Paco Ignacio Taibo IIBesprekingen
Auteur van Guevara, also known as Che
Besprekingen
No Happy Ending door Paco Ignacio Taibo, II
"The poet liked to think of himself and his three friends as something like the tide scum left on the beach at the high-water mark; The indefinable children of a turbulent decade marked by upheaval much bigger than themselves, a series of changes they'd experienced peripherally as spectators, protagonists, and victims"
A great introductory novel to the fiction of Paco Ignacio Taibo II. This edition graced with a lovely cover.
¿Qué ocurrió realmente? ¿Por qué una batalla sin mayor importancia concentra el corazón negro del imperio norteamericano?
Paco Ignacio Taibo II's Life Itself
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 10, 2019
I've sd it before & I'll say it 'til my dying day.. maybe w/ a few words missing in its last iteration, Taibo is the bomb, the shit, the bee's-knees, the extrusion on the fidelity-smurf. Life Itself was no exception.. but it was exceptional. It begins w/ informative author's notes:
"Note II: For the non-Mexican reader, the PRI is the official government party that, since the close of the 1920s, has ruled Mexico in a civil dictatorship rife with violence and electoral fraud; members of the PRI are called "priítistas." "Cacique" is a term for the political boss of an agrarian zone; originally the word meant "Indian chief." Since the 1920s, Mexican labor unions have operated under heavy government control; in their opposition to these organizations, "red" independents refer to them as "yellow unions."" - p -iv (reviewer's numbering: it means 4pp before p 1)
It's this sort of educational background that makes these novels so important to me. Of course, what helps is that they're also of interest to me just as writing & stories.
"Send me a package by Frontier Bus Lines, a bunch of black ribbons for the Olivetti portable, the cotton ones they sell at the shop on the corner, as well as the original, which is in a red briefcase with a lock, and a pile of novels by J. P. Ma"[n]"chette that I left on my side of the bed" - p 10
For those of you who may be too young to remember, an "Olivetti" is a brand of typewriter, so he's asking for the things that provide the ink that the keys impress upon. As for "Machette"? I don't know his or her work so I look them up online & find nothing. BUT THAT'S BECAUSE THE NAME WAS MISSPELLED "Machette" instead of "Manchette". Later in this bk it was spelled correclty so I looked for books by him again & ordered 5 online.
"If you're going to divorce me, for God's sake send me the blue turtleneck sweater and the aspirins, Manchette's novels,"
[..]
"the correspondence with the Strugatski brothers, in a folder under S in the file cabinet" - p 71
The Strugatski Brothers! They're in my 'pantheon' of great SF writers: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/ReviewerSF.html .
"One and a half yards from the entrance he stopped in front of a bookcase of Latin American literature when he saw Soriano's There Will Be No More Pain or Forgetting. A book he'd been looking for for years. Beside it, The Compañeros by Rolo Díez, just out, a novel they talked about in Mexico City, about the last years of the Argentine madness and the guerilla movement. He went on browsing, squatting before the bookshelves. He had forgotten why he was there." - p 109
That wd be Osvaldo Soriano (1943-1997), an Argentinian writer. I just ordered his Winter Quarters: A Novel of Argentina & A Funny Dirty Little War in English & Díez's Tequila Blue in English — the point being, obviously, learn from those who know.
"The novel continues. It is a novel about tattoos. Its characters are a commander of the judicial police who has a tattoo on his ass that says: Who arrives here does not leave alive; also a North American who has a tiny rose on her forearm with the phrase Loneliness is the heart of life. Also, so it won't be too easy, an albino gunman who has a plumed serpent tattooed on his left arm.
"As you will see, the novel appears to belong to Vázquez Montalbán and not to me." - p168
The reference being to Montalbán's novel Tattoo wch I've read a reviewed here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2570126786 . For that matter, you might as well go to my Tattoos website: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Tattoos.html .
The basic plot is that the main character is a crime fiction writer who's asked to be the chief of police in a town where the politics are successfully 'progressive' enuf for the forces-that-be who're opposed to such progressiveness to try to undermine it. Hence, previous sympathetic chiefs have been murdered.
At the same time that this new police chief takes the job seriously & conducts actual investigations he's also a bit flip about aspects of it.
""Do I get a sheriff's badge?" he asked his second-in-command.
""The truth is, I never asked. They do give ID."
""Without a badge, I feel half out of uniform," said José Daniel, stopping at a toy stand. He picked through the buttons: there were Snoopys, ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE, Che Guevara, the Sandinista Front, Rafael and Rocio Durcal. He chose one that showed Spiderman in a posture of challenge." - pp 19-20
Armed w/ a Spiderman badge, he's sure to get out of sticky situations.
""Serious as in do people kill? Yes, they kill, and to tell you the truth, I don't like it. I don't like it when they kill in cold blood. I don't like it when they let fear loose in the streets. This was the land of the bosses, sir, a company town; here they beat you up for breathing, and even more for smiling. There's a lot of bastards running around loose - - - A lot of fucking bastards running around loose. And they don't like what we're doing."
""And what are we doing?" said José Daniel, staring at the assistant chief of his yet-unseen police force of his still half-guessed-at city.
""Popular power, my good man. What kind of a fucking question is that, excuse me? Do you think you could be chief of police of a PRI town?"" - pp 21-22
So there you have it. Turning a decteive story novelist into a police chief & having him be the hero in an adversarial former-company-town environment is a very interesting premise for a novel IMO.
The writer character inflects his behaviour w/ literary & filmic references.
""Are you speaking to the assistant police chief of Santa Ana?" asked José Daniel in full drag, changing from Bogart into Clint Eastwood and pointing a finger at the suited man's belly. "You are obstructing a police inquiry.""
[..]
""Look here, the big honcho of the CTM*, neither more nor less," said Blind Man, pointing to a fat man in a blue shirt standing in front of the door.
""Are you in line for the women's bathroom, sir?" asked José Daniel, doing a Lew Archer with a light touch of Woody Allen."
"*Federation of Mexican Workers, a yellow union." - p 23
""Who locked you up, ladies?" asked José Daniel.
""Domínguez, the owner."
""Him, Domínguez, and the yellow leader of the CTM, Martin Guerra, that revolting fathead."
""None of that now," threatened the fathead.
""To jail with the two of them, Blind Man," said José Daniel. "Accused of kidnapping. We'll indict them right now."" - p 24
Ha ha! If only! The writer-turned-policeman pursues 2 of the town's corrupt bosses for his 1st arrest b/c they were trying to intimidate employees out of labor organizing. Ahhhh.. Here's another sample villain:
"Number three, all agree, and numbers one and two on certain anonymous lists, Manuel Reyna, Blackie. A hired gun who runs the shock troops of the PRI in Santa Ana. Responds directly to the will of the state capital, doesn't treat with the local powers. Everyone says it was he who fired on the April 20 demonstration with a machine gun from the church tower. Someone told me that before being a gunman he sold agricultural equipment. They call him Blackie because he's an albino. Good to know that. Better to notice him from afar." - p 43
A prostitute in the employ of a local boss attempts to compromise the new police chief. He ejects her from his room & pulls an act of poetic justice:
""Greñas? . . . Do you know where Don Sabás lives? . . . There's a naked woman in the hallway of my hotel, a whore whom I believe is named Maria. Arrest her on morals charges, and take her to Don Sabás . . . That's what I said . . . Are you married? . . . Better yet . . . Take her to the front door and tell them that the chief of poilce ordered she be delivered there, because the lady gave that as her address . . . Exactly."" - p 62
Beautiful.
