Harold Bloom aptly describes Joseph Smith as a religious genius. Through force of personality and spiritual intellect, Smith converted enough followers to found what would become the first indigenous religion in the United States of America. To understand the Latter-Day Saints, and polygamy in America, one must understand the life and times of Joseph Smith.
Smith was born into a poor farming family living a hardscrabble existence in the Green Mountains of Vermont. When Joseph was a boy they resettling to Palmyra, a small New York town near the banks of the Eerie Canal.
Smith came of age in a period known to historians as the Second Great Awakening, when revivalists roamed the American countryside preaching myriad strains of the Protestant faith. Smith’s region was so visited by these itinerant preachers that came to be known as the Burned-over district. Young Smith struggled over which of these rival Christian faiths he should join, and one afternoon while praying in a grove near his parents’ house, he received a vision through a blinding shaft of light he feared would set the woods on fire. The human forms of God and his son Jesus Christ appeared side by side in the beam dressed in flowing white robes. Joseph asked them which among the competing faiths he should join, and God replied that he should not join any of them, that he should await a higher calling. He later received a series of visitations by the angel Moroni, who directed the young Smith to a rock that harbored gold plates covered in hieroglyphics.
After waiting several years for the appropriate time announced by the angel, Smith dug up the plates and began the translation of the ancient text. Over the course of eight weeks Smith, with the aid of a seer stone, deciphered the glyphs line by line and read aloud to a scribe who sat on the other side of a blanket that hung between himself and the prophet. After the original translation was lost, many think at the hands of the of the jealous and disbelieving wife of Joseph’s assistant, Smith for a second time translated line by line the 275,000 words that were to become the Book of Mormon.
The book revealed a fantastic explanation for the original settling of the Americas. The golden plates that preserved the text had been buried over a thousand years before Smith’s time by the same Moroni who had been the last descendant of the Nephites, a group who claimed to descend from the lost tribe of Israel. These ancient prophets turned mariners escaped Babylon and sailed to the Americas six hundred years before the birth of Christ. In the New World the tribe splintered into brotherly factions and warred for centuries. Moroni was the last of the Nephites, and the group who defeated his people, the Lamanites, were cursed with dark skin and descended into savagery. (The LDS considers the Native Americans to be descended from this cursed tribe of Laman) This is a concise history of the New World according to the Book of Mormon. Mormons still believe that this new testament of the Lord Jesus Christ and his father gives them a unique position as new chosen people of our time. All pre-existing faiths have lost their mandates, since over time links to their respective prophets have been severed. The Latter-Day Saints, on the other hand, can trace directly back to Joseph Smith through their Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. For this reason the Book Of Mormon refers to all non-believers, even the Jews, as Gentiles.
The anti-Mormons of Smith’s day, doubting his revelation and the existence of the gold plates, put forth a secular explanation for the source of the Mormon testament. Eight relatives and colleagues of the Reverend Solomon Spaulding claim that the Book of Mormon was actually a forgery of the professor’s Manuscript Lost, a novel about a man who unearths the hieroglyphic record of an ancient people who sailed from Biblical lands to ancient America. They were fueled in this conviction by the disappearance of a copy of Spaulding’s work from a house next door to a work site where young Joseph had been a day laborer prior to meeting his (first) wife Emma.
Others challenged the text as nothing more than a verbose imitation of the Old Testament. Mark Twain described the Book of Mormon as “chloroform in print.” He wrote, “If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle—keeping awake while he did was, at any rate.”
Real or fictional—none of world’s religions can be ‘explained’ with empirical evidence—Smith’s final product was a fantastic revelation, one Smith felt compelled to share. He confided only in his family at first. Then with the first publication of the Book of Mormon coupled with the outdoor revivals typical of the day, Smith began to accrue a growing flock of believers.
By all accounts, Smith was a more compelling preacher than prose writer. Repeated testimonies from his contemporaries speak of the prophet’s incredible magnetism, of his “air of majesty”, “luminous pallor”, and the blue oceans of his eyes. Though highly charismatic, Smith was an unusual prophet of the Lord. Smith was a notorious drinker, gambler and womanizer, according to the governor of Illinois he, “cursed like a pirate.” Before he discovered the gold plates under a rock on Hill Cumorah, Smith had been a treasure hunter who had been taken to court for the fraud of peddling his skills as a diviner. And that was the first in a series of fraud case involving the Prophet.
Though he and his converts would face years of religious persecution in the midwestern states, the first and last times Smith was run out of town were due to his worldly pursuits. In mid-1835, Smith established the Banking Company of Kirtland Ohio, legally incorporated as an “anti-banking” venture in an attempt to avoid regulation. He raised initial capital from his followers and began issuing notes signed with his name and with the implication they were as good as specie. The notes soon spread beyond the Mormon community. After the agent of a Pittsburgh financier arrived to inquire about the bank’s reserves, the currency collapsed. Saints and Gentiles alike lost their life savings in the scandal. A mob of non-believers drug Smith from his home where he was tarred and feathered.
Indeed, the Mormons under Smith also faced religious persecution. After Joseph and his flock were run out of Ohio, they would come to face trouble in Missouri. Though antebellum Missouri is better remembered for its conflicts between slavery advocates and abolitions, the late 1830’s a series of raids and retaliations flared into what became known as the Mormon War. Slavery was an issue in the conflict. Most Mormons, coming from the northeast, were abolitionists. Most of their neighbors had settled in Missouri from the south and were pro-slavery. But the Missourians also came to resent the new settlers' claims that all of the surrounding land was the Zion of a new chosen people. The Saints were equally distrusting of the Gentiles and a series of raids and counter raids escalated into standing conflict. The war climaxed with Governor Lilburn Boggs executive order of October 1838 calling for the extermination or forced removal of all Mormons from the state. Three days after the order was issued, 17 Mormon men, women, and children were murdered by a Missouri militia at the Haun’s Mill Masacre. Smith realized that unless they fled, he and his followers faced extinction in Missouri.
Smith was determined to avoid another debacle, and with his next settlement sought to build institutions that would make his followers a force to reckon with. Smith and his Saints resettled in Illinois on a bluff above the Mississippi, vacant since it was flanked by malarial marshland. They drained the swamps, and within five years Smith and his followers had built up a town he called Nauvoo that rivaled Chicago in population. Smith made it known that his sizable voting bloc was available to the highest bidder. The Illinois Whig Party was willing to do anything for the votes, and Smith negotiated with them for a town charter that gave Nauvoo unprecedented autonomy and local control. The city of Nauvoo had the right to make and enforce its own laws, establish a court, and field a city militia. The latest incorporation of Zion possessed a legal status that made it a virtual enclave within the state. And Smith acted the part of founding father. He declared himself Lieutenant-General of the 6,000 strong Nauvoo Militia, a rank that hadn’t been held by any officer in the United States since George Washington.
It was in Nauvoo where Smith set about perpetuating his biggest fraud of all. That, or the Prophet received the most startling revelation of Mormonism—that church leaders should follow the example of the Old Testament prophets and take a number of wives. In 1843 he began to circulate this revelation on “celestial marriage” among the highest-ranking members of the church. Almost without exception they were horrified. Surely even the most ardent believers would question a faith that explicitly condoned polygamy, they reasoned. But Smith was adamant on the point, and continued to beseech church elders to live the new principle, as he had been doing in secret for some time. Smith anticipated his own revelation by nearly a decade when he seduced a favorite house servant in Kirtland.
In 1842, one year before Smith’s revelation, his former right hand man, Illinois power broker, and first mayor of Nauvoo, John Bennett, published the 341 page A History of the Saints. This work was a scathing critique of Mormonism that included an expose on the practice of polygamy as secretly practiced by the Mormon elite. Vigorous character assassination of Bennett—he was in all senses an opportunist and a one-time physician who had made a living performing abortions—limited the book’s fallout among the rank and file Mormons. Still, hundreds of people left the church. The work convinced many more non-Saints in Illinois of the dangers of Mormonism. The more outspoken Protestant denominations now railed against the unsavory cult resident on their western border.
Later testimonies corroborate Bennett’s most scandalous claims—that Smith kept an office above his grocery store in Nauvoo where he and other church leaders (including Brigham Young) conducted their plural courtships. Smith, according to Bennett, would invite women he had selected to be future wives to his office and then lead them to an adjoining bedroom. There he would tell his young woman, or sometimes girl, that she was sworn to secrecy about what was to follow. Then he’d tell her that he had long wanted her, that he asked the Lord for her, and that the Lord had said that He wanted Joseph to have her. Then Joseph would try to kiss her, which would invariably induce his subject to faint. Upon revival she would furiously protest on behalf of her chastity. Smith would then explain the benefits of a celestial marriage, that it was not “till death do us part” but a union where she would be “sealed” to the Lord’s Prophet in this world and for eternity beyond. If she still did not consent, Smith’s final argument was the powerful of all. He would remind his future wife that punishment for refusing God’s command was ex-communication and damnation in the afterlife.
Joseph’s apostles continued to fear the repercussions should their polygamy become public knowledge within Nauvoo, and some were slow to participate in the new commandment. The resisters seem to have been moderately successful in containing their prophet. Eliza Smith’s father, Chauncey Webb, who was an influential Mormon due to his entrepreneurial successes despite the frequent forced relocations, was approached by Smith and encouraged to pray on the matter of taking another wife. Chauncey did not act on the request.
Smith’s revelation of 1843 came long after the start of his foray into polygamy. It seems his motive for writing out the new doctrine was to placate his wife Emma. After circulating a copy among select elders, Smith presented the revelation to Emma. The first wife was not amused. Emma pulled the tract from the Smith’s hands, placed a candle in the fireplace, and set the paper alight.
Smith’s will to power matched his insatiable libido. In 1844 he declared himself a candidate for President of the United States and dispersed his Saints throughout the country on a mission to campaign on his behalf. This ambition further intensified scrutiny on Smith. A former counselor to Smith, William Law, who had become Smith’s enemy after the prophet tried to seduce his wife, started a newspaper called the Nauvoo Expositor. The Expositor narrated in graphic detail Smith’s appetite for new female converts. Smith could not countenance an attack from within his own fiefdom. He personally led the mob that attacked the office of the Expositor. Smith and his henchmen mangled the press works and destroyed every copy of the paper they could get their hands on. The prophet miscalculated the reaction to his violent censure. Citizens of Illinois were outraged. Within days the governor issued a order for his arrest.
Joseph Smith’s first response was to flee across the river to Iowa. His wife among others counseled him to return, that he would appear to be a coward before his people if he abandoned them. He agreed. He re-crossed the river and submitted to state authorities. Within days a mob descended on the jail-house where Smith and his deputies were being housed in an upstairs cell. The skeleton crew militia guarding the jail was loath to fire upon fellow citizens and was powerless to stop the mob. As they pounded down his door, Smith unloaded a six-shooter into the mob and then turned to leap out of a second story window. By most accounts his bullet ridden body was dead on impact. So instead of being tried an adulterous charlatan before a court of law, Smith died a martyr. The timing couldn’t have been better since the issue of polygamy was threatening to rip apart the community of Saints in Nauvoo. Smith’s murder gave the troubled Saints a rallying point, and Brigham Young returned from a mission to become the Moses and Paul of Joseph’s new religion. Young delivered the Saints west to Zion and built up the institutions of what is now the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The facts in the colorful history of Joseph Smith paint him a charismatic rascal. But who is to say whether or not he was a vessel of God’s will? Religious belief does not reside in the rational or the realm of earthly deeds. Had there been printing presses in the days of antiquity, we might have similar evidence of mortal weaknesses of the Biblical prophets. True or false, Smith's religious contribution is unparalleled in the history of the United States, and he may one day be remembered as the most significant religious figure since Martin Luther. As the architect of the only religion indigenous to the United States, he is surely an underappreciated figure.
