See that sharp drop?

click to enlarge

Adam Isacson, of the Center for International Policy, reminds us today in his truly wonderful Plan Colombia and Beyond blog, not to believe reports that US aid to Latin America has doubled under Dubya.

Bush in Bogota II

click on the image while you still can.

Meanwhile, the Colombian foreign office has its knickers all in a twist about a caricature Amnesty International put out just ahead of Bush's visit.

Watch it, and see for yourself if it warrants this response from Minister of Foreign Relations, Fernando Araujo Perdomo:

Deseo expresar mi más profundo rechazo y enérgica protesta por el contenido y publicación de ese video clip, toda vez que constituye un irrespeto a los esfuerzos, sufrimiento y lucha del Gobierno y del pueblo colombianos en su aspiración legítima de alcanzar la paz.

I wish to express my deepest rejection and most energetic protest for the contents and publication of this video clip, which is disrespectful of the efforts, suffering and struggle of our Government and the Colombian people in their legitimate desire for peace.

Amnesty's response a day later.

Bush in Bogota

The sign top right says "Welcome to Bogota"

Dubya is headed south, and Colombian counterpart Uribe does not want anything bad to happen to the man who signs $4 billion cheques each year. Hence the tank roll out, swinging two elite troops up from the guerrilla-controlled southern plains, and preparing 22,000 military police to patrol not just the caravan route, but every corner of this city of 8 million.

Man is this embarrassing.

Leaving nothing to chance (after, say, yesterday's rock-throwing party at the National University: bring a balaklava and some spray paint and a few anti-imperialist slogans), Bogota's government has also decreed several other measures:

• "dry law," usually reserved for election weekends, is already in effect: no alcohol for sale until after W is gone -- then you can celebrate. The supermarkets tend to stretch ticker-tape across the refrigerator with "ley seca" scribbled on it to keep from having to restock. Wouldn't want anyone to be so drunk they accidentally let a bomb go, now would we?
• no back-seat motorcycle driving. Yes, this caught on first in Cali, where assassins were riding so often on the back of motorcycles (in the parrillero position) that a law was passed limiting two-wheeled machines to only one person. (Originally, the law said no two men on the motorcycles, but assassins started to wear wigs and dresses -- nothing better than a skirt for hiding a submachine gun.)
• no ciclovia. Bogota's famed 121 km of closed roadways, celebrated every Sunday and holiday, will not be open this weekend, because America is coming to visit. As a lot of comments on El Tiempo's website point out: what a shame that "Mr. Bush" won't get to be pleasantly surprised by a peaceful city free of car traffic, with hundreds of thousands of people riding their bikes.
• interrupted cell phone service. Some of the 1,086 gringos who requested visas for this trip have been down in Bogota already for several weeks, checking the sewer grates along the airport road (and installing satellite surveillance devices on each), hanging FBI cameras on light posts all along the caravan route, and spotting sniper positions. They are also bringing cell phone jamming technology, which, the government has warned Colombians, is going to make phone calls spotty on Sunday -- too bad for you! Bombers can't just phone it in.
  

National police have confirmed tapping alleged guerrilla communications with "orders for acts that alter the order." A number of workers syndicates are calling for demonstrations on Sunday morning to oppose Bush's presence in Colombia. As long as they aren't riding a bicycle, drinking, trying to call or sitting shotgun on a motorcycle, they don't see why not.

Jamming the shipment

I suppose by now drug seizures in Colombia are so routine they don't even warrant a wire report. After all, yesterday's was a good 500 lbs. short of a ton, and, being camouflaged in a boxes of jam jars, was hardly the world-class deception that resourceful Colombians have dreamed up in the past: a submarine in the Andes, pure-bred puppies, specially-welded steel coils, to name just a few.

Ever since Escobar "crowned" his first trip to the U.S. in the tiny plane he promptly placed over the entrance to his 7,000 acre estate, Hacienda Napoles, it has been catch-as-catch-can on both sides of the misnamed drug war.

What I like about the report in El Tiempo is that the irony spreading thick, if you will, is not lost on the comment-writers.

Hola hola si Amsterdam?? imaginense que tenemos un retardito con la entrega, nos cojieron un cuarto de la merca en puerto pero ya negociamos re-comprar la mitad y lo que falte se lo metemos en el de la proxima semana! PD; gracias por el contacto en Belgica... que gente pa gueler ala!

Hello Amsterdam? There's been a bit of delay on this delivery, they got a quarter of the merch in port but we've already dealt for a buy-back of half and what's missing we'll make it up to you next week! PS thanks for the Belgian contact... they really know how to sniff!