It seems that almost everything I chose to comment on in this novel is a literary reference:
""My neighbor stands up at night when he thinks that nobody sees him," said the voice on the phone. José Daniel does not need to ask who was its owner. He reacted as a character out of Earl Derr Biggers.
""What else can you tell me, Mrs. Ling?"" - p 182
Earl Derr Biggers being, of course, the author of the Charlie Chan novels. Not only have I made a movie about the use of yellowface by Warner Oland in Charlie Chan movies ( https://youtu.be/XMP8mU1OfSY ) I've also reviewed Yunte Huang's analysis of the Charlie Chan phenomena: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1158289-charlie-biggers-huang?chapter=1 .
Read on!!
Paco Ignacio Taibo II's Four Hands
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - September 15-19, 2019
FULL REVIEW: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1146194-taibo
I haven't gotten tired of praising Taibo yet. Reading his work is almost like reading the work of Philip K. Dick when I 1st started reading his work in 1984 & ended up reading almost a bk by him per wk for the entire yr — in other words, the Taibos are engrossing. I am immediately interested & I read them quickly. This particular Taibo bk is actually 'signed' — whether the signature is authentic or not I wdn't know but it's got 'PIRII/94" written on the title page.
Ya just never know what juicy thing Taibo'll dream up next. In this case, it's Stan Laurel wtinessing the assassination of a major Mexican revolutionary.
""They killed Pancho Villa!" he screamed.
"The scream broke Stan's trance and he managed to lift the gin to his lips. He emptied the bottle. It was 8:02 in the morning, July 20, 1923." - p 6
The inter-related narratives include an American named "Alex" who runs a branch of the secret police called the "SD". Their nefarious purpose being a particularly nasty mixture of assassination & disruption & character assassination thru disinformation. Taibo depicts him as diabolically conscience-free. An E. Howard Hunt sort, perhaps. I wonder if Taibo ever read any of Hunt's crime fiction novels?
"Alex is just inches from clinical paranoid schizophrenia. If the psychiatrist continues to question this diagnosis, Alex himself doesn't have a shadow of a doubt, he's completely convinced of his absolute insanity. But as long as they'll let him, he'll keep running the SD, owner and master, omnipotent czar, ruler of strange destinies. And it doesn't bother him to play God in an office that one enters through a hat boutique, a ladies' room, a cleaning closet, a service elevator, a fire escape stairwell, a window and the boss's desk. Actually, he loves it. This is his idea of heavenly bureaucracy." - p 12
Note that the translator, Laura C. Dail, writes " ladies' ", not adding an "s" after the apostrophe for the possessive of a word ending in "s", but writes " boss's ", adding an "s" after the apostrophe for the possessive of a word ending in "s". TAKE THAT, RULE-MONGERERS!! Otherwise note that this extreme villain is referred to by his 1st name, almost as if he's a personal friend, uncomfortably practically making him family despite the extremity of his socipathic behavior.
"On the night of the fifth or sixth of February, 1926, unknown intruders entered the Pantheon in Parral, profaning the tomb of the caudillo of the Agrarian Revolution of the North, slashed off the head of the cadaver and stole it. The affair caused rivers of ink to run in the North American press, since the United States continued to feed the myth of the fierce bandit who had dared in 1916 to attack the town of Columbus, in New Mexico, accomplishing the only foreign invasion in the history of modern North America. The Los Angeles papers devoted a large space to Villa and the pursuit of him. Mexican rumors rapidly crossed the border, placing the missing head one day in the hands of the widow of a rich rancher whom Villa had assassinated, another day a circus had it and was touring Texas exhibiting the remains, then it was in the hands of a group of fugitive lunatics from a mental asylum in Chihuahua, after that it was the illicit property of an Oklahoma spinster who had been in love with the Mexican military genius and who had commissioned a band of professional thieves from San Francisco to steal it." - p 15
Now, I shd point out that I deserve a fucking medal for quoting that last passage b/c I found Pancho Vila's head flattened like a flower between the pages where that passage appears & it was a mess, I'll tell you what!!. Maybe that's why Taibo signed this copy.
"Pancho Villa’s coffin had been dug up during the night and his body mutilated. Amparan was reluctant to report the desecration to the municipal authorities because Villa’s body had been decapitated and the head was missing." - https://www.theyucatantimes.com/2018/11/the-beheading-of-pancho-villa-92-years-o...
But what about John Dillinger's penis?
"One of the more bizarre celebrity legends is the claim that notorious bank robber John Dillinger was not only the proud possessor of an unusually large penis, but that this portion of his anatomy was removed post-mortem and put on display at one of the Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C. (Some versions state that the receiving institution was not the Smithsonian but the Armed Forces Medical Museum, which is on the grounds of the Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington.) That the Smithsonian denies having (or ever having had) this piece of classic Americana in their collection is part of the game, of course. (An auxiliary portion of the legend is that Smithsonian docents, upon being asked where Mr. Dillinger’s organ can be found, will not deny its presence in the collection but will fabricate an excuse as to why it is not currently on display.)
"How and when this rumor got started is unknown. No documentary evidence indicates that Dillinger was renowned for either his sexual prowess or his possession of a prodigious member during his lifetime." - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/penal-institution/
You know the infamous SPK video where they show a corpse's head being held in a hand that's making it perform fellatio on a corpse's erect male member? Was that Pancho Villa & John Dillinger? Does the slang term "Deadhead" have anything to do w/ this?
"And to this astonishing information, one can add some of the legendary stories transmitted by the cultured natives in the Jesuit missions who say "the invisible people," "the big men" lived crazily following some insane reasoning, and practiced free sex in their ceremonies, later returning to normalcy, and they did not have chiefs, nor did they engage in war, nor did they have Gods or permanent homes (Cabrera, 147, 190-198, 212). - p 27
Wha?! Having just plopped that down in front of you w/o context it's only fair to add:
"Lydia Cabrera (May 20, 1899 in Havana, Cuba – September 19, 1991 in Miami, Florida) was a Cuban independent ethnographer.
"Cabrera was a Cuban writer and literary activist. She was an authority on Santería and other Afro-Cuban religions. During her lifetime she published over one hundred books; little of her work is available in English. Her most important book is El Monte (Spanish: "The Wilderness"), which was the first major ethnographic study of Afro-Cuban traditions, herbalism and religion. First published in 1954, the book became a "textbook" for those who practice Lukumi (orisha religion originating from the Yoruba and neighboring ethnic groups) and Palo Monte (a central African faith) both religions reaching the Caribbean through African slaves. Her papers and research materials were donated to the Cuban Heritage Collection - the largest repository of materials on or about Cuba located outside of Cuba - forming part of the library of the University of Miami. A section in Guillermo Cabrera Infante's book Tres Tigres Tristes is written under Lydia Cabrera's name, in a comical rendition of her literary voice. She was one of the first writers to recognize and sensitively publish on the richness of Afro-Cuban culture and religion. She made valuable contributions in the areas of literature, anthropology, art, ethnomusicology, and ethnology." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Cabrera
Cool, huh?! Aren't you glad I told you about her? Don't you want to just find & read one of her bks now ASAP?! But back to Alex & the SD:
"That's why Alex's idea was interesting. In the beginning it would be enough to saturate the enemy machinery with abundant disinformation and then offer the poor misguided a providential exit." - pp 34-35
"The members of the original SD didn't even know they belonged to an organization with a strange name, and the officials who had authorized its existence didn't have the slightest idea that the operative unit they had approved was known by Alex as the Shit Department (SD)." - p 35
Now, if one were using the SD as a generalized example one might say "Take a Shit Department..".