Click Here to Read More..
Friday, May 16, 2008
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Mormons Part Two: The 27th Mrs. Young
This is four part series. Scroll down or click the link to the right for the previous entry.
In 1873, Anna Leonowens, of Anna and the King fame, wrote a now forgotten second book, The Romance of the Harem. The work focused on the role of polygamy in the Siamese court where she had been governess to King Mongut’s sixty odd children. She documented experiences from among the 9,000 wives and concubines of the king and pulled no punches when sharing her opinions on the practice.
“Polygamy—or properly speaking, concubinage—and slavery are the curses of the country,” wrote Mrs. Leonowens, “The number of concubines is limited only by the means of the man. As king is source of all wealth and influence, dependent kings, princes and nobles, and all who seek the royal favor, vie with each other in bringing their most beautiful and accomplished daughters to the royal harem... in Siam, woman is the slave of man.”
The book was a sensation in America. It was a success not because of its exotic content, however, but because of a familiar chord it struck with the American reading public. Polygamy was the source of national scandal in 1873, and because of this Mrs. Leonowens’ book was perfectly timed. Her work was confirmation that polygamy linked our country with the least progressive places on earth, the harems of Arabia and the calcifying empires of the Far East. Romance of the Harem fueled ire and humiliation at a peculiar institution practiced openly within US territory.
Americans in the second half 19th century did not equivocate on the issue of polygamy. Polygamy was considered akin to another peculiar institution, recently abolished African slavery. In the penultimate election before the Civil War, Republican John Fremont’s presidential platform of 1856 directly tied the two institutions with the denunciation of, “those twin relics of barbarism—polygamy and slavery.”
Many of the same reformers who led the fight against slavery took up cause against polygamy. Famed author Harriet Beecher Stowe compared the anti-polygamy crusade to the abolitionist movement, “we must loose the bonds of a cruel slavery whose chains have cut into the very hearts of thousands of our sisters,” she wrote, “a slavery which debases and degrades womanhood, and the family.”
President Lincoln signed the first federal anti-polygamy laws in 1861, and for three decades each successive administration stepped up the pressure for the Mormons to conform to the law. Not until the government threatened the seizure of all church held land did the Mormons drop their practice of plural marriage. This capitulation paved the way for Utah’s statehood in 1890.
1873 saw a national flowering of anti-polygamist sentiment, and the person most responsible for the information on the practice was Ann Eliza Young, the 27th wife of Brigham Young, the second prophet of the LDS and leader of the Mormon exodus to Utah. That was the year Mrs. Young brought her personal reflections and the grievances of Utah’s plural wives to a national audience.
Under threat of violence and ensuing excommunication from the LDS, Eliza escaped from Utah and abandoned her marriage to the Prophet.
Eliza then toured the country lecturing on the evils of polygamy in the Utah territory. Audiences were captivated by her tale. It was a tale of neglect, of a parsimonious husband who, as controller of LDS tithing revenue, was considered to be one of the wealthiest men in the Western United States. Most touching were the pains that she claimed infected the hearts of all plural lives, a desperate competition for the divided attention of a distant husband (who in Young’s case barely knew the names of his hundred odd sons and daughters). She spoke of the shock her mother faced when, just after the death of Mormon founder Joseph Smith, Brigham Young first revealed to her and her husband the secret of celestial marriage. In a pattern that must have been repeated in many early Mormon households, the shock gave way to sadness, then bitterness as she was compelled to share her husband with women half her age. Eliza’s escape from Utah was itself a gripping tale, for when she left her husband the Prophet she became the enemy of every Saint in the Utah territory and beyond.
“Imagine, if you can, my feelings,” Eliza later wrote, “on being alone with my little child, in a strange place, under such peculiar circumstances. I had abandoned my religion, my father, mother, home, and friends—deliberately turned away from them all, knowing that the step I was taking could never be retraced. My heart cried out for my mother, who I knew would be more sorely stricken with my action than anyone else in the world. I would have spared her if I could, but I was powerless to act in any other manner.”
She gave her lectures to packed halls in Denver, St. Louis, Chicago, Boston, and hundreds of smaller towns across the country. On April 14th 1874 she addressed a lecture to a packed house in Washington D.C. that included many members of Congress as well as Julia and President Ulysses S. Grant. Her speech is credited with the passage of the Poland Law which tightened the prohibitions on polygamy in the US and its territories.
Eliza Young was a second generation Saint. She did not chose the new religion of Joseph Smith, rather she was born into a Mormon household. As a young child she remembers the wagon train she and her family rode to Utah. Those earliest memories also include her “second” mother, and the heartache her real mother endured each time her father took another of his five wives.
Eliza’s parents had been among the earliest converts to this new religion. They both fell under the spell of Joseph Smith, a man who claimed to be the living Prophet of Jesus Christ. It was an audacious claim, one that Eliza’s father initially considered with a great deal of skepticism. Yet Smith converted him. This prophet was imbued with a rare charisma even in an era rampant with revival.
The decision to practice polygamy was not one the family took lightly. From the earliest days of the Church Joseph Smith had been taking multiple wives, but he did so in secrecy. Only slowly did he expanded the practice among church leaders. Polygamy was never a universal practice among Mormons, but in time affluent Mormons were encouraged to practice "the principle". Ann Eliza recounts that after Smith’s death, when Brigham Young was consolidating his control of the church, he used Smith’s martyrdom to make polygamy explicit Church doctrine. Young visited Ann Eliza’s father and demanded he acknowledge the “revelation of plural marriage” by taking a second wife. Chauncey refused to comply without consulting his wife. He knew that the Mormon church was more important to his wife than to himself as he had been prepared to leave it before when twice defrauded of money by Joseph Smith. So he left the decision to her, that they either leave the church or take another woman into their home. She was horrified that religion she had devoted her life to was now asking her to poison her happy home. But the new prophet made clear that the only alternative was apostasy. So the first Mrs. Webb reluctantly decided that Chauncey should marry their nineteen-year old house girl.
It was not until after their migration west into the Salt Lake Basin that the Church of Latter-Day Saints officially announced their sacrament of plural marriage to the world. It had become an unavoidable admission. There were no hotels in the Utah territory circa 1850, and the forty-niners who had stayed in Mormon households on their way to the California gold fields saw enough to circulate rumors of the concubines of Utah. The California press circulated these stories to the world. Still, the rest of the US was aghast in 1852 when Brigham Young publicly revealed the Mormon practice of celestial marriage. For four decades the issue kept the Mormons as a people set apart from the rest of the country. And there were very few links into this world, especially not into the family of the spiritual leader of Mormonism. Thus the sensation when Ann Eliza began her lecture circuit. From 1873 she would lecture 8 months out of the year for over a decade, one of the top box office hits of her generation. Click Here to Read More..
In 1873, Anna Leonowens, of Anna and the King fame, wrote a now forgotten second book, The Romance of the Harem. The work focused on the role of polygamy in the Siamese court where she had been governess to King Mongut’s sixty odd children. She documented experiences from among the 9,000 wives and concubines of the king and pulled no punches when sharing her opinions on the practice.
“Polygamy—or properly speaking, concubinage—and slavery are the curses of the country,” wrote Mrs. Leonowens, “The number of concubines is limited only by the means of the man. As king is source of all wealth and influence, dependent kings, princes and nobles, and all who seek the royal favor, vie with each other in bringing their most beautiful and accomplished daughters to the royal harem... in Siam, woman is the slave of man.”
The book was a sensation in America. It was a success not because of its exotic content, however, but because of a familiar chord it struck with the American reading public. Polygamy was the source of national scandal in 1873, and because of this Mrs. Leonowens’ book was perfectly timed. Her work was confirmation that polygamy linked our country with the least progressive places on earth, the harems of Arabia and the calcifying empires of the Far East. Romance of the Harem fueled ire and humiliation at a peculiar institution practiced openly within US territory.
Americans in the second half 19th century did not equivocate on the issue of polygamy. Polygamy was considered akin to another peculiar institution, recently abolished African slavery. In the penultimate election before the Civil War, Republican John Fremont’s presidential platform of 1856 directly tied the two institutions with the denunciation of, “those twin relics of barbarism—polygamy and slavery.”
Many of the same reformers who led the fight against slavery took up cause against polygamy. Famed author Harriet Beecher Stowe compared the anti-polygamy crusade to the abolitionist movement, “we must loose the bonds of a cruel slavery whose chains have cut into the very hearts of thousands of our sisters,” she wrote, “a slavery which debases and degrades womanhood, and the family.”
President Lincoln signed the first federal anti-polygamy laws in 1861, and for three decades each successive administration stepped up the pressure for the Mormons to conform to the law. Not until the government threatened the seizure of all church held land did the Mormons drop their practice of plural marriage. This capitulation paved the way for Utah’s statehood in 1890.
1873 saw a national flowering of anti-polygamist sentiment, and the person most responsible for the information on the practice was Ann Eliza Young, the 27th wife of Brigham Young, the second prophet of the LDS and leader of the Mormon exodus to Utah. That was the year Mrs. Young brought her personal reflections and the grievances of Utah’s plural wives to a national audience.
Under threat of violence and ensuing excommunication from the LDS, Eliza escaped from Utah and abandoned her marriage to the Prophet.
Eliza then toured the country lecturing on the evils of polygamy in the Utah territory. Audiences were captivated by her tale. It was a tale of neglect, of a parsimonious husband who, as controller of LDS tithing revenue, was considered to be one of the wealthiest men in the Western United States. Most touching were the pains that she claimed infected the hearts of all plural lives, a desperate competition for the divided attention of a distant husband (who in Young’s case barely knew the names of his hundred odd sons and daughters). She spoke of the shock her mother faced when, just after the death of Mormon founder Joseph Smith, Brigham Young first revealed to her and her husband the secret of celestial marriage. In a pattern that must have been repeated in many early Mormon households, the shock gave way to sadness, then bitterness as she was compelled to share her husband with women half her age. Eliza’s escape from Utah was itself a gripping tale, for when she left her husband the Prophet she became the enemy of every Saint in the Utah territory and beyond.
“Imagine, if you can, my feelings,” Eliza later wrote, “on being alone with my little child, in a strange place, under such peculiar circumstances. I had abandoned my religion, my father, mother, home, and friends—deliberately turned away from them all, knowing that the step I was taking could never be retraced. My heart cried out for my mother, who I knew would be more sorely stricken with my action than anyone else in the world. I would have spared her if I could, but I was powerless to act in any other manner.”
She gave her lectures to packed halls in Denver, St. Louis, Chicago, Boston, and hundreds of smaller towns across the country. On April 14th 1874 she addressed a lecture to a packed house in Washington D.C. that included many members of Congress as well as Julia and President Ulysses S. Grant. Her speech is credited with the passage of the Poland Law which tightened the prohibitions on polygamy in the US and its territories.
