no room for peppino impastato

““One usually dies because one is alone, or because one has got into something over one’s head. One often dies because one does not have the right alliances, because one is not given support“*

Thirty years ago Peppino Impastato died. This extraordinary man bravely fought against mafia and his own family. His extraordinary life of protest and continuous demonstration of getting “into something over his head” and his death (exploded while tied with a rope on train rails in Cinisi, Sicily) can’t be forgotten. However, none of the major Italian newspaper has room for commemoration today. This is Italy, 2008.

* quote by Giovanni Falcone, “Cose di cosa nostra”.

Update. Alfredo found out that the newspaper Qds.it dedicates an article to quote Peppino’s brother. However, approx 7 lines, and linked from the very bottom right of the home page…

More update: some articles are coming up. Still, little coverage so far. Check them out, in Italian, here.

short

I am opening this new category, “short”. The one thing that prevents me from blogging a lot is that it takes a lot of time and effort if you want to write something meaningful.

So, “short” is a place for posts of maybe one or two or three sentences.

My short post this time round is for all the things I have not written because it was too painful for me to even think about writing. I will drop a couple, in name of “the pain of the wronged world*”. There we go: one and two.

* : “Yes, Porfirio,” the man Ezechiele responded. “He’s suffering, and not for himself.”
“Not for the little things of the world,” the knife grinder explained. “Not because they gave him a fine, not because he tried to play a little prank on his fellow man. . . “
“No,” the man Ezechiele said. “It’s a universal pain that he’s suffering.”
And the knife grinder said: “The pain of the wronged world.”

excerpts from “conversation in sicily” by elio vittorini

gone analogic. brb.

Sorry, I have been busy with life in analogical mode lately. Like, talking to people and wearing funny hats and so. It was interesting altogether. I will be back, digital mode, sometimes soon. Maybe.

“And the words float out like holograms
They say, feel the waltz, feel the waltz
Come on, baby, baby, now feel the waltz“ 

intrinsically glorious

There is something, I don’t know what, but it’s something intrinsically glorious in discussing  a photo stunt dressed in a suit  as the WTO goes to Dublin.

I can’t make it so I am taking the shortcut here. Not only that, but you can even get to know EPAs here. It will make you a better person, promise.

I can’t believe I did that, but I did: NGOs again

Today I was talking about NGOs again and I thought there are quite a few things you might happen to do when volunteering /working/whatever for an NGOs, and some of them are truly unbelievable. My personal favorite, ever:

1) inteview somebody about the fundamental, highly underestimated importance of labeling food cans using Catalan rather then Spanish;

2)  In the context of an international  Conference, with topics from human rights to education to peace keeping etc., digitalize pieces of primary importance of “conference documentation”, ie., among others, the unmissable recipe of Papas Rellenas (traditional Cuban recipe).

3) In front of a audience of hundreds, highlight the beauty of perfumed hand made soap in a Corporate Social Responsibility Seminar, to justify the presence of the sponsor. (Due to excess of emphasis the sales representatives stopped me saying: well, in the end it is just soap).

Still wondering why sometimes one just wants to leave it all behind? :)

the world is hungry

Food expenditure for one week: 375.39 Euros or $500.07

The Melander family of Bargteheide beats them all.

quidquid French dictum sit, altum videtur, maybe

In the Latin tradition, no matter what you say in Latin, it sounds great. It does not seem to work equally well in French, though. Try the gross prose written by Henri Guaino and read aloud by Nicholas Sarkozy where he states, quoting the Telegraph, that “the tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history,” and that for the traditional African “there is no place for human adventure or for the idea of progress”. Not a mention about Western slavery, colonialism, etc. Thank God at least Bernard-Henri Lévy noticed.

[via Internazionale from Paris]

And they said it changes when the sun goes down (quote)

I usually try to refrain from blogging about “breaking news” just because it is so overall bravi ma basta, which this time means, please don’t give me more of it. I usually wait for the sun to go down on some topics - I am particularly interested in the life span of critical news, that’s it. (BTW: notice how Brit and Itish TV call last minute news breaking news, while American TV calls it Alert! That says a lot.)
On a side note, I am not entirely convinced of how much blogging about a certain topic helps to raise awareness. In “How Mobiles and Blogs Don’t — and Do — Help Human Rights” Emily Gertz cover similar issues up to a certain extent. I mean, this photo/video/blogging/etc visibility isn’t just comfortable finger pointing? Yes and no. Yes, because otherwise you’d never find out. No, because taking action is something different. If this situation was an ad, I’d say theconversion rate of blogging is minimal.  The call to action won’t always work. Still, I’d say, better a failing call then no call at all.

man i’m predictable aka rocinha in my stomach

I was talking to m about Brazil etc etc and he goes, i’m sure you went to a favela, didn’t you? I am predictable, I thought. Or m knows me so very well. It was a warm and nice feeling anyway and I am happy if people think this is the typical thing I’d do.