"Fats had compiled more interesting material, which we could use to fill a good historical piece on the Revolution of the Carnations of April for which Madrid's Historia 16 had already offered by phone." - p 39
An interesting thing about reading multiple bks 'at the same time' (not actually simultaneously but alternating w/ each other) is the way synchronicities can occur. I wdn't've known what the Revolution of the Carnations of April meant if I hadn't just read about it in Scott MacDonald's Avant-Doc — specifically the interview w/ Portuguese moviemaker Susana de Sousa Dias.
"Susana de Sousa Diaz's experience of the fall of the Salazar regime in 1974 when she was 12 years old helped to create a fascination with the nature of the Portuguese experience during the decades before the Carnation Revolution freed the nation from forty-eight years of dictatorship." - p 266, Avant-Doc
"On December third of '75, Alex returned to New York from Lisbon on a Pan Am flight just hours before Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho and the military officers of COPCON, the extreme left of the Movimiento de la Fuerzas Armadas, had been arrested, accused of implication in the preparation of a military coup." - p 43
"Otelo Nuno Romão Saraiva de Carvalho, GCL (Portuguese pronunciation: [ɔˈtɛlu sɐˈɾajvɐ dɨ kɐɾˈvaʎu]; born 31 August 1936), is a retired Portuguese military officer. He was the chief strategist of the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Lisbon. After the Revolution, Otelo assumed leadership roles in the first Portuguese Provisional Governments, alongside Vasco Gonçalves and Francisco da Costa Gomes, and as the head of military defense force COPCON."
[..]
"On 25 November 1975, a military radical left-wing coup was attempted, made up of members of the MFA, the Portuguese Army Commandos, and COPCON under the leadership of Otelo. The coup, orchestrated by Otelo, failed to take control of the Portuguese government. As a result of the coup, Otelo was imprisoned, COPCON was disbanded, and António Ramalho Eanes rose to power. As punishment for participation in the coup, Otelo was imprisoned for three months." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otelo_Saraiva_de_Carvalho
I've assumed that Alex & the SD were fictional characters used to explain US government dirty tricks. I looked superficially online to see if I cd find an "alex sd" but didn't. I then turned to a bk I have called Secret Police (1981) by Thomas Plate & Andrea Darvi. I found an "SD" based in Haiti & an "SDB" based in Yugoslavia but nothing for the US. Despite this, it seems relevant to quote the following:
"However, certain internal-security practices common to a SAVAK or a DINA have been adopted in the United States. Those aspects include extensive surveillance of political activity—in particular, although not exclusively, of the Left, and considerable counterintelligence penetration of left-wing groups, including the employment of agent-provocateur techniques.
"In order to achieve a high degree of political surveillance, the United States system of surveillance has operated in a highly decentralized, and to an important degree, unorganized fashion. This disorganization and decentralization derives from the complex political organization of the republic itself, as it operates on at least five levels: federal, state, county, city, and private corporate.
"The federal component of this sytem has included Army Intelligence; the CIA (which is prohibited in theory, but not in reality, from domestic spying); the FBI (practicing the classic variety of surveillance techniques, including surreptitious entry, penetration by informants, and electronic eavesdropping, as well as the usual agent-provocateur and disinformation measures); and the NSA (National Security Agency), with the technological ability to tap telephone conversations and other electronic communications. For a time, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency was a potentially active member of this system, but the Watergate revelations, which resulted in the resignation of President Nixon, curbed that development. At times, other agencies in the mammoth federal government have plugged into this informally organized intelligence system. For instance, in 1967, the Community Relations Service, in theory set up by the 1964 Civil Rights Act to mediate and conciliate racial disputes, was authorized to spy on militant black, antiwar, and radical protest groups."
- p 294, Secret Police — The Inside Story of a Network of Terror
Now, that bk was published in 1981 & Four Hands was copyrighted in 1990 so it's not too far-fetched to think that Taibo might've been influenced by this type of information in creating the Alex character & his SD. Now, imagine how much the US secret police state may've developed since then, since 9/11, & since the various horrible presidents (wch I include Obama in). I recently read Kim Stanley Robinson's Green Earth (2005/2015) in wch a character is surveilled by a US 'intelligence' organization similar to Taibo's SD in its slippery peripheralness. In the novel, Robinson presents the various groups that surreptitiously keep track of American citizens. Here's his list followed by an addition from this here reviewer:
""The Air Intelligence Agency. Army Intelligence and Security Command. Central Intelligence Agency. National Clandestine Service. Coast Guard Intelligence. Defense Intelligence Agency. Office of Intelligence, Department of Energy (really?). Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Department of State. Office of Intelligence Support, Department of the Treasury. National Security Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate. Marine Corps Intelligence Activity. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. National Intelligence Council. National Reconnaissance Office. National Security Agency. Office of Naval Intelligence. United States Secret Service.
""The Covert Action Staff. The Department of Homeland Security, Office of Intelligence and Analysis. The Directorate of Operations. Drug Enforcement Administration. Office of National Security Intelligence.
""The United States Intelligence Community (a cooperative federation).
FULL REVIEW: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1146194-taibo
Paco Ignacio Taibo II's The Shadow of the Shadow
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 17, 2019
I can't really praise Paco Ignacio Taibo II's novels enough. They're always politically educational & a 'good read' in the usual engrossing sense.
"He liked the Secret Policemen's Marching Band the best and after that the Mexico City Police Corps Orchestra which, in the time of Police Chief Ramirez Garrido, had learned to play the Internationale with such enthusiasm that it became a regular practice number for them and they would play it when tuning up before their concerts." - p 9
According to typical Taibo fashion, there must really be a Mexican police band that plays the Internationale. That, of course, is a remarkable indicator of Mexican culture.
The 4 friends who populate this novel, whose experiences I've been delighted to read about in other Taibo novels, include a lawyer:
"Or better yet, there's still my translation into Spanish of the great anarchist writer Enrico Malatesta. The proof is in the pudding, as they say. I can still see my Uncle Ernesto foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog when I put a signed and dedicated copy in front of him on the desk. I remember reading out loud to him in a honeyed voice where it says: "The enemy is not he who is born beyond our borders, nor he who speaks a language different than our own, but he who, without any right, seeks to strip away the liberty and independence of others."" - p 21
Indeed. & the censors on the internet, such as those on YouTube, wd be well-advised to consider that.
""As for me, I'm starting to believe less and less in coincidence all the time," said the poet. "First someone kills the damn trombonist, then Manterola here watches the trombonist's brother fall out of a window, and now you get this invitation to the widow's house."" - p 41
Taibo is an expert at tying loose ends together.
"The Chinaman pictured the face of Gómez, chief of the Mexico City gendarmerie, the mounted police, the same man who almost a year ago ordered the police attack on the strikers at the Palacio de Hierro Department Store. The same Gómez who ordered his troops to fire on the militant railroad workers. The black beast, the arch-enemy of the anarcho-syndicalists in the Valley of Mexico." - p 48
Right after the Mexican Revolution, there must've been at least some sympathy for revolutionaries amongst whatever form the revolution put the police in. But by the time of this novel, roughly 70 yrs later, the police had presumably reverted to being thugs for the rich. In other words, the revolution shook things up but when things settled there was entirely too much Business as Usual again.
