanders with no political agenda — who vanished without a trace. The six-year reign of terror began when a junta overthrew Argentina's democratically elected government on March 24, 1976 and attempted to systematically cleanse the country of "subversives."

Democracy was restored in 1983 and a national commission documented the abductions of men, women (some pregnant), and children; 340 well-organized secret detention centers; and the methodical use of torture and murder. Records of most of the atrocities were destroyed by the military in the aftermath of the Falklands War in 1982. The perpetrators of the crimes have not been brought to justice and most of the victim’s families have never recovered the bodies of their loved ones.

After seeing several films ("The Official Story," "Missing," and "Cachimba" are all good) and a few PBS specials on the topic, I'm going to the photo exhibit at the Mission Valley Library and plan to attend the public lecture at San Diego State University on April 4. There are several films, including "The Official Story," and additional lectures on the topic at the library, as well.

Virginia Gianonni, installation artist from Argentina, will speak about her artistic tribute to the desaparecidos.

Gianonni's installation consists of exhibition panels depicting the faces of 600 hundred of the missing taken from photographs published in a Buenos Aires newspaper. Included are tributes from their loved ones.

Gianonni's April 4 lecture in Spanish will include a short videotape about the exhibition's reception in Argentina. Call (619) 594-6736 for more information.

Via SDSUniverse and the San Diego Public Library