Eliza Young was a second generation Saint. She did not chose the new religion of Joseph Smith, rather she was born into a Mormon household. As a young child she remembers the wagon train she and her family rode to Utah. Those earliest memories also include her “second” mother, and the heartache her real mother endured each time her father took another of his five wives.
Eliza’s parents had been among the earliest converts to this new religion. They both fell under the spell of Joseph Smith, a man who claimed to be the living Prophet of Jesus Christ. It was an audacious claim, one that Eliza’s father initially considered with a great deal of skepticism. Yet Smith converted him. This prophet was imbued with a rare charisma even in an era rampant with revival.
The decision to practice polygamy was not one the family took lightly. From the earliest days of the Church Joseph Smith had been taking multiple wives, but he did so in secrecy. Only slowly did he expanded the practice among church leaders. Polygamy was never a universal practice among Mormons, but in time affluent Mormons were encouraged to practice "the principle". Ann Eliza recounts that after Smith’s death, when Brigham Young was consolidating his control of the church, he used Smith’s martyrdom to make polygamy explicit Church doctrine. Young visited Ann Eliza’s father and demanded he acknowledge the “revelation of plural marriage” by taking a second wife. Chauncey refused to comply without consulting his wife. He knew that the Mormon church was more important to his wife than to himself as he had been prepared to leave it before when twice defrauded of money by Joseph Smith. So he left the decision to her, that they either leave the church or take another woman into their home. She was horrified that religion she had devoted her life to was now asking her to poison her happy home. But the new prophet made clear that the only alternative was apostasy. So the first Mrs. Webb reluctantly decided that Chauncey should marry their nineteen-year old house girl.
It was not until after their migration west into the Salt Lake Basin that the Church of Latter-Day Saints officially announced their sacrament of plural marriage to the world. It had become an unavoidable admission. There were no hotels in the Utah territory circa 1850, and the forty-niners who had stayed in Mormon households on their way to the California gold fields saw enough to circulate rumors of the concubines of Utah. The California press circulated these stories to the world. Still, the rest of the US was aghast in 1852 when Brigham Young publicly revealed the Mormon practice of celestial marriage. For four decades the issue kept the Mormons as a people set apart from the rest of the country. And there were very few links into this world, especially not into the family of the spiritual leader of Mormonism. Thus the sensation when Ann Eliza began her lecture circuit. From 1873 she would lecture 8 months out of the year for over a decade, one of the top box office hits of her generation. Click Here to Read More..
Mormons Part One: YFZ and Polygamy
“Did you ever feel you were doing something wrong?” Larry King asked.
“No sir, we have a pure life here.”
“What about your husband?”
“The interest here is the children.”
“You have no interest in your husband?”
“Our interest here is the children. We want the children out of that pavilion.”
None of the eight women seated before the camera looked up as they answered King’s questions over the satellite link that connected their Yearning for Zion meeting house to the CNN studios. Perhaps they didn’t know where to look. Given the extremity of their cloistered lives, it is possible they have never seen a television camera before.
Under the lights, the women appeared unsettled and scared. With their homespun prairie dresses and beehive hairdos, the plural wives of Zion were reminiscent of the displaced Okies in Ansel Adams’ WPA photos from the Great Depression—faces filled with agony and hopelessly out of touch with the modern world. And these were the women chosen and prepped by their lawyers to be the public face of their campaign to retain custody of their children.
It is not the first the time and likely not the last that we will be confronted with the bizarre images of American polygamy. According to Mormon scholar Carmen Hardy, about once a decade the American public turns its attention to the ongoing practice of polygamy in the United Sates. We have come to expect these stories out of Utah and remote desert settlements in surrounding states of the mountain west. The focus of the latest media scrutiny falls on the aftermath of a raid on the Yearning for Zion (YFZ) community of Mormon fundamentalists in El Dorado, Texas, a two-hour drive from San Antonio. Neighbors and local officials had long been wary of the group, who from the beginning were less than forthcoming about their settlement. They were obviously more than the hunting lodge they claimed to be. Upon receiving an anonymous call from a young woman who claims she was beaten and raped on the compound, the state had cause to move in on the YFZ. Careful to avoid another Waco, Texas authorities entered YFZ grounds and removed more than 400 children from the group’s custody.
Though the young women who called in the initial allegation has yet to be identified, evidence against the YFZ continues to mount. Initial reports claim more than half of the 52 girls aged 14 to 17 are or have been pregnant and that dozens of children were found to have had broken bones. Some social workers are now expressing concerns that young boys have also been the victims of sexual abuse.
More questions remain. To what extent were the adult women on the YFZ accomplices to the child abuse on the compound, and to what extent are they victims? In a contained community that requires several (young) women for every man, what happens to the teenage boys? And until clear evidence comes to light there remains the possibility that authorities acted on trumped up charges. America has always been susceptible to a good old-fashioned witch hunt.
Sadly the pattern of child abuse that may be emerging in the El Dorado case is consistent with similar discoveries on polygamist compounds unearthed throughout the mountain west. The YFZ community is an offshoot of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), more commonly known as the UEP, the United Effort Plan. The UEP splintered from mainstream Mormonism after the LDS church gave up the practice of polygamy in 1890. Polygamy, known to Mormonism as celestial marriage, was a revelation received by Joseph Smith that became a central tenant of the religion. The UEP believes that Mormonism cannot be divorced from polygamy, since Smith and early church leaders considered celestial marriage the most important Mormon sacrament.
Anywhere from 30 to 100 thousand people living in the Western US are practicing “fundamentalist” Mormonism—the LDS disputes that there is such a thing as a Mormon fundamentalist—and the doctrine of polygamy. The UEP is the largest religious entity within this population.
UEP leader and prophet Warren Jeffs was convicted in 2007 as an accomplice to the rape of teenage girls whom he had married to himself or to other men in his community. The allegations against the YFZ are eerily similar the charges brought against Jeffs and to the long list of crimes committed by other UEP affiliates as documented in several recent histories of the group. The Prophets, like Jeffs, of the various branches of the FLDS routinely take girls as young as 13 and assign them to be married to the most influential figures in the communities, men who usually several times older than their teenage brides. Cases of rape, violence, and coercion against polygamist wives are so rife as to be the considered the norm in these communities. Still, prosecutors are slow to go after UEP church leaders. Of course polygamy is on the books in Utah and Arizona, where the largest UEP communities reside. Charges of polygamy are rarely pursued unless there is accompanying evidence of more serious criminal activity.
The longstanding reluctance to prosecute polygamy can be traced back to the public backlash against a raid on a polygamist town in the summer of 1953. The site of the raid was Short Creek, Arizona. A small town straddling the Utah border, Short Creek, since renamed Colorado City, (the home of Warren Jeffs) was an ideal location for a polygamist community. Separated from the rest of the state by the Grand Canyon, Short Creek was far from the eyes of state officials in Phoenix. More importantly, the community was beyond the jurisdiction of Utah. The LDS dominated government in Salt Lake City loathed polygamists for the bad reputation they lent to the official Mormon Church. So when a hundred odd fundamentalist Mormons founded Short Creek in the early 1920’s, they did so in relative obscurity.
By 1953 Short Creek had doubled and redoubled in population, and both the state of Arizona and LDS leaders became wary of the polygamist enclave. Church and state cooperated to remedy this potential embarrassment. With LDS support and financing, the Arizona police and the National Guard embarked on a pre-dawn raid that netted 122 men and women, the largest mass arrest of polygamists in US history. National headlines, including a front-page story in the NYT, plastered the raid into the American consciousness. The initial public reaction was shock and condemnation of the polygamists. Then as photos circulated, officers dragging apart families, distraught mothers and crying children, the public began to sympathize the with Short Creek, and the raid was cast as religious persecution. The fallout ruined the careers of the principals involved. Arizona Governor John Howard Pyle, who ordered the raid on the Short Creek community, lost his bid for reelection in 1954. Short Creek emerged unscathed. Elected officials have since been reluctant to go after polygamist sects for fear of another backlash.
El Dorado still has the potential to become another Short Creek. Images of mothers in pastel prairie dresses mourning the loss of their children, pleading on CNN to be let alone to lead their simple, wholesome lives, were harrowing. Authorities have not yet identified the caller who phoned in the raid. There are claims emerging that the real caller was not a 16 year old girl but 33 year old Rozita Swinton, a Colorado woman with a history of mental illness and past charges of phoning in false abuse stories. The ACLU contends that if the initial complaint is proven to have been false, the raid was unjustified since, "exposure to a religion's beliefs, however unorthodox, is not itself abuse and may not constitutionally be labeled abuse." Ok, but polygamy is a state and federal crime. Anti-polygamy legislation was passed in Congress at least in part to address the demeaning and abusive relationships documented in polygamist unions of 19th century Utah. Would that alone not be sufficient grounds
As the case against the YFZ unfolds, the allegations may or may not grow more severe. It is unclear whether a live and let live attitude will prevail.
Already the story is fading. As the 24 hour news cycle spins on, the El Dorado story jumps further and further into the back pages. Even if the YFZ is snuffed out, other polygamist communities will remain nestled in their hiding places until the next sensationalist story returns them to the spotlight. And since it can still be political suicide for local officials in Northern Arizona and other remote western locales who pursue polygamist leaders, nothing short of the sensational is likely to bring the next round of scrutiny. Click Here to Read More..
“No sir, we have a pure life here.”
“What about your husband?”
“The interest here is the children.”
“You have no interest in your husband?”
“Our interest here is the children. We want the children out of that pavilion.”
None of the eight women seated before the camera looked up as they answered King’s questions over the satellite link that connected their Yearning for Zion meeting house to the CNN studios. Perhaps they didn’t know where to look. Given the extremity of their cloistered lives, it is possible they have never seen a television camera before.
Under the lights, the women appeared unsettled and scared. With their homespun prairie dresses and beehive hairdos, the plural wives of Zion were reminiscent of the displaced Okies in Ansel Adams’ WPA photos from the Great Depression—faces filled with agony and hopelessly out of touch with the modern world. And these were the women chosen and prepped by their lawyers to be the public face of their campaign to retain custody of their children.
It is not the first the time and likely not the last that we will be confronted with the bizarre images of American polygamy. According to Mormon scholar Carmen Hardy, about once a decade the American public turns its attention to the ongoing practice of polygamy in the United Sates. We have come to expect these stories out of Utah and remote desert settlements in surrounding states of the mountain west. The focus of the latest media scrutiny falls on the aftermath of a raid on the Yearning for Zion (YFZ) community of Mormon fundamentalists in El Dorado, Texas, a two-hour drive from San Antonio. Neighbors and local officials had long been wary of the group, who from the beginning were less than forthcoming about their settlement. They were obviously more than the hunting lodge they claimed to be. Upon receiving an anonymous call from a young woman who claims she was beaten and raped on the compound, the state had cause to move in on the YFZ. Careful to avoid another Waco, Texas authorities entered YFZ grounds and removed more than 400 children from the group’s custody.
Though the young women who called in the initial allegation has yet to be identified, evidence against the YFZ continues to mount. Initial reports claim more than half of the 52 girls aged 14 to 17 are or have been pregnant and that dozens of children were found to have had broken bones. Some social workers are now expressing concerns that young boys have also been the victims of sexual abuse.