"THE ANARCHISTS' BALL
"They closed off Rosario Street, parking a car at one end and camouflaging it with a few clay flower pots for appearances' sake. Then they fenced off the other end of the block and set up a security team, revolvers showing in the men's back pockets. Banners hung on the walls with the emblems of the CGT (General Workers Confederation) and the Textile Federation. Security wore red arm bands, the reception committee wore green ones." - p 56
As an anarchist, I loved this description. The novel was written in 1986. I didn't know of such events until I was exposed to them as Take Back the Street, probably in the late 1990s. The 1st one I participated in was in Adelaide, Australia on March 25, 2000. See this movie starting at minute 40:14: https://archive.org/details/1stNonExistentInternationalNeoistApartmentFestivalIn... . Note that even w/ police presence the street event continued unabated & there was no gun violence or any other violence that I'm aware of. The remarkably peaceful & astonishingly tolerant behavior of the Australian police wd be well-emulated in other places.
One thing a good writer might do is toss a speech strangeness into a situation to make the whole thing even stranger still:
""Look into my eyeth," Celeste ordered the poet. "Look deep into my eyeth. You will thee a lake, the blue thea."
"But the widow Margarita's eyes were violet and her skin under her white blouse was even whiter still.
""Ale you sule?"
""A thtitl, calm othean of blue water, with jutht the thofy rocking of the waveth."" - p 89
Having a hypnotist w/ harmful ulterior motives also have a lisp is a nice unexpected touch. Then there's the Chinaman, one of the 4 friends, who was really born in Mexico, but who speaks w/ "l"s substituted for "r"s anyway. He strategizes a way to trick the strike-breakers:
""Let's tuln the tables on them, what do you say? You go tell the colonel that we'le going to open the dool to the mill, and me and the compañeols'll head over to the house where Donadieu's got his scabs and we'll cut them off befole they evel get hele."" - p 93
The poet partially makes his living by writing ad copy:
"["]Best tire in Mexico. Fits every car, every make, every model, good for all. Pelzer model 96-C. We call it THE ONLY ONE."
""The only one?"
""THE ONLY ONE."
""Okay. So what's the deal? Does it cost less, last longer?"
""No, costs more, lasts less. But very good tire, excellent tire.["]" - p 103
So the poet, full of integrity will still write lies & seductive come-ons for capitalism. We're not talking purism here.
"["]But that gentleman over there says he wants to talk to you."
"Manterola followed the bartender's pointing finger and found himself contemplating an elegantly dressed officer, his military jacket and pants impeccably pressed, his stripes shining in the dim light. It was the same man he'd known only a week earlier in the form of a comatose hod carrier." - p 164
The "comatose hod carrier" was the officer in disguise in a bed adjacent to Manterola in a hospital.
"After leaving the union meeting at the Providencia mill, Tomás and San Vicente walked together through the back streets of San Angel. The Chinaman had found a hiding place for himself, Rosa, and San Vicente in a coal yard run cooperatively by a couple of his anarchist friends blacklisted in the local mills." - p 192
Just as the officer appears in a bed, disguised, & then reappears in a later chapter in uniform, San Vicente also appears in Taibo II's Just Passing Through (also 1986) (see my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1087722-sebasti-n-san-vicente ). In the "After the Novel" section Taibo explains:
"Sebastian San Vicente was deported a second time in 1923, following his participation in the heroic streetcar strike. I compiled his brief Mexican biography in Memoria Roja, and again, in novelized form in De Paso (Just Passing Through). It appears that he died years later fighting in the anarchist ranks against the fascists in Spain." - p 231
Oil is POWER in more ways than one:
"Gómez held his hand out to the senator, then saluted the oil barons. He clicked his heels once for Standard Oil of New Jersey, representing a third of all Mexican oil operations, then again for the owner and namesake of Sinclair Oil, and once more for the men from Huasteca Petroleum. With these three brief gestures, he offered up his reverence to what amounted to 30 percent of the entire income of the Mexican treasury" - p 199
But back to the "After the Novel" section:
"The anarcho-syndicalists based in the south of Mexico City won the strike described in this book—and many more, until 1926 when they started to feel the effects of the repression unleashed by the government of President Calles." - p 231
Back to my earlier speculation: "Right after the Mexican Revolution, there must've been at least some sympathy for revolutionaries amongst whatever form the revolution put the police in." If the revolution took place from 1910 to 1920 maybe the positive aftermath of the revolution only lasted from 1920 to 1926.
I highly recommend this author. Consider this:
"PIT II recently collaborated—to international fanfare—with the notorious Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista Revolutionary Army to resurrect Shayne as hero in the novel The Uncomfortable Dead (Akashic Books)." - p 234
THAT I'd like to read.
Paco Ignacio Taibo II's Return to the Same City
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 28, 2016
Yeah, my full review was too long for here so go to "Return to the Same Old Shit" for its full glory: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/456816-return-to-the-same-old-shit
I was looking for work by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán at the library for a friend of mine to get out. The library worker who was helping us recommended Taibo. I got the impression that Taibo was 'old', maybe early 20th century - but, then, the library guy was young so somebody who wrote before he was born might've seemed 'old' to him - or maybe I just misunderstood.
Anyway, the library worker got me interested. I love Montalbán's writing b/c it's very politically informed & I was told that Taibo was much the same. SO, I started looking for Taibo in used bookstores & I cdn't find anything by him anywhere. I started thinking they might be old hardbacks, out-of-print, not likely to be reprinted. THEN I found this: a mass market paperback, originally copyrighted 1989, translated English edition published in 1997, really not that 'old' at all. As it turns out, the guy's only 4 & 1/2 yrs older than me. The librarian was dead on, tho, Taibo's about as close to Montalbán as I cd hope for, a truly excellent political mystery writer.
The detective hero had been killed off in the last bk featuring him. "A Note from the Author" 'explains':
"Don't ask me when and how Héctor Belascoarán Shayne came back to life. I don't have an answer. I remember that on the last page of No Happy Ending rain was falling over his perforated body.
"His appearance in these pages is therefore an act of magic. White magic perhaps, but magic that is irrational and disrespectful toward the occupation of writing a mystery series."
The character, apparently resurrected, is not exactly in a hurry to jump back into risking his life again:
"The phone rang again.
""Could we meet?" asked the woman with the Peruvian? Bolivian? Chilean? Mexican? accent.
""Do we know each other?"
""I do, yes, I know you a little."
""What kind of bra do you wear?"
""Why?"
""No, nothing. It was to see if we knew each other." Héctor said, playing with the knife. "I now see that we don't."
"He hung up again". - p 8
He avoids the job over & over again. He also thinks of Cortázar, thusly endearing himself to me. This is a philosophical detective.. &/or writer.
"Elisa had once read aloud something Cortázar wrote about the train station in New Delhi and the sensation he'd been filled with—that you cannot cohabitate with certain dark regions of this world without becoming a little cynical, turning into a real son of a bitch" - p 10
Sometimes it's easy to tell wch generation a person has grown up in. My parents, born in the mid-1920s were 'conservative' in almost every way. A generation born in the mid 1940s might have been more exposed to consciousness-expansion drugs, might be more comfortable w/ rock'r'roll morés. A generation born in the 1960s might take graffiti a bit more for granted as socially acceptable:
""I paint on top of their paintings. I go out at night with my spray can and paint over theirs. It's war."
""But what do you paint?"
