Well, I´m still here in Santiago. The thing is that there aren´t any internet cafes too close to my house and since I´m not going to school anymore I don´t stop by the one I used to go to by the university. But I´m still alive and safe and healthy and gaining weight. I started running last week to counteract my two times a day hash brown addiction but it doesn´t seem to be working, especially when I can´t drag my lazy ass out of bed and put the damn shoes on. I will tomorrow though. I promise.
Last week my housemate Reinhardt and I attended a series of lectures about the state of the world in the wake of the war in Iraq. On Wednesday this rad Peruvian professor spoke about what the impact of what the US is doing will have on Latin America. Apparently just 5 days before the Sept. 11th attacks Bush said that priority number 1 for the United States was Latin America but obviously that attitude ended up changing. And since his crazy ass has gone all Rambo and shit on the Middle East, the current political situation down here has swung to the left in a big way. Lula from Brazil, Lagos here in Chile, Kirschner in Argentina, the new president whose name I forget in Ecuador and also the guy whose name I also forgot who´s gonna win in Uruguay in September have all been elected left of the middle since two hijacked planes took out them towers in Manhatten. Also the president of Peru named Toledo who thinks he´s all special and shit because he studied economics at Harvard has a whopping 80% of the country not believing a fucking word out of his lying ass mouth. Poor Peru, they also have to put up with this revolutionary group called Sendero Luminoso (Lighted Path) who have an ideology that´s a mix of native Andean traditions and Maoist communism, among other things. Basically they run around kidnapping and killing people denouncing terrorism and violence that they personally cause most of. Sound familiar? And I´m not even gonna start on poor Colombia. It´s gonna take all the power Shakira and Juanes can muster to pull them out of their current funk. Basically her prediction and mine too are that in the year or two that come you´ll all see a very very sudden renewed interest in Latin America and I´ll even guarantee that Bush will try to link at least one other country besides Cuba with terrorism in the Middle East. My guess right now is that it´s either gonna be Venezuela or Paraguay. The other super interesting thing the professor said is about the current state of Mexico and effects of how much the US meddles in their politics and economy. She said that as Mexico continues industrializing itself with the help of US companies you´re going to see an attitude toward immigrants from Central America seeking higher pay in Mexican factories that will sharply resemble the common attitude towards Mexicans hopping the border into the US. Shitty, huh.
Cool as her talk was, Friday was the best. Santiago Pavlovic (who only has one eye and a bitchin´ eyepatch) and Rafael Cavada are the two Chilean journalists who covered the Iraq War. They talked a lot about the media and means of communication and said that both Iraqis and US and British soldiers were eager to put their hands over the camera lens to censure what they filmed. They said that as satellite and other types of technology grows the US will have even more power to fuck with journalists and control what kinds of images they convey. They also said that of the couple hundred other foreign journalists covering the war from Iraq, they heard virtually nobody say a goddamn thing positive about what the US and Britian were doing. I think that´s really important, seeing as they generated that opinion from what they actually saw inside Iraq during the war and since they got to see more than everybody except military personel. Rafael Cavada made this really interesting point about the emerging struggle between culture and human rights, that for him human rights is more important than, say, the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia even though that type of treatment has been imbedded in their culture for centuries. I´m still struggling with the idea, I agree with him mostly but I can´t decide if I could say human rights over culture every single time. we´ll see.
Okay, this update has gotten out of hand so I´m gonna wrap it up with my current favorite quote. This one comes from the US undersecretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz: When asked what the difference is between Iraq and North Korea, meaning why the US went after Iraq first, he responded "Because Iraq swims in a lake of oil." What?