More questions remain. To what extent were the adult women on the YFZ accomplices to the child abuse on the compound, and to what extent are they victims? In a contained community that requires several (young) women for every man, what happens to the teenage boys? And until clear evidence comes to light there remains the possibility that authorities acted on trumped up charges. America has always been susceptible to a good old-fashioned witch hunt.
Sadly the pattern of child abuse that may be emerging in the El Dorado case is consistent with similar discoveries on polygamist compounds unearthed throughout the mountain west. The YFZ community is an offshoot of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), more commonly known as the UEP, the United Effort Plan. The UEP splintered from mainstream Mormonism after the LDS church gave up the practice of polygamy in 1890. Polygamy, known to Mormonism as celestial marriage, was a revelation received by Joseph Smith that became a central tenant of the religion. The UEP believes that Mormonism cannot be divorced from polygamy, since Smith and early church leaders considered celestial marriage the most important Mormon sacrament.
Anywhere from 30 to 100 thousand people living in the Western US are practicing “fundamentalist” Mormonism—the LDS disputes that there is such a thing as a Mormon fundamentalist—and the doctrine of polygamy. The UEP is the largest religious entity within this population.
UEP leader and prophet Warren Jeffs was convicted in 2007 as an accomplice to the rape of teenage girls whom he had married to himself or to other men in his community. The allegations against the YFZ are eerily similar the charges brought against Jeffs and to the long list of crimes committed by other UEP affiliates as documented in several recent histories of the group. The Prophets, like Jeffs, of the various branches of the FLDS routinely take girls as young as 13 and assign them to be married to the most influential figures in the communities, men who usually several times older than their teenage brides. Cases of rape, violence, and coercion against polygamist wives are so rife as to be the considered the norm in these communities. Still, prosecutors are slow to go after UEP church leaders. Of course polygamy is on the books in Utah and Arizona, where the largest UEP communities reside. Charges of polygamy are rarely pursued unless there is accompanying evidence of more serious criminal activity.
The longstanding reluctance to prosecute polygamy can be traced back to the public backlash against a raid on a polygamist town in the summer of 1953. The site of the raid was Short Creek, Arizona. A small town straddling the Utah border, Short Creek, since renamed Colorado City, (the home of Warren Jeffs) was an ideal location for a polygamist community. Separated from the rest of the state by the Grand Canyon, Short Creek was far from the eyes of state officials in Phoenix. More importantly, the community was beyond the jurisdiction of Utah. The LDS dominated government in Salt Lake City loathed polygamists for the bad reputation they lent to the official Mormon Church. So when a hundred odd fundamentalist Mormons founded Short Creek in the early 1920’s, they did so in relative obscurity.
By 1953 Short Creek had doubled and redoubled in population, and both the state of Arizona and LDS leaders became wary of the polygamist enclave. Church and state cooperated to remedy this potential embarrassment. With LDS support and financing, the Arizona police and the National Guard embarked on a pre-dawn raid that netted 122 men and women, the largest mass arrest of polygamists in US history. National headlines, including a front-page story in the NYT, plastered the raid into the American consciousness. The initial public reaction was shock and condemnation of the polygamists. Then as photos circulated, officers dragging apart families, distraught mothers and crying children, the public began to sympathize the with Short Creek, and the raid was cast as religious persecution. The fallout ruined the careers of the principals involved. Arizona Governor John Howard Pyle, who ordered the raid on the Short Creek community, lost his bid for reelection in 1954. Short Creek emerged unscathed. Elected officials have since been reluctant to go after polygamist sects for fear of another backlash.
El Dorado still has the potential to become another Short Creek. Images of mothers in pastel prairie dresses mourning the loss of their children, pleading on CNN to be let alone to lead their simple, wholesome lives, were harrowing. Authorities have not yet identified the caller who phoned in the raid. There are claims emerging that the real caller was not a 16 year old girl but 33 year old Rozita Swinton, a Colorado woman with a history of mental illness and past charges of phoning in false abuse stories. The ACLU contends that if the initial complaint is proven to have been false, the raid was unjustified since, "exposure to a religion's beliefs, however unorthodox, is not itself abuse and may not constitutionally be labeled abuse." Ok, but polygamy is a state and federal crime. Anti-polygamy legislation was passed in Congress at least in part to address the demeaning and abusive relationships documented in polygamist unions of 19th century Utah. Would that alone not be sufficient grounds
As the case against the YFZ unfolds, the allegations may or may not grow more severe. It is unclear whether a live and let live attitude will prevail.
Already the story is fading. As the 24 hour news cycle spins on, the El Dorado story jumps further and further into the back pages. Even if the YFZ is snuffed out, other polygamist communities will remain nestled in their hiding places until the next sensationalist story returns them to the spotlight. And since it can still be political suicide for local officials in Northern Arizona and other remote western locales who pursue polygamist leaders, nothing short of the sensational is likely to bring the next round of scrutiny. Click Here to Read More..
Friday, March 7, 2008
Texas Two-Step
830 PM: I had just escorted Maria Hernandez to and from her caucus site at Austin High School in north El Paso. Headquarters was as empty as I had seen it as most of the volunteers were still caucusing. I walked back to the phone banks where our lawyer and logistics captain were locked in a heated discussion.
“We have got to get a packet out to 1xx as quickly as possible,” Kate, the lawyer, said.
“I don’t have a car for you,” Christian said.
“I’ve got a car,” I said, walking up behind them.
“Then take this down,” Kate said.
She gave me the name of our precinct captain, Oscar ______ who was supposedly on site, a phone number and an address. Christian, a hulking wise-guy from Flushing, Queens, scrambled to get me directions.
“Make sure you get this packet directly in to Oscar’s hands,” Kate said. “Don’t let anyone else touch it. Watch them do the count if they’ll let you.”
In the matter of 90 minutes the Texas two-step had taken me 360 degrees. Early reports of egregious voting fraud committed by local Obama supporters left the staffers wary of a dirty fight in the state of Texas. Around noon several of our precinct captains began calling with reports that Obama partisans had obtained the caucus packets from the precinct judges. These packets were critical to running the caucus as they contained the voter sign-in sheets used to tally the caucus goers, the minutes and instructions, the worksheets for computing the number of delegates, and the reporting procedures that included the all important green sheet with a secret pin code necessary to dial in the delegate count. By late afternoon we had received complaints in 15 locations in El Paso and the surrounding towns. In a couple of cases the people who had stolen the packets were signing people into the caucus that afternoon as they left the primary. The advantage gained, of course, was that these voters would not need to come back to their precinct for the caucus if they had already signed in.
The Obama campaign had officially pulled out of El Paso a week before the primary and hadn’t conducted the caucus trainings the Clinton camp ran all week. His supporters generally had little knowledge about the caucus process. The one thing they did seem to know was to get their hands on those green sheets.
A couple of these folks will almost certainly be going to jail. One supporter who had asked for and received the packet in the afternoon had removed the green sheet before caucus began. This man then waited until after the caucus and phoned in the results, flipping the delegate count to Obama’s favor. Another supporter had been dumb enough to phone in all the delegates from his precinct in favor for Obama. In a city where Clinton won over 70 percent of the popular vote, and won virtually every caucus, there is one precinct that has reported 100 percent of its delegates for Obama. Not even the Texas legislature could gerrymander that well. That this same fraud, stealing the green sheets, was attempted other several times suggests that someone was telling these people what to do if they got their hands on the packet. I am NOT suggesting that anyone in the Obama campaign had a hand in this. The less appealing side of a grassroots campaign are the neophyte participants turned zealots who lose sight of the spirit of the Democratic process and have little regard for the rule of law.
I didn’t have all the details that afternoon, but I was a part of the fire drill team that contacted every Hillary precinct captain in the county and encouraged them to get to their polling site, contact the judge, and make sure that he or she understood the rules that clearly state the caucus materials are to remain in their hands until 715 or until the last voter at the precinct casts his ballot in the primary.
So I was expecting the worst at the precinct I attended with Maria. Yet the caucus at Austin High School was more lithium convention than the rowdy pep rally we had promised our supporters. There were certainly no shenanigans. The mostly Latino and elderly crowd sat quietly in the school cafeteria, signed the caucus rolls. Maria looked nervous. Nearly 75, she did not speak English and did not trust my Spanish. So I would tell Graciela what was being said at the front of the room and she would translate for Maria.
The caucus goers nominated the election official present to chair the meeting. Then the woman who had passed the sign in sheets was nominated secretary, though tried several times to refuse. The old people took a long time to sign the forms, and those who only spoke Spanish even longer. The print was small and the Spanish speakers were rightly wary sign a document without a proper explanation. Maria and I sat and waited next to Jose and Graciela Sanchez, a 60 something bilingual couple native to El Paso.
“Why do we have to vote twice?” Jose said, looking at me. “We sure have a strange system in Texas.”
“Shut up. You just be glad you have the right to vote,” Graciela said to her husband. “You just be quiet, you Communist.”
But I thought Jose had asked a good question, one I hadn’t heard a good answer for. Why do these people have to vote twice in a day?
I watched the count, more curious for the results than anything, and the chair read off a steady stream of Clintons occasionally interrupted by an Obama.
Then they filled in the formulas (see explanation on Day 3 report). The final result was 77-14 for Clinton, which netted her eight delegates to Obama’s one.
The chair chose delegates and alternates from the caucus goers. Two Obama people quickly volunteered.
“Cohen, that’s a Jewish name,” Graciela said, nodding to the table with the Obama delegate. “Damn Jews.”
Her husband shrugs. Limited sample size, but Clinton seems to be doing well with the McCarthyist, anti-semite vote.
Graciela wanted to be a delegate for Clinton, but so did a good number of the other elderly supporters. She lost three coin flips and ended up an alternate.
I took Maria home. She had been my only passenger of the day. My van netted one extra caucus vote. Though without Maria's signature, Obama would have picked up another delegate in her precinct, So I scored it 127 bucks for one precinct delegate. This is not what I had expected. I had gotten up at sunrise to pick up the van I had promised the campaign for the get out the vote drive. I had asked the coordinator Monday if there was a need for additional transportation, and he was very enthusiastic to have the extra capacity, that yes, there was a great need for a van. When I rolled into the headquarters Tuesday I was told by the same person that I wouldn’t be asked to drive until “the caucus shift”, meaning they didn’t need me to drive anyone to the polls.
So it wasn’t until 830, and the pandemonium at precinct 1xx, that I was jazzed to be speeding down the dark city streets of El Paso. I kept looking down at the map resting on my thighs. It was a ten-mile drive southeast to the elementary school holding the caucus where Oscar was waiting for me to deliver a copy of the minutes and caucus instructions they hadn’t been able to find in the official packet. It seemed impossible I could drive this far south without crossing into Mexico. Then I noticed the fence on my right running parallel to the street. I was 100 yards from the Mexican border. I called Oscar, and told him to meet me outside.
There were only a handful of cars left in the parking lot at Chavez Elementary. Oscar met me and led me into the gym, where a dozen people were sitting in folding chairs and two women stood at a podium with signature sheets and the papers with the caucus formulas. No contention, angry supporters, or battling for the minutes now in Oscars hand. The scene was almost too tranquil. They had called the office as much for a helper as for materials.