"Punks are Strawberries, Long Live Enver Hoxha, or Che Guevara Lives, He's a Living Ghost, Be Careful Assholes, He Lives in the Neighborhood, or Sex Punks Were Born With a Silver Spoon in Their Mouths, or If a Dog Falls in the Water, Kick Him Until He Dies. Some come out too long, they're not effective" - p 13
The messages here strike me as mostly ambiguous, They're probably full of references I don't get. I assume that "Punks" refers to the same subculture in Mexico as it wd in the US. I assume that "Strawberries" is a derogatory term so I look it up:
"Fresa (Spanish for strawberry) is a slang social term used in Mexico and some parts of Latin America to describe a cultural stereotype of white spanish superficial youngsters who, by the traditional definition of the word, came from a high class and educated family and nobility. The word was originally used by teenagers and young adults alike. Nowadays, its use has spread to all age groups. Lower class meztisas are often called "NACAS" who are heavily mixed with Natives of the area.
"The term fresa may be considered synonymous with the term "preppy" which originated in the United States in the 1960s to define teenagers with a conservative mentality, who did not drink and proudly displayed their social status. In Mexico, during the 1970s, the meaning changed and became a term to describe the lifestyles of the youth who were wealthy and well-known.
"However, the current usage of the term in Mexico has its origins in the late 1980s. During the rapid change in society as a result of globalization, which brought new forms of fashion, food and entertainment into the culture, a number of Mexican people began to adopt the "preppy" American lifestyle by mimicking American styles of dress, mannerisms and etiquette. Some examples include wearing polo shirts, boat shoes and chinos. The colloquialisms used by fresas is often referred to as "fresa talk"."
Now, "Punks" may still refer to the same subculture that it does in the US & the palimpsest graffitist might be saying that the punks are really preppies. That certainly wdn't've been the case in the punk culture I was around in BalTimOre in the late 1970s & early 1980s where most of the people were working class or lower middle class.
As for "If a Dog Falls in the Water, Kick Him Until He Dies": taken literally, it's pretty mean, taken metaphorically, it's also pretty mean. I don't think I understand the cultural reference.
"he walked over to the record player and put on Silvio Rodríguez's latest. Side A, track three." - p 20
Ok, I'm sure that I have a Rodríguez CD so I was proud of myself but I just went looking for it twice & didn't find it so now I'm disappointed in myself. Anyway, if this bk is supposedly taking place around 1987 the record in question might be "Árboles" made w/ Roy Brown & Afrocuba & the song might be "Mujer poetisa" (wch might mean "woman poet" or "poetess woman").
Héctor holds off on taking the job until given the right incentive:
"The elevator creaked up to the office as Héctor was trying uselessly to recover the last year of his life. The elevator door opened before it should have. Alicia gave hima lavish smile and entered without his being able to stop her. She pushed the 6th floor button.
""Alicia, remember?" she said.
""No, I'm not Alicia. I'm a retiree going to the third floor. More than two floors of stoppage against my will can technically be considered an abduction," he said and looked down at the elevator floor.
""Damn it," the woman said.
"Héctor looked at her.
"Alicia was wearing a sweater and black wool pants. She grabbed her sweater at the waist and slowly lifted it to expose here breasts to the open air. She wasn't wearing a bra. They were bigger than they suggested when covered. Pointed, with pink nipples.
""It's true, one is bigger than the other . . . In addition to the abduction, rape . . ."
"She put her sweater back where it belonged. Héctor felt dejected. It was like wearing a muzzle. Didn't they say the mouth was faster than the brain? The door opened onto the sixth floor. Defeated, Alicia pressed the third floor.
""It's okay, I give up," Héctor said. "I'm listening."" - p 24
The case is ostensibly about a husband who drives a wife to suicide:
"That guy would get high and turn red from all the shit he put up his nose, injected into his veins, and then he'd think himself a man and his dick wouldn't work for shit. How could foolish Elena go and marry a wretch like that? My sister was naive, she was an absolute idiot. Because the guy was handsome. Luke Estrella, the handsome rumba dancer, the charmer." - p 28
Seems realistic to me. So the ostensible sister of the ostensible wife wants revenge:
"You've got to fuck him up, for me. He's coming to Mexico next week. I'm sure, he's arriving on Pan Am's Thursday night flight. Pan Am from New York. I work for an airline and I asked all my friends to tell me if his name came up on the computer. He's got a reservation to come to Mexico on Thursday and no doubt he's going to pull some kind of shit, because that's the only thing he knows how to do. Up there in Miami, he was always involved in strange things, in drugs, I think, and that shit, with the Cuban mafia in Miami, the gusanos, the guys who owned the neighborhood." - p 29
Again, seems realistic to me. I remember a coke head bragging to me that he'd deliberately spill coke on the floor to watch the "coke whores" crawl around w/ their asses in the air to snort it. As for the Cuban mafia? The Cuban revolution was sensible enuf to evict them from the country, the US was idiotic enuf to import them as 'assets'.
"He had read in a novel that a paranoid could be defined as a Mexico City citizen with an acute perception of reality and an abundance of common sense." - p 43
I remember William S. Burroughs referring to "practical paranoia", a paranoia that recognizes that the most incredibly fucked-up things can, & do, happen.
Taibo has referenced Cortázar & Hammett already & now:
"In his decalogue on mystery novels, Chandler forgot to prohibit detectives from getting metaphysical" - p 45
3 of my favorite novelists. He never does reference Montalbán tho so I have to wonder about that. Taibo doesn't prohibit his detective from being foolish:
"Héctor thought about the distance. He needed to back off. He'd approached Estrella twice. A one-eyed man is exceedingly visible, like a brand of cola on a television ad, you always get the feeling you've seen him before. The only thing he was missing was a fluorescent T-shirt and a couple of rumba dancers hanging off his arm. He would have to get the glass eye out of the dresser drawer, he would have to put on a no-man's face, he'd have to dress like a lamppost, anonymous, like an ad for something out of style, he would have to follow Estrella from a distance if he wanted to fuck him." - p 46
"Luke Estrella moved through Mexico City without much hesitancy, including knowing a few codes that are usually reserved for natives and denied to tourists, like not hailing the taxi in front of the hotel, but walking a couple of blocks and stopping one as it passed, which would certainly be cheaper; like wrapping your big bills inside smaller ones; like you don't need coins for the public phones because even though the instructions order you to insert one, after the earthquake the phone company disconnected the payment system due to the emergency system and it's still that way." - pp 49-50
What a remarkably effective passage. Taibo explains so much w/ such concision.
"On this day" [ September 19] "in 1985, a powerful earthquake strikes Mexico City and leaves 10,000 people dead, 30,000 injured and thousands more homeless." - http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/earthquake-shakes-mexico-city
The detective crosses paths w/ an investigative reporter. Like Montalbán, Taibo's writing is peppered w/ political references that must seem pretty opaque to underinformed readers:
"There's still a third rule. The interesting one is the one whose name is not mentioned, the one they tell you isn't important, the one your usual sources seem to ignore.
"Gary Betancourt fit the three rules, one after another. He appeared casually as a second reference while I was investigating the assassination of Olaf Palme. No big deal, a very secondary mention in a newsletter of the Swedish groups in solidarity with Central America, mentioning that the Cuban had tried to infiltrate them. They used that name, Gary Betancourt. I didn't give a shit about the story, I was trying to establish connections between the assassins of Orlando Letelier and those of Palme." - pp 59-60
Orlando Letelier is someone I've heard of, I wasn't familiar w/ Olaf Palme so I decided to check online to see if he's a fictional character inserted into a context of real politically-motivated murders:
"Olof Palme, Prime Minister of Sweden, was assassinated on 28 February 1986 in Stockholm, Sweden, at 23:21 hours Central European Time (22:21 UTC). Palme was fatally wounded by a single gunshot while walking home from a cinema with his wife Lisbet Palme on the central Stockholm street Sveavägen. Mrs Palme was slightly wounded by a second shot. The couple did not have bodyguards at the time.