Another comment points out the irony of the coffeeshop-country destination, and adds, "LONG LIVE MARMALADE." This shipment was to go out in a container from Cartagena. One comment asks how many more have already gone , while another simply hurrumphs about the narcotics division of the national police: "WHO BELIEVES THEM?"

In their tone is the explanation of why no U.S. paper will pick up this news item.

The Vatican goes 全球性

Catholic World News reports that the Vatican will be providing Chinese translations of important documents out of the Holy See, as it continues to repair rifts with China.

Fine, but check out the Holy See website! Vatican never had reason to pinch pennies (oh, wait: there's Peter's Pence) and someone splurged on some servers in some room with frescoes, so the Vatican can have flashy intros and virtual tours. Libraries and museums well worth the cyber-visit.

Why hasn't the New Yorker sent Alexander Stille to stalk Antonio Cappella, Superintendent of the data processing and applied technologies section? The Vatican always had one of the original global visions -- fascinating to see how they come slouching toward the web.

Capturing movement

That's the way things are these days. You have an idea, you go with it. This is what happened with Maria Gomez, a Colombian anthropologist working as an enthnographer at CUNY.

As part of my fieldwork, I was interviewing "latino immigrants" in the Bronx, and I thought it would be interesting to show life stories as opposed to statistics, and to create an experimental project that involved my own personal experience as an immigrant and that showed my particular reality.

The result: the Colombian Migration Project, a blog posting her collection of video interviews with Colombians living in New York. (All Spanish is subtitled to English, and notes are written in both languages.) The second half of the project, she says, now involves talking to people with overseas experience living in Colombia, and the first of these are starting to go up.

Gomez explains in an update from January:

The project was always meant to be non-spectacular, kind of the opposite of the stuff you hear about on the news around migration. We’re not looking for the drama, we’re just trying to show the experiences of regular people who go and live in another country. It’s not a scientific sample, the people we interview are mostly middle-class, well educated. We’re just trying to show a slice of the immigration experience, what it’s really like. Most of what you see about immigrants always shows the same story, the poor farmer who goes to work in a kitchen in New York or on a farm in California, and a lot of people do live that experience, but the people we know and the experiences we lived were very different from that, which is why we decided to show that side of the story too.

And non-spectacular it is, which is not to say uninteresting.

For a taste, I recommend Vanessa, who talks about her arrival 20 years ago as a child, setting up her beauty salon in Queens, and missing the grandmother who raised her back home:

I was talking about what you lose, the little things you lose... I would have liked not have moved here when my grandma was still alive.

Gomez says she's not sure what will come of it. "For now," she says, "the idea is to put the edited interviews on line so other people can see them." As one comment says, "sometimes you just can’t get home out of your system. you always go back!"

Turn down the heat under the melting pot

An intuitive speculation on globalizing trends: there should be more inter-ethnic and inter-racial marriages today than ever in America, right? The more global we get, the less our racial, cultural and ethnic backgrounds should matter, right? Wrong.

A new study finds that intermarriages (as a percentage of total marriages) declined between 1990 and 2000, reversing a thirty year trend. How did this happen?

The study, published in the latest issue of the American Sociological Review, found "large increases in marriage between native- and foreign-born co-ethnics among Hispanics and Asian Americans" -- that is, immigrants integrating into previously-established immigrant populations rather than seeking to assimilate through access to the white-majority world.

Something both new and old is going on. "Traditional assimilation theory" holds (to oversimplify) that minorities become absorbed by majorities, but sociologists are beginning to revise this view. The intermarriage data confirms previous experiences of immigration "waves": the first generation is ushered in to ethnic enclaves, and the second generation begins to intermarry and move out of immigrant sphere.

But as long as more than half of adult Hispanics and three-quarters of adult Asians are immigrants, the pool remains large enough for any newcomer to seek cultural equivalents for marriage. Just think: 11 million immigrants in the 1990s! As the wave subsides (this is yet to happen), late-arriving immigrants and second-generation populations are forced to look beyond their cultural confines.

A rose is una rosa

Buying or sending roses for Valentine's? Chances are they came from Colombia. Three out of every 4 roses in America originate from the greenhouses of Colombia's Andean plateau, with each rose averaging out to somewhere between $3 and $4, almost entirely in transport and retail mark-up.

Strangely, this is not widely known (to wit: today's Times op-ed on flowers with no mention of Colombia), despite some staggering figures:

• 2 billion stems of Colombian flowers sold for Valentine's day alone
  
• $900 million in export sales in 2005 for Colombian growers
• 98% of the chrysanthemums and 90% of the carnations bought in the U.S. and Canada are Colombian

This from an industry not yet in its fourth decade.

So if you look at Manhattan delis and see rows of flowers arrayed under a plastic awning outside, you are looking at almost purely Colombian product (with the rest likely supplied by Ecuador).