Patricia, who had been elected chair of the caucus, had no idea how to fill out the forms or award the delegates. She handed me a list of the signed in caucus goers and asked me if I could compute the formulas and fill out the paperwork.
“No, I can’t do that,” I said. I explained that I was an out of state observer and a volunteer for Hillary Clinton. The only thing I could do was to observe the caucus. Fortunately, the instructions were straightforward once I suggested to her where she start reading. Then to the delegate math. Oscar, Patricia and her quiet friend made a go at the the formula. Fortunately the math was not that complicated, nor in this case necessary. This had not been a contested caucus. Of the 105 people on the caucus sheets, there were only four Obama supporters. Since there were 15 delegates to be awarded in the precinct, it would have taken seven supporters for the Obama group to form a caucus. Since they hadn’t met this threshold, Obama did not have enough support to earn a delegate from the precinct. The only problem reported at this precinct was the case of a Clinton supporter whom the record shown having voted early but was not allowed to caucus by the precinct judge. Her vote would have made it 102-4.
It was painful watching Patricia and Oscar lumber through the formula and the minutes sheet, especially knowing that the returns would be flowing in by now from the primary. I wanted to get to the party surely underway at headquarters. I had a good feeling that if the level of Clinton support in El Paso was reflective of the support in the border towns south and east along the fence that ran behind this school all the way down to Brownsville, Hillary would pull out a victory in Texas.
But this scene at Chavez Elementary was the caucus. Oscar and Patricia fumbling through the Texas Two Step that only a handful of people understood how and no one could explain the why.
I dialed into NPR on the way back up the border. Clinton had won in Ohio and was pulling ahead in the primary tally here in Texas. Time to pull some Clintonista ass.
And as Jose and later my father pointed out, I can one day tell my grandchildren about my bit part in the Texas Two-Step. Click Here to Read More..
“We have got to get a packet out to 1xx as quickly as possible,” Kate, the lawyer, said.
“I don’t have a car for you,” Christian said.
“I’ve got a car,” I said, walking up behind them.
“Then take this down,” Kate said.
She gave me the name of our precinct captain, Oscar ______ who was supposedly on site, a phone number and an address. Christian, a hulking wise-guy from Flushing, Queens, scrambled to get me directions.
“Make sure you get this packet directly in to Oscar’s hands,” Kate said. “Don’t let anyone else touch it. Watch them do the count if they’ll let you.”
In the matter of 90 minutes the Texas two-step had taken me 360 degrees. Early reports of egregious voting fraud committed by local Obama supporters left the staffers wary of a dirty fight in the state of Texas. Around noon several of our precinct captains began calling with reports that Obama partisans had obtained the caucus packets from the precinct judges. These packets were critical to running the caucus as they contained the voter sign-in sheets used to tally the caucus goers, the minutes and instructions, the worksheets for computing the number of delegates, and the reporting procedures that included the all important green sheet with a secret pin code necessary to dial in the delegate count. By late afternoon we had received complaints in 15 locations in El Paso and the surrounding towns. In a couple of cases the people who had stolen the packets were signing people into the caucus that afternoon as they left the primary. The advantage gained, of course, was that these voters would not need to come back to their precinct for the caucus if they had already signed in.
The Obama campaign had officially pulled out of El Paso a week before the primary and hadn’t conducted the caucus trainings the Clinton camp ran all week. His supporters generally had little knowledge about the caucus process. The one thing they did seem to know was to get their hands on those green sheets.
A couple of these folks will almost certainly be going to jail. One supporter who had asked for and received the packet in the afternoon had removed the green sheet before caucus began. This man then waited until after the caucus and phoned in the results, flipping the delegate count to Obama’s favor. Another supporter had been dumb enough to phone in all the delegates from his precinct in favor for Obama. In a city where Clinton won over 70 percent of the popular vote, and won virtually every caucus, there is one precinct that has reported 100 percent of its delegates for Obama. Not even the Texas legislature could gerrymander that well. That this same fraud, stealing the green sheets, was attempted other several times suggests that someone was telling these people what to do if they got their hands on the packet. I am NOT suggesting that anyone in the Obama campaign had a hand in this. The less appealing side of a grassroots campaign are the neophyte participants turned zealots who lose sight of the spirit of the Democratic process and have little regard for the rule of law.
I didn’t have all the details that afternoon, but I was a part of the fire drill team that contacted every Hillary precinct captain in the county and encouraged them to get to their polling site, contact the judge, and make sure that he or she understood the rules that clearly state the caucus materials are to remain in their hands until 715 or until the last voter at the precinct casts his ballot in the primary.
So I was expecting the worst at the precinct I attended with Maria. Yet the caucus at Austin High School was more lithium convention than the rowdy pep rally we had promised our supporters. There were certainly no shenanigans. The mostly Latino and elderly crowd sat quietly in the school cafeteria, signed the caucus rolls. Maria looked nervous. Nearly 75, she did not speak English and did not trust my Spanish. So I would tell Graciela what was being said at the front of the room and she would translate for Maria.
The caucus goers nominated the election official present to chair the meeting. Then the woman who had passed the sign in sheets was nominated secretary, though tried several times to refuse. The old people took a long time to sign the forms, and those who only spoke Spanish even longer. The print was small and the Spanish speakers were rightly wary sign a document without a proper explanation. Maria and I sat and waited next to Jose and Graciela Sanchez, a 60 something bilingual couple native to El Paso.
“Why do we have to vote twice?” Jose said, looking at me. “We sure have a strange system in Texas.”
“Shut up. You just be glad you have the right to vote,” Graciela said to her husband. “You just be quiet, you Communist.”
But I thought Jose had asked a good question, one I hadn’t heard a good answer for. Why do these people have to vote twice in a day?
I watched the count, more curious for the results than anything, and the chair read off a steady stream of Clintons occasionally interrupted by an Obama.
Then they filled in the formulas (see explanation on Day 3 report). The final result was 77-14 for Clinton, which netted her eight delegates to Obama’s one.
The chair chose delegates and alternates from the caucus goers. Two Obama people quickly volunteered.
“Cohen, that’s a Jewish name,” Graciela said, nodding to the table with the Obama delegate. “Damn Jews.”
Her husband shrugs. Limited sample size, but Clinton seems to be doing well with the McCarthyist, anti-semite vote.
Graciela wanted to be a delegate for Clinton, but so did a good number of the other elderly supporters. She lost three coin flips and ended up an alternate.
I took Maria home. She had been my only passenger of the day. My van netted one extra caucus vote. Though without Maria's signature, Obama would have picked up another delegate in her precinct, So I scored it 127 bucks for one precinct delegate. This is not what I had expected. I had gotten up at sunrise to pick up the van I had promised the campaign for the get out the vote drive. I had asked the coordinator Monday if there was a need for additional transportation, and he was very enthusiastic to have the extra capacity, that yes, there was a great need for a van. When I rolled into the headquarters Tuesday I was told by the same person that I wouldn’t be asked to drive until “the caucus shift”, meaning they didn’t need me to drive anyone to the polls.
So it wasn’t until 830, and the pandemonium at precinct 1xx, that I was jazzed to be speeding down the dark city streets of El Paso. I kept looking down at the map resting on my thighs. It was a ten-mile drive southeast to the elementary school holding the caucus where Oscar was waiting for me to deliver a copy of the minutes and caucus instructions they hadn’t been able to find in the official packet. It seemed impossible I could drive this far south without crossing into Mexico. Then I noticed the fence on my right running parallel to the street. I was 100 yards from the Mexican border. I called Oscar, and told him to meet me outside.
There were only a handful of cars left in the parking lot at Chavez Elementary. Oscar met me and led me into the gym, where a dozen people were sitting in folding chairs and two women stood at a podium with signature sheets and the papers with the caucus formulas. No contention, angry supporters, or battling for the minutes now in Oscars hand. The scene was almost too tranquil. They had called the office as much for a helper as for materials.
Patricia, who had been elected chair of the caucus, had no idea how to fill out the forms or award the delegates. She handed me a list of the signed in caucus goers and asked me if I could compute the formulas and fill out the paperwork.
“No, I can’t do that,” I said. I explained that I was an out of state observer and a volunteer for Hillary Clinton. The only thing I could do was to observe the caucus. Fortunately, the instructions were straightforward once I suggested to her where she start reading. Then to the delegate math. Oscar, Patricia and her quiet friend made a go at the the formula. Fortunately the math was not that complicated, nor in this case necessary. This had not been a contested caucus. Of the 105 people on the caucus sheets, there were only four Obama supporters. Since there were 15 delegates to be awarded in the precinct, it would have taken seven supporters for the Obama group to form a caucus. Since they hadn’t met this threshold, Obama did not have enough support to earn a delegate from the precinct. The only problem reported at this precinct was the case of a Clinton supporter whom the record shown having voted early but was not allowed to caucus by the precinct judge. Her vote would have made it 102-4.
It was painful watching Patricia and Oscar lumber through the formula and the minutes sheet, especially knowing that the returns would be flowing in by now from the primary. I wanted to get to the party surely underway at headquarters. I had a good feeling that if the level of Clinton support in El Paso was reflective of the support in the border towns south and east along the fence that ran behind this school all the way down to Brownsville, Hillary would pull out a victory in Texas.
But this scene at Chavez Elementary was the caucus. Oscar and Patricia fumbling through the Texas Two Step that only a handful of people understood how and no one could explain the why.
I dialed into NPR on the way back up the border. Clinton had won in Ohio and was pulling ahead in the primary tally here in Texas. Time to pull some Clintonista ass.
And as Jose and later my father pointed out, I can one day tell my grandchildren about my bit part in the Texas Two-Step. Click Here to Read More..
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Postcards from Tino
From Bogota I headed northeast to Villa de Leyva, a meticulously preserved colonial town in the Andean highlands. Declared a national heritage landmark in 1954, Villa de Leyva is the Colombian equivalent of Williamsburg, where all modern architecture is forbidden. The Plaza Mayor is the country's largest public square, 120 by 120 meters, and the only structure on the cobbled expanse is a small fountain at its center that once provided drinking water for the town. The irregular cobble rambles for blocks in any direction from the square.
Villa de Leyva is a popular weekend retreat for the Bogota elite. Several portals off or near the main square open up into a series of immaculate courtyards and nooks housing a half dozen gourmet restaurants, bars and cafes. Many artists have been attracted to the town and the surrounding Andean highlands and a number of them have opened galleries about the town.
As peaceful as the town center is, I had heard many excellent reviews of a guesthouse a mile uphill from the square. The cobble gives to asphalt for a few blocks and the last half mile runs up a dirt road past the army barracks and then right up to the base of the surrounding mountains. The dorm room was only three beds in a cabana above the guesthouse. As I was the only guest upon arrival, I had the cabana to myself with its view of the valley beyond the floor to ceiling windows.
On my third evening at the Renacer Guesthouse, a backpack appeared on the bunk next to mine. There are many brilliant and entertaining backpackers on the road, and hearing their experiences is one of the many pleasures of travel. There are also some real morons out there. By the way the new arrival had settled in, the floor already was strewn with dirty clothes, trash, and other junk, I was fearing my roommate for the night was in the latter group.