"Although more than 130 people have confessed to the murder, the case remains unsolved" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Olof_Palme
About Letelier a bk entitled The CIA's Greatest Hits by Mark Zepezauer & published by Odonian Preess has this to say:
""Are you the wife of Orlando Letelier?" asked the anonymous caller, "Yes," she answered. "No," the caller said, "you are his widow."
"A week later, on September 21, 1976, the exiled Chilean diplomat and prominent critic of the CIA-backed Pinochet regime" [..] "was torn to pieces by a car bomb on the streets of Washington DC. Also killed was Letelier's American aide, Ronni Moffit. Her husband, blown clear of the car, immediately began shouting that Chilean fascists were responsible for the atrocity.
"He was right, but those fascists had powerful allies in Washington. An FBI informant knew of the plot to assassinate Litelier before the fact but the FBI did nothing to protect him. After the combing, CIA Director George Bush told the FBI that there'd been no Chilean involvement whatsoever." - pp 56-57
There's even a bk entitled Assassination on Embassy Row by John Dinges & Saul Landau (Pantheon Books, 1980). Landau has been somewhat well-known to me as a primary exposer of CIA dirty tricks in Latin America. One of many people mentioned in Assassination on Embassy Row is Orlando Bosch, a terrorist mass-murderer apparently so highly favored by Bush Senior's administration that one of his parting acts from the presidency was to pardon Bosch who was released from a US prison & allowed to live in Florida to the ripe old age of 84:
"Orlando Bosch Ávila (18 August 1926 – 27 April 2011) was a Cuban exile, former Central Intelligence Agency-backed operative, and head of Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations, which the FBI has described as "an anti-Castro terrorist umbrella organization". Former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh called Bosch an "unrepentant terrorist". He was accused of taking part in Operation Condor and several terrorist attacks, including the 6 October 1976 bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner in which all 73 people on board were killed, including many young members of a Cuban fencing team and five North Koreans. The bombing is alleged to have been plotted at a 1976 meeting in Washington, D.C. attended by Bosch, Luis Posada Carriles, and DINA agent Michael Townley. At the same meeting, the assassination of Chilean former minister Orlando Letelier is alleged to have been plotted. Bosch was given safe haven within the US in 1990 by President George H. W. Bush, who in 1976 as head of the CIA had declined an offer by Costa Rica to extradite Bosch." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_Bosch
"An even more dubious case than Hammer’s also reached Bush’s desk during the first year of his presidency. In 1989, prominent Cuban-Americans in Florida began agitating for the release of Orlando Bosch, a notorious anti-Castro terrorist then serving a prison term for entering the United States illegally. American intelligence and law enforcement authorities firmly believed that Bosch was responsible for far worse actions, including the 1976 explosion that brought down a Cuban airliner, killing all 76 civilians aboard, although Venezuelan prosecutors had failed to convict him of that terrible crime. There was certainly no question that Bosch was an advocate of terror and had been involved in numerous bombings.
"The Justice Department wanted to deport Bosch because, according to the FBI, he had “repeatedly expressed and demonstrated a willingness to cause indiscriminate injury and death.” Freeing Bosch at a time when Washington was condemning terrorism abroad would obviously be hard to explain — had someone asked.
"But Miami’s leading Republican contributors and politicians persistently lobbied Bush to free Bosch, insisting that the former pediatrician was really a noble freedom fighter. And in 1990, when Bosch was eventually released and permitted to reside in Florida under an extraordinary deal with the Bush Justice Department, much of the credit went to the alleged mass murderer’s best-connected White House lobbyist — a budding local politician named Jeb Bush. The Bush son who would be elected governor of Florida eight years later had, by 1990, already become wealthy in real estate and other deals with the same Cuban exile businessmen who wanted Bosch to be freed. Among Jeb’s business partners active in the Cuban-American National Foundation, the institutional advocate for Bosch, was one Armando Codina, also a regular GOP donor and activist. (Codina, however, tells Salon that he neither supported the release of Bosch, nor ever lobbied his business partner, Bush, on the issue.) According to the administration’s spokesmen, however, all those personal and financial ties were just a set of happy coincidences. Anyway, nobody in the mainstream media or on Capitol Hill got upset because the president’s son had opened prison doors for an unrepentant terrorist." - http://www.salon.com/2001/02/27/pardons_3/
Paco Ignacio Taibo II's Returning as Shadows
- by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 31, 2016
This bk is SUBSTANTIAL, therefore, my REAL REVIEW is also SUBSTANTIAL. What follows is just the beginning of that. For the FULL THING go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/467386-those-who
This is only the 2nd bk by Taibo that I've read & once again I'm very impressed. For my review of Return to the Same City go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/456816-return-to-the-same-old-shit . Most (or all?) of the odd-numbered chapters are titled "Interruptions and Invasions" & at 1st it wasn't clear to me whose voice they were written in, where they writing from, & what the significance of the numbering of the paragraphs was:
"4. A corollary (though this is not what's interesting): Fascism is filled to no end with eagles, bronze statues, plaques, and the rest of this sort of paraphernalia; its caustic symbols fill our eyes, its torchlit parades and militarized children burn our pupils. But the truly important thing here is that this plaque was invariably cleaned every morning with a buffer and, sometimes, with polish. The buffer was a "Limcream" bran, while the polish bore no mark." - p 3
The story gradually revealed itself w/ an incredible command of writerly skill. It's a bizarre one but it's even got some 'facts' mixed in w/ its 'fiction' - in fact, the 'facts' are the main well-spring. Were nazis killing the indigenous people of Chiapas in 1941?
""They're not Castilians, and they're not the ranchers. So who are they?" asked Múgica, gently pressing the issue. "You're trying to take other indigenous communities upon yourselves. If you are Tzotziles, then you're taking on Choles. Who, then, are the instigators, the ones causing the problem?"
"The envoy shook its collective head. Didn't the general understand anything?
""They're of the cross. The ones doing the killing are of the cross."" - p 22
The broken cross as it turns out. Sometimes it seems like using nazis as the bad guys is too easy but we're not talking Dean Koontz here. This is profound literature. It might seem predictable & easy too to have the nazis be disrespectful & destructive of nature but ain't that the way of things?:
"They were fast hikers, but they scorned the jungle: they didn't bury their shit, they hacked at young shrubs for no reason, they shot birds and jackrabbits for sport, and they stripped the bark from trees." - p 27
If there's a system to the numbering in the "Interruptions and Invasions" sections I never found it. I interpret it as something to make the reader feel as if we're stumbling across fragments following a logic we're never to know. Chapter 13 on p 32 begins w/ "10":
"10. Writing a novel is fundamentally and act of shamelessness. Combing one's hair is also an act of shamelessness, if only because you're trying to cover up deep scars with a thick head of hair. But this is only a minor act, whereas writing is something much more grave. It's a masking of reality, an obscuring of fears, a reinvention of things said and, ultimately, of those who said them."
Does that make this particular narrator the author of the bk? If so, as we discover who this person is, there's significance to be read into it.. While chapter 13 ends on the number 11, chapter 15 begins w/ 16 & ends w/ 17 while chapter 17 goes from 6 to 7.