But it’s true. There are a few things to I want to do in my life and one was to visit a slum.

First things first, this is probably the lamest thing to say, the word visit used together with slum. Sort of oxymoron, as the taxi drivers in Rio would remark, favelas are not a place to visit “because they’re ugly and people are ugly too”. I figured out that anyway our idea of tourism and traveling substantially differs from the Brazilian one, at least in Rio.

 

Recollection washes away feelings and I still have to digest a lot from this travel. I still have all these compacted feelings all mixed and mashed and they can’t really find an easy way out.

Favelas of Rio are one of the many contradictions of this city. Favela is a term derived from the hardy plant that resists to all adverse conditions and grows on tough terrains. Not surprisingly the inhabitants of favelas live in the most adverse conditions too - and sometimes, by choice.

Surprisingly, it turned out that living in the slum is not necessarily synonimous of extreme poverty. Some inhabitants of the favela really have nothing - but others do have a job, or sort of, they just do not afford enough to pay bills or taxes. So they live in this sort of no man’s land. There is officially no tax payer here - that is why it is so hard to figure out how many people live here. The favela we visited (Rio has several), Rocinha, is the biggest and has a population of some 60K people. Still, in a way or another, people manage to get electricity and water, the main road is served by public transportation, and there’s even a creche.

So what’s the problem? The inner irresponsibility of the city towards the favela made the general corruption and overall catastrophic hygiene, safety and security conditions the status quo. People do not leave the favela not to pay taxes - and tax payers refuse to help the favela population to improve their condition. Not to mention that traditionally favelas are the place for all sort of illegal activities - specifically drug manufacturing and dealing. Besides, the taxi driver on the way to the airport, as all taxi drivers so far, gets angry when the favela get in the conversation - and adds that with our visits we are just contributing to increase the corruption of the locals, to keep the tourists safe. This is probably true - moreover I think most people would not walk around alone and that it is pretty easy to squeeze money out of the average Western tourist (we insisted on not taking the tour; managed to find an alternative way and paid approximately the half of what the tour coasted, so I think it’s true, that no doubt it is another way to speculate.)

So an apparently easy to solve issue (burn down and build from scratch) seems against everybody’s interest, for different reasons. What happens then? Nothing. The status quo is the winner - at least until the world won’t realize this is just making things worse.

No doubt tax payers reclaim the help government gives to favela for themselves. No doubt there are basic human rights abused that very much deserve priority. There’s no easy way to fix this. But who is making the most out of this is definitely not the favela inhabitants, nor the average Brazilian tax payers. In fact there’s probably enough money to make both happy. Rocinha is situated, and this is the most shocking part, right next to some of the fanciest districts of Rio. Copacabana is only 15 minutes away. Sao Conrao is literally on the other side of the street.

There’s a fact: human rights do not exclude each other. The right of those who want to see their rights represented - such as living in peace, prosperity and all the rest of the stuff brought you by the welfare you’re paying for - should not exclude the right of others to basic services like electricity, or public hygiene keeping. So I do not believe in this war of poor VS poorest. This goes only in the interest of those who really have enough money or power or both to solve the issue; and do nothing about it, leaving people fight over the crumbles. This was my overall perception, carefully matured over, oh, the course of half a morning visit, so it does not pretend to be exhaustive or anything.

It is just a confused mix of feelings that is taking much of the room in my stomach lately.

the Holy Trinity of September 11

I remember I had a Spanish class on the morning after Manuel Vázquez Montalbán died.

As a student, I don’t remember having read much of his work. The lecturer made us read something, on the morning after the death. It was about three events happened on September 11. You might or might not know about them, but they’re equally important. It’s the day of the murder of Allende and end of democracy in Chile, and the day of the defeat of Catalan independence. Together with the New York’s twin towers.

Find the article here, in Spanish: La Santísima Trinidad del 11 de septiembre