I was watching the sunset from a hammock on the porch when my roommate appeared in the doorway. His name was Tino, a young German with blond hair curling down past his shoulders. His face seemed pinched horizontally around his eyes We spoke Spanish for a moment, but he was having difficulty expressing himself and quickly switched to English.
Tino looked younger than his 19 years, too young to be travelling the world. He had been in Bogota for a couple months, working for the YMCA with street children in the barrios. He was headed to a national park along the Atlantic coast where he would get room and board for helping the park rangers.
When I said I was from the States, Tino did not hesitate with his opinions of America and her citizens abroad. He does not like American travelers. He finds Americans to be arrogant, rude, reticent to discuss politics, and worst of all, he finds them everywhere. He likes the American government even less. At least here we had some common ground, though Bush bashing is a tedious conversation piece given all the ideas and places that could be discussed with a fellow traveler. I steered the conversation away from politics for a moment, but Tino either did not get the hint or did not care, and in the next breath was criticising a political system represented only by two parties, "You only have Democrits and Republics, you don't have a Green party... America always is talking about Democracy, but the elections aren't real, it's all for the television."
I went to bat for our congressional system. At the cost of representation for minor parties, there is greater stability in our goverment than in a Parliamentary system. But mostly I wanted to get away from this kid for the evening. I told him I was going back into town for dinner. With the look of a bare bones backpacker I assumed he'd be cooking for himself. To my disappointment he said he would join me.
We aren't a dozen yards from the guesthouse when Tino pulls a cigarette carton from his bag and from it a joint the size of his middle finger.
"Are you sure that's a good idea, away from the hostel?"
"Don't be paranoid," Tino replied.
He takes a half dozen hard drags and soon is talking about Alice in Wonderland and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the cartoon and the movie, respectively. There didn't seem much point in riffing off his thoughts, as it was evident he was unable to follow conversation, his own included.
He insisted I take a hit. I declined, and suggested he be careful as we were walking along the low stone wall and past the sand bag pill boxes of the army barracks.
"Don't be paranoid, no one is watching."
I missed the next turn in Tino's monologue. Something about The Doors. He was asking me if I had heard of Idpusus. I hadn't.
"You know, man, the Trojan Horse."
"You mean The Iliad?"
"Yes, he sleeps with his sister and then, he, ah..."
"Killed his father," I finished, "Oedipus."
"Yah, the song about Oedipus."
The dirt road kicked out into the pavement and Tino continued smoking as we passed a group of kids playing soccer in the street. He extends the joint to my chest.
"You must try some. It's not that strong. And I've got plenty more," he said, patting the cloth purse slung over his shoulder.
He is probably right about the weed. The stuff our parents smoked in the 60's had about 15-20% of the THC levels, the psychoactive compound in cannabis, as the weed grown in the States today. In a place like Colombia, where pot grows everywhere with minimal cultivation, the stuff is likely to have the 3% THC--versus 15-18% in hydroponic strains grown today in North America and Europe--level found in naturally occuring cannabis. If a puff of today's hybridized strains is enough to send one flying (it is), then Tino should be doing fine by the several dozen hits from a fat joint
At the point we hit the cobble of the town center a jeep a few blocks down started moving in our direction, jiggering along behind low beams.
"It's the police." Tino said, contemplating a last hit, the joint pinched between his thumb and index finger.
The jeep bumped towards us, and once the headlights were at an angle we could see a middle aged driver out on the town, his shirt unbuttoned to display a gold chain and cross in a nest of chest hair.
Tino was proud of himself that he hadn't panicked and thrown his roach into the gutter.
"Way to stick to your guns, Tino," I said..
"What?"
"I said, way to stick to your guns. It's an expression."
"That's another thing I don't like about Americans, they are crazy about guns. And the death penalty."
"Have you ever fired a gun?" I asked.
"No."
"You should try it sometime, it's fun."
A couple of gringos were walking up the street opposite us. Tino clearly liked the look of them. He quickened to a jog while shouting out to them, in English.
"Hey, where are you from?"
Canada and Sweden, they replied.
"Great," Tino said, "I'm tired of meeting so many Americans here. They are everywhere."
And who exactly did he expect to meet working for the YMCA?
"Yeah, man, we were on a vision quest with some Californians," The Canadian replied.
I hadn't noticed Tino's clothes in full before this moment, his back now turned to me as he spoke with the non-Americans. With his hooded cardigan and its green, yellow and red stripes, baggy pastel pants and brightly colored cloth sack, Tino had the stoner look down cold. He was a blond haired version of myself twelve years ago.
Next yet to his companions, Tino was a DARE poster boy. The Canadian had a decomposing beehive of dreadlocks piled on top of his head. His eyes were in free float, and his jaw kept working a few seconds beyond his last syllable. The deep tan suggested months, perhaps years, on the road. He was what Tino wanted to be--the White Rasta. Yet after all these years--he claimed to be 27--he could not escape his accent. Beneath the stoner falsetto he had a (now scrambling) precision in his diction that suggested upper-crust Connecticut boarding school. Tino should really hate this guy, the "I'm Canadian" American.
"What kind of vision quest?" Tino asked.
"We went up into the mountains for 7 days without food or water. It's so cleansing. On the third day I started to see these spirits! They were buzzing around my skin," the White Rasta acts out this routine, pinching up and down his arms while looking around everywhere at once. "I said, 'Hello sprits! Would you please give me some knowledge?' They wouldn't. They're tricksters, those spirits."
"You went for a week without water?" I asked.
His routine finished, it took the White Rasta a long moment to respond.
"That's nothing, man. There are these yogis. In India. These yogis can live for 500 years. They touch their pulse," the Rasta demonstrates, "and stop, their hearts. Just like that. I saw this yogi, man, who bent a spoon. With his mind."
"Here come the Police," Tino said.
A dirt bike approached from the square.
"The police are just in your head," the Swede said.
He was right. Even from a block away, it was clear the helmeted rider was not a policeman.
The young man from Sweden was not as ostentatious as his fellow traveller. His thin and wispy beard made his baby face look even younger than was possible, though he had to be least 18. Of the three, he was the most clearly zonked. The deep red in the whites of his eyes blended into his sunburnt skin. I enjoyed for a moment the irony of running into personified examples, according to Roman, of the two characters most likely to stick out on a Colombian sidewalk. Villa de Leyva is as laid back and secure as Colombia gets. Still, four ridilculous looking gringos speaking loud English in the street at night were bound to be asking for trouble.
"Hey, we'll trade emails. Then we can meet up. On the coast." Tino suggested to the Rasta, mimicking his companions glacial cadence.
I figured this was my out so I turned to make my exit.
"He's a writer, he should have a pen." Tino said.
I turned back around and dug in my bag for a pen.
"Hey, here come the police," Tino said.
"You've got to get the police out of your mind, man," the White Rasta replied.
I fished out my pen. Looking up from my bag I saw four men with reflective vests approaching from the square. The police were now in my mind too.
Tino grabbed the pen from my hand asking in the same breath if I had some paper too. Something was telling me to walk away. But now he had my writing pen.
I looked back toward the square. The police were a block away. The Swede had produced a card from his wallet and the three were exchanging their information. Slowly. I snatched back the pen as Tino lifted it from the m in '.com' and pivoted towards the square. But the police were now upon us. The lead officer announced that they wanted to search our bags.
I am probably the only one who understood, and terrified about what they might find on the three clowns behind me, I immediately held out my bag for the search. This was more than the weapons check I was accustomed to on the road. The officer who performed the search, no older than Tino, unzipped every last pocket on my bag. He even thumbed through my papers and looked in between my un-mailed postcards. This one was definitely looking for drugs.
I was cleared. As casually as possible, I began walking in the direction of the square. I made it ten feet when Tino screamed in broken Spanish.
"Travel together!"
I look over my shoulder to see Tino's outstretched arm and finger frozen in a bird-dog point in my direction. For the first time I saw his face unpinched, his eyes were wide open, full of terror and hatred. One of the officers, also young, was holding Tino's rasta satchel in one hand and a smaller bag, what must have been his dope, in the other. A third officer, at least my age and likely in command, held up his hand as he approached me.
I took a breath, and in the cleanest accent I could muster, began, "Disculpe me...(Excuse me officer, but this boy and I are not travelling together. He arrived tonight at the guest house Renacer where I have been staying for several days. We walked into town for dinner, but I do not know him)."
The officer did not reply. He had stopped a few feet from me and did not move closer.
"May I?" I asked, motioning towards the square.
He nodded.
I wasn't ten more more feet when Tino yelled, this time in English.
"I need to borrow your pen!"
I was tempted to reply, "I don't think they have postcards in prison, Tino."
I thought it wiser to minimize my connection to the boy.
Tino did not return to the hostel that night, nor the following morning. He either didn't have the means or the guile to bribe his way out of custody. I hadn't stuck around long enough to find out what happened to the White Rasta and his friend, though I can only guess they found something on them.
If I were a stoner in Colombia, I don't think I would advertise the fact decked out in the international symbols of pot smoking. I would also make sure to speak near fluent Spanish, in the event I had to talk and bribe my way out of trouble. Tino's pidgin wasn't even good enough to bring someone else down with him.
In Israel, they don't recommend that immigrants spend money on Hebrew classes--the army will teach them the language. I wonder if the same holds for a Colombian prison. Maybe his new rasta friend will teach him. To bend the bars. With his mind.
Please write, Tino. I am sure you will have some interesting stories to tell. Click Here to Read More..
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Bogota and Growing Up with Pablo Escobar
Santa Fe de Bogota gets a bad rap. I only heard the negatives before arriving: dangerous, dirty, polluted, cold and dreary. Some travelers avoid the capital entirely, never stepping out of the airport while en route to Medellin or Cartegena. That’s a shame. Bogota might not have the romantic architecture of Buenos Aires, the dilapidated charm of Montevideo, or the sunny clime of Santiago, but if I were to choose a place to live among the South American capitals I have visited, I'd take Bogota in a heartbeat. I'd be pressed to think of a major city abroad I'd rather spend the next few years. And with half my reason for returning home having just evaporated, I've added the real estate section of El Tiempo to my daily reading list.
Bogota is a city, like the country as a whole, clearly on the upswing. The mayor and police force have made great strides in security, and anywhere of interest to a foreigner is perfectly safe in daylight hours. The cabs are a cheap and safe means to access the vibrant nightlife. And Bogota has a strong cosmopolitan current, more of a San Francisco chic than the Miami vibe of Cali and Medellin. The student population and twenty-somethings tend to have an artistic and intellectual aesthetic which I find much preferable to the plastic and silicon set that dominates the other major cities here (and a good portion of Latin America for that matter).
I stayed in the neighborhood La Candelaria, the expansive colonial old town nestled at the base of the mountains towering over the city center. La Candelaria has been sufficiently spared the 20th century: narrow cobbled streets, many of which are closed to traffic, and bright colonial facades representing distinct colonial styles from across the country. This motley array rivals the beauty of the (tiny by comparison) San Telmo district in Buenos Aires, and without the sense that it has been preserved for the sake of the tourists. The museums, led by arguably the best gold museum in the world, are outstanding. Colombia pays a great deal of respect to its artists and writers, and many of their homes have been preserved as monuments to their work and times. Even better, all the sights can be taken in peace as the crowds of camera wielding tourists have yet to flock here.