"7. What do I see through the Galileico telescope fitted with 300X Zeiss lenses which they let me keep in my cell?" - p 38
At 1st I thought this particular narrator was in jail. Then an insane asylum became more likely:
"10. Casavieja relates films to me. He understands that the iron seclusion of prison deprives a man of his most important approximation of reality: the dark theater and its magical silver screen. He's told me, with a surgeon's detail, if two films that I can only describe as being superficial and nearly illiterate: the final two films of Veronica Lake.
"He also knows that I like the novels of Hammett, and so he narrates the film versions of The Glass Key and, above all, I Married a Witch." - p 46
I have a modest collection of at least 7 movies based on Hammett stories & characters wch includes The Glass Key, wch is the title of a Hammett novel. But I Married a Witch? I don't find that title in any of the novels or in the The Continental Op or The Big Knockover short story collections, the only 2 I have. SO, I look up "I Married a Witch" & discover that it was directed by René Clair & stars Veronica Lake & not written by Hammett so I misunderstood that Hammett had anything to do w/ it.
Alas, Lake only made it to 50 yrs old before her alcoholism caught up to her & killed her. I've never pd any attn to her until Taibo got me interested. Her last 2 movies were Footsteps in the Snow (1966) & Flesh Feast (1970). I cd easily fall in love w/ her but she's been dead for 43 yrs so I don't think it'll work out too well.
By p 56, "Interruptions and Invasions" has reached 1. Is the chronology jumping around? Apparently not, b/c p 66 also begins w/ 1. One might think that there's in-fighting on p 63 but it's, shucks, all in fun:
""Strange, dark, and certainly winding is the proletariat's path. You who are a populist romantic liberal and even a bit of a libertarian . . . you have to prefer the straight and narrow, right?"
""If it weren't for the fact that I like how you write, Pepe, I'd tell you to go fuck yourself. Listening to you makes me think that maybe Marxism is a step backwards in terms of political thought, a breakdown of intelligence."
""I'd better go before you decide to take your ribbons back.""
Typewriter ribbons, ie. The person sponging the ribbons is named Revueltas:
"Revueltas was a tragic figure; he came from a family of geniuses who had all died young. Manterola remembered Silvestre the musician and especially Fermin the painter, one of Mexico's greatest muralists" - p 63
For a tiny bit more about Silvestre see this webpage of mine: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/mmm058.html .
Bit by bit, the reader pieces together the plot & deduces who's who & what they're doing:
""Tomás was too much of an anarchist to ever sing on with the Communist party.""
[..]
""Verdugo disappeared. After the whole thing with his wife, he just up and vanished. Maybe five years ago."
""I read what you wrote about that. What a story."
""Verdugo was always close to tragedy. Flirting with it."
""But he's not in prison, is he?"
""Frankly, I don't know. One day I asked about him, and nobody knew anything. No word about prisons, about morgues, nothing."" - p 68
It's interesting to think that in today's world of rapid travel between very different environs that not only do diseases travel fast but so do immunities to them. It hasn;t always been this way:
"in the corner of the state of Chiapas and on the border of Guatemala, lies the region of Soconusco, isolated and unpopulated, devoid of roads and ports, forever condemned to be the periphery of the periphery.
"Here a simple virus, a flu, brought unknowingly by the conquistadors, devastated the indigenous population." - p 73
When it comes to some types of historical detail I assume that there's an attempt to have accurate background:
"Behind this miracle of coffee were thirty-two German plantations on which lived no more than three hundred German citizens and their families, the twenty-five haciendas, property of their Mexican partners, but above all the hundreds of ill-fated farmhands who lived in slavelike conditions and the thirty or forty thousand contract laborers paid in slave wages.
"The Mexican Revolution never reached this region, whose agrarian order remained intact. As far as ranch towns go, Tapachula was cosmopolitan, even European: the Castillian and French languages were used to transmit orders, originally in German, to workers who spoke the various Mayan dialects." - p 75
But let's not assume. Here's what a promotional website for one of the coffee companies of the region has to say for itself:
"It all began...
"...more than 60 years ago: In 1941 the late Don Juan C. Luttmann, an outstanding coffee producer and promoter of Mexican coffees, founded the coffee exporting company Exportadora de Café California in Tapachula, Chiapas, one of Mexico's leading coffee regions close to the Guatemalan border. Now, in their third generation, the Luttmann family's dedication to coffee has not wavered. Being a reliable partner to both farmers and roasters is still one of the most important aspects of their company's philosophy.
"In 1993 Neumann Gruppe, Germany, and the Luttmann family decided to combine their know-how, creating one of today's largest green coffee exporting companies in Mexico.
"Being a part of Neumann Kaffee Gruppe, Exportadora de Café California has benefited over the years from the expertise of the world's leading green coffee service group. The combination of a traditional and reliable business with modern risk management makes our company unique in the Mexican coffee sector.
"Exportadora de Café California plays a central part in the Mexican coffee export business with a market share of around 20%. At the same time the company is a main supplier to the local industry." - http://www.eccmexico.com/aboutus/history
&, gosh, there's no mention of slave labor or any connection between the German families & naziism. Another website does little more than describe the coffee:
"Located in the Sierra Madre de Chiapas, Turquesa, which is located in the southernmost part of the Chiapas coast extending south from the Ulapa River to the Suchiate River. The dry mill is located in the town of Tapachula, Chiapas, “between the waters.” In native Aztec Nahuatl and Tapachula it’s “between the waters” due to the area’s persistent flooding.
"This is one of those coffees that doesn’t necessarily bowl you over, but just because of that can be enjoyed without burning out on it. The prep is outstanding, and the flavor leans a little more toward nutty than our organic option which is a bit more chocolate. It’s a subtle, balanced coffee you can drink all day." - http://www.cafemuertos.com/mexico-tapachula-chiapas/
Let's see what Wikipedia has to say about Tapachula:
"About eighteen percent of the working population works in agriculture and livestock. About twenty three percent of these workers are not paid a salary." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapachula
Of course, I deliberately picked that tiny excerpt from a much longer & more balanced entry just to show something relevant to the plot of this bk & to hint at the possibility that some outrages might be intrinsic to the economic system even to this day. An article from "Counterpunch - The Fearless Voice of the American Left Since 1993" gets into substantial detail about more current-day problems of coffee workers in Mexico:
"December 15, 2004
"Migration and Coffee in Mexico and Central America
"by Luis Hernández Navarro
"Reyno Bartolo Hernández died of heatstroke in the Arizona desert near Yuma on May 22, 2001. He wasn’t the only Mexican farmer who lost his life that day trying to cross the border. Thirteen of his countrymen and -women perished along with him in one more of the migratory tragedies of modern history.
"Reyno and his companions were small coffee growers from the township of Atzalan, Veracruz. Atzalan is a formerly rich region but in recent years it has been impoverished by senseless policies. Until just a few years ago, few of its residents migrated to the United States. Then the price of coffee fell, and so did the price of citrus fruits and cattle. To make matters worse, bananas were attacked by fruit flies and the coffee crop was overcome by a devastating plant disease.
"So little by little, the inhabitants of Atzalan set out along the route blazoned by small farmers from the states of Michoacan, Zacatecas, and Jalisco decades earlier. The coffee farmers began to look for a way to cross the 3,107-kilometer border that separated them from the United States, hoping to get to “the other side.” In desperation, they hooked up with the infamous polleros, the smugglers who led them to their deaths.