Even the hostel was outstanding. On a hill that overlooks the museums and government buildings, Hostel Anandamayi is set around two large garden courtyards strung with hammocks and with an even larger garden in the rear of the building. The 8 bed dorm room I shared with two other travelers was in a cavernous room with clean hardwood floors and a fireplace that we put to use on account of the freezing alpine nights. In the evenings I pulled a comfy leather reading chair up to the fire and caught up on the books I've lugging halfway around the country: The Poet of Tolstoy Park and then Under the Volcano. The Confessions of Nat Turner is next on my list.
I assumed the new guest in the hostel on my second to last night, blonde haired and blued eyed, was European. In the standard traveler’s greeting, I asked him where he was from, and was incredulous when he replied Colombia. He explained his mother was German, but he had been born and grown up in Medellin. After a short conversation about my travels, Roman transformed into a self appointed ambassador for his country. He swung around his laptop and started showing me hundreds of pictures from the countryside and the heterogeneous citizens of Colombia. He was full of travel advice and potential itineraries. More fascinating were his stories about his childhood in Medellin.
For the past 5 years tourists have begun to trickle into Colombia past the quick visit Cartagena, though a bleach blonde Scandinavian or a dreadlocked whitey-Rastafarian will still draw stares in the smaller cities and towns. When Roman was a child in Medellin 25 years ago his European genes drew bewilderment about town. He remembers times when old ladies would crowd around him to touch his hair and look at his eyes up close. Sometimes older boys would challenge him on the street. It wasn't until he opened his mouth to speak that they realized he was a native paisa. Quite the opposite of my experiences here; I’m assumed to be Colombian until my Yanqui twanged Spanish droops from my tongue.
Now 34 years old, Roman´s childhood coincided with the wild-west Mafia years in Medellin. Assassinations, bombings and kidnappings were so commonplace that everyone had a story about a friend or relative, or even their own experiences with the urban Mafia and the guerilla groups dominant in the countryside. Roman recalled the first time it angered him. For ages the violence had been reduced to small talk at friend and family gatherings. One evening he realized that this was because they had come to accept that the violence as commonplace as the eternal springtime weather.
Still, not until Roman attended University in Berlin did he realize what a special childhood he had lived. People were fascinated that he came from a place with such mystique. His birthplace made him more exotic in Germany than his coloring had made him in Colombia. He quickly tired of the typical first encounter in Germany. He would first be asked if he had any cocaine, second if he had ever seen Pablo Escobar.
Of course he had seen Pablo Escobar. Everyone in Medellin saw Escobar because Escobar was everywhere. In the 1980's Pablo Escobar was the de facto mayor of Medellin. Roman remembers one time going to the shopping center with his mom and seeing Pablo seated under a small tent in the parking lot behind a table stacked with bricks of money. A line wrapped several times around the center of people waiting to shake Escobar's hand and receive a hundred dollars or so from his cash mountain. Another time Roman remembers passing through a road block set up by Escobar’s men on the outskirts of town. Heavily armed henchmen were checking all the cars while Escobar sat in the backseat of his Bentley. If the thugs didn't like someone, they yanked him out of his car and into the woods.
I asked Roman if the violence ever made his parents worry about raising their children in Medellin. Yes, there was one evening, Roman remembered, when a nearby explosion shattered all of the windows in their apartment. That night his parents said, “enough, tomorrow we will get plane tickets out of here."
The next morning came and his parents shrugged. Just another cartel bombing, only the windows had been broken. So they cleaned up the glass and went about their day.
His parents couldn’t leave Medellin for they had fallen in love with the country. Neither of them were born Colombians. Roman's father is from Chile and was working in Frankfurt when he met Roman’s mother. They decided they wanted to live together in Chile, though right around the time of their move Allende was overthrown by Pinochet, and given his father’s family alliances, they decided it was unsafe to return. So they chose Colombia instead. By the time the terror of the 80´s was in full swing, they had been living in Medellin for nearly 15 years and it would have been prohibitively expensive to buy their way back into the German health system. Though Roman believes that last bit was just an excuse. The real reason for staying was that they couldn’t just up and leave the family and friends they had acquired over the years, and they were truly happy despite the very real risks of the times. His parents, like Roman, are nature lovers and Colombia is one the most beautiful and climatically varied places on earth, an outdoorsman’s paradise.
After five years in Germany, Roman came to a similar conclusion that his parents had made and decided it was time to move back home.
"In Germany, I had some close friends, and Berlin was great, but there were a lot times I found myself lonely," he said. "In Colombia, I am never lonely. That's what is so cool about Colombia. You can’t be lonely here."
Roman is proud to be Colombian and loves his country. He is a believer in President Uribe. Five years ago he couldn't have made the trip from Medellin to Bogota by car. Now he and his friends travel anywhere in the country, even the remote and long isolated Pacific coast towns inhabited by the descendants of runaway slaves.
Roman is in the overwhelming majority of the eighty percent of Colombians who support Uribe. His legacy is truly remarkable. Before his reforms, many Colombians feared the army as much as the rebels and drug traffickers. Corruption was rife, and it was nearly impossible to travel without doling bribes to soldiers who did little to make the journey safer. Most of the army recruits were young men who hadn't finished grammar school. Their lack of education, coupled with what seemed a hopeless fight against rebel outfits flush with cocaine dollars, left them undependable at best and at worst a danger to the people they were supposed to be fighting for. Now there are strict educational requirements for entering the army, and soldiers attend many hours of additional education and seminars. Uribe's platform focused on the elimination of corruption in the armed forces and the government, a never ending struggle and one rarely achieved by a politician. Uribe has delivered on his promises. Reduced corruption has paid clear dividends in everyday security and economic vitality.
The change in the military alone is amazing. Soldiers are friendly and helpful and do their jobs with efficiency. The majority now see the army as a force for the good of the country. As recently as five years ago, when soldiers used stop to check a vehicle they would start taking apart the car piece by piece until offered a bribe. Now soldiers only check documentation and make an honest search for weapons. I've been searched for weapons, along with all the other male passengers, twice a day on average when traveling. It's a quick procedure. We file out of the bus. They search our bags and pat us down. We’re back on the road inside of five minutes.
"Sometimes I’ll give them 10,000 pesos (5 USD) for beer money because I am happy to see the change," Roman said.
Roman sees the guerilla conflict as intractable. There is just too much money in the cocaine trade to ever truly weaken the rebels. And he laments the lost promise of Plan Colombia. Originally, Plan Colombia was designed as a multi-national aid scheme to improve rural transportation links and provide crop subsidies to poor farmers willing to make the switch from coca to other crops. Unfortunately, though the Bush Administration has promised billions for Plan Colombia, the aid is conditional, and the bulk of it is allocated to obliged military acquisitions. US aid also come with mandates for controversial fumigation of the countryside and the portion remaining for agriculture requires the purchase of expensive herbicides and non-regenerative seeds from Monsanto and other US based agricultural firms. It’s similar to Vietnam; no amount of herbicide/napalm is going suppress the cocaine trade and the billions that flow to rogue groups inside and outside of the government. Short of outright drug legalization in consuming and producing countries, it is unlikely we will see an end to the evils of the cocaine trade.
Problems aside, Roman articulates the same sense I got when making plans for this trip--that after decades of turmoil Colombia is a place truly on the make. Problems remain, but the world is taking notice and offering a hand. And the beauty and warmth of the people here will not be a secret for long.
Roman is an articulate advocate for his country. If he’s not already drawing salary from the Ministry of Tourism, he should be. Click Here to Read More..
Thursday, January 24, 2008
San Agustin- Casa François
I have been in Bogota a week now and about the only negative here is the shabby internet cafes. I might have to wait till I get back home to finish posting my Colombian entries. I left off last week promising the story of Francois, owner of a idyllic guesthouse on a hilltop overlooking San Agustin.
One of the many benefits of the improved security situation in Colombia is that San Agustin and its enigmatic monuments are once again accessible to the greater public. Though less than 100km from the white walled colonial town of Popayan, it is a tortuous six hour bus ride over the mountains on rough dirt roads. It had rained the day before I departed, so the trip was seven hours through the mud.
I was treated to a typical South American journey. The dirty short bus that gasped and shuddered up to the terminal an hour and a half late was already full, a peasant in every seat and the aisles stacked with sacks of various goods. Two bird cages, also occupied, were resting precariously on the dry goods just behind the driver. It did not appear there was room for me or the Swiss woman who also had a ticket in hand for the 7am, now 8:30 bus. There was no way I was willing to risk a later departure; it is still not safe to travel after sunset. The ticket agent squeezed the Swiss woman in between the driver and a passenger riding shot gun, and I was offered a sack of corn where I was ear level with the parrots.
Still, I was glad I had taken the second bus of the morning. Two hours into the trip we passed the 6am bus broken down in the middle of the road on a steep and muddy incline. A couple hours later the rain started and before long we reached our first impasse. All the men on board, myself included, got out and helped another bus in front of us that was stuck in a mud hole. We dug up large rocks from the shoulder and threw them into the stretch of mud-bog until there was a sufficient bridge for the vehicles to pass.
The ride was worth it. San Agustin is one of the most spectacular sites in Colombia. The town is set in a hollow one rise of hills away from a gorge containing the headwaters of the Magdalena River, Colombia´s longest running almost a thousand miles north before emptying into the Caribbean near Cartagena. Several hundred shades of green make up the hills and gorges dropping off into the river. At scattered sites around the town lie the remains of a people that disappeared around the time the Spaniards first planted their flag on South American soil. Little in known about these people, though archeologists suppose that the statues left behind can be attributed to several different pre-Columbian groups. The hundreds of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic stone monuments sprinkled over the hills are thought to be funeral markers.
San Agustin is the kind of place one could linger for some time. This is exactly what Francois decided. He came to San Agustin seven years ago, long before a tourist footprint existed in the town due to the FARC control of the area. Francois had previously been living in Nicaragua, and did not consider the rebel army much of a threat. So he dropped his backpack and opened what quickly became the town's most popular bar. In time he earned the money to purchase a dilapidated farmhouse.
On the afternoon he went into town to settle his deed, there were three men waiting for him on the bank´s front porch. One of the men greeted him and asked if he`d care to join him for a drink. They directed him to a jeep, blindfolded him, and headed off on one of the bumpy roads winding into the hills.
Francois admits he was little nervous in the back of the jeep, though not panicked. The local commander of the FARC had visited his bar and by word of mouth Francois had gathered that he had liked it. Maybe this would count for something, he thought, as he was led out of the jeep and into a farmhouse. His escorts helped him to sit in a chair, and then undid his blindfold. He found himself seated before a spread of juices, cakes and other sweets. A group of soldiers sat around him at the table. One of the soldiers he recognized as the commander, who said,
"We want nothing from you only that you know that we exist."
Though he crossed paths with guerrillas several times while hiking in the mountains, he never once was hassled after his welcoming party to the region.
With seven years of construction experience in France, Francois set to transforming his crumbling homestead into a comfortable home and guesthouse. With knowledge of carpentry, masonry, and electricity, he did most of work himself, only slowed by the time he needed to purchase materials. And the materials are eclectic. He added a second story to the farmhouse with a guadua frame, the largest variety in the bamboo family. In the masonry of the enlarged kitchen and extra guestrooms, he added all sorts of recyclables to the stucco additions. The glass bottles he inserted into the kitchen wall add colorful light during the day, and various plastic objects can be found throughout the main house and the guest rooms. A cabana stuck on ten foot high guadua stilts is the four bed backpackers´ dorm. The room has thirteen sides, producing a round room with five pairs of large wooden shutters and a double door opening out to vistas of undulating hills and mountains.
I arrived to Casa Francois at sundown. By luck the Swiss woman was a old friend of Francois and convinced me to climb the hill and have a look at his place. The other inhabitants of the cabana, a guy from Norway and another from Canada, were rolling their evening joints while staring out into the darkening landscape. I settled into a hammock on the porch and appreciated the quiet. The parrots had squawked in my ears the entire ride from Popayan.
I spent three days hiking trails to the monument sites. The most spectacular of the lot were carvings made directly into the rock face of a gorge that bottomed out into the Magdalena. Four waterfalls were visible along the opposite wall of green and impossibly steep fields of coffee bushes.
I would have stayed much longer than I did if it hadn´t been for a resident kitten who had lathered the beds and blankets with her dander. I got very little sleep, sneezing the night away on my hilltop paradise. This was probably for the best. I saw most of the major archeological sites, and my bunkmates were so stoned for the duration of my stay that they had little to contribute in conversation.
So I caught a 5am bus to Bogota, a twelve hour trip through the mountains and then along the opening of the Magdalena Valley. We passed through the Tatacoa Desert one of the smallest by area in the world, an 80 square kilometer stretch of sand and scorpions where the sky is blue straight above though mountain-blocked clouds are visible in all directions on the horizon. Then the long creeping climb up into the high plateau of Santa Fe de Bogota. Click Here to Read More..
Friday, January 18, 2008
No Worries
The difficulty with posting on the road isn´t just the hassle of working with clunky computers I haven´t seen the likes of since college. With a lack of editing there is always the potenial that things don´t come out right. After my last post about uncle Hugo, I received several mails from people concerned about my security.
When I suggested that the FARC was intellectualy bankrupt, I did not mean to suggest they are now in the business of grabbing anyone they see with money off of the streets and holding them for ransom. Rich Colombians are a target of the FARC, foreign tourists are not. And there is a clear distinction from the FARC´s point of view. The FARC pursues persons it considers responsible parties for the political situation in Colombia. Almost all of their hostages are Colombians, and the few foreign nationals are also somehow involved in the country´s politics. The three Americans held by the FARC, for example, are likely CIA operatives, either field directors in the greater Plan Colombia, or intelligence types working to subvert the leftist groups still hiding out in the jungle.
And my lament for Chavez´ meddling was purely for Colombia´s sake. There is nothing that Hugo could do in the short term to change for me the security situation on the ground.
For the record, Colombia is and should continue to be a safe country to travel in. Now, if I told you I was heading to Caracas, well, then you could start worrying for my safety.
When I arrive to the big city this weekend, I will tell the story of François, a Frenchman (obviously) who decided to make his home in Colombia six years ago. His experiences here with the rebels will illustrate what little interest they have in foreign nationals. Click Here to Read More..
When I suggested that the FARC was intellectualy bankrupt, I did not mean to suggest they are now in the business of grabbing anyone they see with money off of the streets and holding them for ransom. Rich Colombians are a target of the FARC, foreign tourists are not. And there is a clear distinction from the FARC´s point of view. The FARC pursues persons it considers responsible parties for the political situation in Colombia. Almost all of their hostages are Colombians, and the few foreign nationals are also somehow involved in the country´s politics. The three Americans held by the FARC, for example, are likely CIA operatives, either field directors in the greater Plan Colombia, or intelligence types working to subvert the leftist groups still hiding out in the jungle.
And my lament for Chavez´ meddling was purely for Colombia´s sake. There is nothing that Hugo could do in the short term to change for me the security situation on the ground.
For the record, Colombia is and should continue to be a safe country to travel in. Now, if I told you I was heading to Caracas, well, then you could start worrying for my safety.
When I arrive to the big city this weekend, I will tell the story of François, a Frenchman (obviously) who decided to make his home in Colombia six years ago. His experiences here with the rebels will illustrate what little interest they have in foreign nationals. Click Here to Read More..
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Hugo the Clown
I remember looking up a word last January when giving my opinion of Chavez to my Spanish teacher in Guatemala. Clown: n. Payaso. Hugo the Clown can entertain; I have enjoyed some of his more puckish moments. Deriding George Bush as the devil before the stiff suits of United Nations General Assembly was classic. Even better was his assistance a few years back to poor Americans with the gift of cheap heating oil. There he stole a page from Eva Peron's guide to political theater. With thousands of her own citizens destitute, Evita showed up Washington by sending clothing and other supplies to poor children in the United States.
With the exception of Dr. Patch Adams, who gave an electrifying speech one October night at Wesleyan and then proceeded to a student lounge where he continued his happiness sermon well past midnight, clowns frighten the hell out of me. And Hugo is one dangerous clown. Chavez has Venezuela well down the road to economic collapse. Inflation is rampant, and Chavez willfully fritters his country's oil wealth by meddling anywhere in the Hemisphere that will lend his red beret air time. All the more tragic for a continent that in most quarters has emerged from decades of economic stagnation.
Though Chavez has initiated many projects for the poorest Venezuelans, most are myopic stopgaps. Hiring Cuban doctors to work the understaffed Venezuelan clinics might alleviate current suffering, yet by not investing resources into medical schools, hospitals, and other public infrastructure, these gains are only for the short term. Venezuela might be better off if Chavez kept away from serious policy initiatives altogether. His proposed education reform, a Bolivarian Education System, would mandate a Marxist (genuine Marxists would be insulted with the comparison) curriculum light on practical applications and heavy on Hugo worship. The initiative threatens to shut down any private school that resists a classroom centered love fest for the great leader.
Worse, Chavez poses a real threat beyond the Venezuelan border. In his most recent foray into foreign policy he has parleyed his leftist credentials to insert himself as an intermediary in the Colombia's conflict with the FARC. The headline negotiations had focused on the release of Consuelo Gonzalez, Clara Rojas and her son Emmanuel, born to a rebel father, three of the more than seven hundred hostages believed to be in FARC custody. Both Hugo and the FARC looked foolish when it turned out that they were not in possession of Emmanuel. FARC stalled, claiming security concerns, then the three year old boy turned up in an orphanage in Bogota.
After Clara and Consuelo's orchestrated release last week, Chavez revealed his hand. Yesterday he asked President Uribe and the Colombian government to stop classifying the FARC as a terrorist group and recognise it as an oppositional force with political ends.
What exactly are the FARCs political ends? Long ideologically bankrupt, the FARC has resorted to kidnapping and the cocaine trade merely to keep its soldiers afield. Not even the rank and file are fooled. When given the chance the men, women and children that comprise the stock of FARC forces often seek to desert their dead end cause.
Chavez clearly would like to use the FARC as another spearhead in his 'Bolivarian' insurgency. While he may have little credibility in many Colombian eyes, he does have a Leftist following and may yet sow tensions in a country weary of conflict. Meanwhile, six more Colombians were kidnapped Sunday while on holiday in a remote region of the Pacific coast. The guerrillas chose six out of the 19 tourists, and released the remainder. They selected their captives based on whom they felt had the most money for ransom. Ideological, in a fashion.
Stay tuned. Click Here to Read More..
Sunday, January 13, 2008
A night in Cali. A day in Salento.
The locals I meet always want to know who I am travelling with. When I tell them I am travelling alone, eyebrows raise. The men usually say, "How Brave!"
The women ask, "But what does your mother think?"
There are hundreds, if not thousands of backpackers making similar treks through Colombia these days. The security situation has improved dramatically, and that is no longer a secret in the travelling community. With normal precautions anywhere but the most remote mountain trails or the sultry jungles along the Pacific coast and the Amazon Basin are under government control. This is not a limitation for me. I am not an alpinist, and I have no interest in hacking my way under a dense canopy shrouding a foreboding array of noxious vegetation, disease bearing insects and venomous reptiles. Nature is competition, and I have no illusions as to how I'd fare in nature´s big leagues. The only way I´d travel through the rainforest would be in a bulldozer, with air con.
I didn´t understand all the hype surrounding the Colombian cities I´d heard so much about in my research for this trip. In Medellin I spent my first couple of days wandering around the sites only impressed by the lovely spring-like weather. Most people don´t travel here to visit the museums. In Colombia, nightlife is the draw. And Colombian cities are transformed after dark. Medellin´s Zona Rosa doesn´t open its metal blinds until after dark. Poblado begins to bustle after 10 pm or so, when the patio restaurants fill up and the young and the rich crowd the sidewalks and pack the ubiquitous bars and discos. The students and starving artists bring their own booze and drink in the park squares within view of the action. In Cali, clubbing is the official pastime. The beautiful people throng into large halls of smoke and lasers and pounding bass lines. One club resembled the inside of an enormous space dome, everything in white, with no corners, throbbing lights, together created the illusion of an unending plane of gyrating bodies, bouncing silicon. The dancing continues into dawn (so I am told).
As much as I enjoyed the city spectacle, I have been more impressed with the Colombian countryside. I visited the small town of Salento, which save for the motorcycles and the odd car, is stuck in the 19th century. Town life is centered on the wide open Plaza, de Bolivar, or course, and there are vistas of green mountains in every direction. I was looking forward to my first full nights rest in the sleepy town. My hostel in Medellin was off a major thoroughfare whose motorists cranked a constant din through midnight and resumed their roar at 5 am. No cars to contend with here. Yet in Salento, it was even worse, I was bolt awake at 430 am when the roosters anticipated the dawn with their moronic shrieks. (My new Colombian friends seemed astounded that roosters had never before been a part of my morning ritual)
East of Salento stretches the Cocoro Valley which is said to have no parallel on earth. First imagine a fertile valley of Swiss pastureland, add dark green patches of tropical forest, and then sprinkle in the impossibly tall and slender wax palm, Colombia´s national tree, onto the open pasture that remains. Finally pour a thin shroud of mist and let it trickle down from hill tops.
I met a Colombian couple, Diego and Claudia, on the road through the valley. They asked me the usual questions and were astounded by solo trip. They complimented on my Spanish, which I got to practice without interruption as neither of them could speak a word of English. In Cocoro the three of us toured a fish farm that serves the Valley and beyond with sweet pink fleshed trout that we had for lunch just up the road from the farm. My fish was served in an iron skillet bubbling with a milky sauce of garlic and peppers. The fish was accompanied by plantain pounded into a thin sheet and fried golden brown. From the restaurant we took horses into a national park bordering the village. I would normally prefer walking, but heavy rain from the night before left the paths thick with mud. Besides, it was easier to contemplate the scenery when I wasn´t the one doing the walking.
Diego and Claudia were very excited about visiting Colombia´s two much hyped theme parks, both within an hour of Salento. They suggested I travel with them for the rest of the week. I had been planning to head on to Cali, but I wasn´t on a schedule and was looking forward to the opportunity both to see what Colombians do on their holiday and to practice Spanish intensively. So I agreed. The three of us met on the Plaza de Bolivar the next morning and caught a bus for Armenia, from where we´d catch a bus to the first of the two parks. Click Here to Read More..
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