"Thomas Navarrete, long-time adviser to the cooperative that many Atzalan growers belong to, notes that the crisis in the region is dramatic and tragic. In many communities, around 70% of the residents have left, most to the United States. Navarrete points out that before people didn’t need to leave their communities, at least not like now. “Even Celso Rodríguez, the president of the cooperative, left to work in Arizona,” he says.
"The border has become a magnet for these coffee growers. If they get over–and many do–they earn $4-5 an hour, compared to the less than $4 a day they earn at home, if they’re lucky. In the coffee communities, the success stories from the other side are impressive. Migrants come back and remodel their houses; they pour a new roof, replace wooden planks with concrete blocks. Everyone can see and envy the changes."
[..]
"In 1989 the economic clause setting country export quotas of the International Coffee Organization was abandoned with the strong support of the Mexican government. Immediately, the price fell through the floor. Prices have gone up and down since the quota system ended, but since 1997 they have mostly gone down.
"The only ones who win in this situation are the large companies and speculators on the commodities markets of New York and London. Coffee-growing communities, already poor, have grown poorer. As a response, thousands of farmers and laborers who cultivate and harvest the crop have decided to leave their homes permanently.
"The old migration of laborers to harvest was marked by hardship. They went to the large plantations because they had to, not by choice. There they suffered abuse, hunger, and sickness. The journey was hell.
"Indigenous peoples of the highlands remember the suffering: “We’d get an advance from the plantation so when we got there we already had a debt to pay off. Then the debt just gets bigger because the plantation doesn’t give you anything, you have to pay for everything, even food In addition to the hard work, we suffered from other things on the plantation. The boss doesn’t care about the workers–if they’re sick, it’s not his concern. So they don’t give us good food and we’re always hungry Before, the foremen mistreated workers a lot, they whipped them, beat them with branches, with belts, with the flat blade of the machete, kicked them. You got punished for anything we were afraid of the plantation but we put up with it because we were poor.” - http://www.counterpunch.org/2004/12/15/migration-and-coffee-in-mexico-and-centra...
In short, in my cursory looks online for substantiation of Taibo's history of the abuses of German immigrants perpetrated on the indigenous population I didn't find much although I'm confident it's out there somewhere. I did, however, find substantiation of reasons for understanding the more general plight of migrant workers.
Some readers might poo-poo Taibo's story as overly sensationalist, as pandering to the public's taste for the lurid, as 'too conspiracy theory' or mythological. I'm convinced it's well-researched.
"The ever-cold rabbi with stained hands began again: "In the beginning, two lunatic Austrians met, Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels and Guido von List. Proto-Templars, admirers of runes, occultists, holders of castles. Hitler met the former in 1909, when he had formed a neopagan organization to practice magic, promote anti-Semitism, defend racial purity, and dabble in esoteric cults. There was a magazine called Ad Astra which Hitler subscribed to."" - p 84
Ad Astra? Sound familiar anyone? It did to me & I was fairly sure it had something to do w/ the AAA (Association of Autonomous Astroanuts) or, perhaps, Stewart Home. SO, I looked for a magazine of that name in my personal library & didn't find it, I looked for a file card of my correspondents under that name & didn't find it, I looked for anything under that name in my AAA file &, Bingo!, Ad Astra! was/(is?) the name of "The newsletter of Raido AAA".
In The First Annual Report of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts ("Published April 23rd 1996"), Raido's mailing address was given as "BM Box 3641, London, WC1N 3XX". On my file card for Home his mailing address as of September, 1994, was given as "BM Senior, London, WC1N 3XX". So, yeah, naming a newsletter after an occult one that Hitler reputedly subscribed to is the kind of prank Stewart wd pull. After all, he repurposed the so-called "Protocols of Zion" used by nazis to defame Jews as a manifesto for something neoist related.
I'm reminded of a prank that my father told me about. Shortly after 'WWII', the Baltimore City Council was having a meeting in wch it was discussed about what to name the plaza in front of City Hall. One of the participants proposed that it be called "Albert Speer Plaza" or some such. The others present apparently didn't care what it was called & just voted in favor of the proposal w/o knowing who Speer was. Presumably, the prankster then revealed that he was the main nazi architect, imprisoned as a war criminal, & the voters retracted.
This type of esoteric dark humor is given further background in informative passages of Taibo's such as this:
"["]Dietrich Eckart intervened in the operation; he was a strange journalist, an admitted Satanist who, at the end of the war," [ie": 'WWI'] "edited a weekly magazine in Munich where he argued, among other things, that any Jew who tainted German blood through marriage should be sentenced to three years in prison and that any Jew convicted of a second offense should be executed. He was also a theater critic and would later go on to produce some of his own works, including In Old Bavaria and Springtime for Hitler."" - p 85
Sound familiar?
"Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp With Eva and Adolf at Berchtesgaden is a fictional musical in Mel Brooks' 1968 film The Producers, as well as the stage musical adaptation of the movie, and the 2005 movie adaptation of the musical. It is a musical about Adolf Hitler, written by Franz Liebkind, an unbalanced ex-Nazi played by Kenneth Mars (then by Brad Oscar and Will Ferrell in the stage musical and the 2005 film respectively).
"In the film, the play is chosen by the producer Max Bialystock and his accountant Leo Bloom in their fraudulent scheme to raise substantial funding by selling 25,000% of a play, then causing it to fail, and finally keeping all of the remaining money for themselves. To ensure that the play is a total failure, Max selects an incredibly tasteless script (which he describes as "practically a love letter to Adolf Hitler"), hires the worst director he can find (Roger DeBris, a stereotypical homosexual and transvestite caricature), and casts an out-of-control hippie named Lorenzo St. DuBois, also known by his initials "L.S.D.", in the role of Hitler (after he had wandered into the wrong theatre by mistake during the casting call -- "That's our Hitler!").
Paco Ignacio Taibo II's No Happy Ending
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 15, 2017
I'd already read Taibo's Return to the Same City in June of last year as my 1st bk by him. It picks up where this one ends, the detective hero has been murdered. SO, I knew to expect that this really wdn't have a happy ending. If I hadn't read that 1st I might've been hoping & expecting for the hero to somehow survive all the odds against him. Such foreknowledge put a weird spin on my reading experience. As I wrote in my review of Return:
"The detective hero had been killed off in the last bk featuring him. "A Note from the Author" 'explains':
"Don't ask me when and how Héctor Belascoarán Shayne came back to life. I don't have an answer. I remember that on the last page of No Happy Ending rain was falling over his perforated body.
"His appearance in these pages is therefore an act of magic. White magic perhaps, but magic that is irrational and disrespectful toward the occupation of writing a mystery series."
The character, apparently resurrected, is not exactly in a hurry to jump back into risking his life again" - https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/456816-return-to-the-same-old-shit
Anyway, this resurrection created a happy ending for the book w/o one. Good. I like happy endings. This one's happy for me for various reasons: it's short, it's easy to review. I've recently written 2 long reviews & need a break. See? Everything's happy. The beginning murder has a theatrical aspect to it:
"A Roman foot soldier sat on the toilet, staring at the tile floor, his throat slashed.
"Blood oozed slowly down the brass breastplate, over the short, pleated skirt, the hairy legs, and into one sandal. A helmet with a faded plume rested on his head. A long wooden spear leaned against the wall.
""They've gone too far this time," Héctor muttered, cautiously lifting the Roman's chin. A four-inch gash cut across his throat.
""Who?"
""The sons of bitches who killed this guy."" - p 4
That got me to thinking: Are there no other types of "Roman soldiers" other than this ancient stereotype? EG: Is there a contemporary Roman solider wearing body armor against bullets & a helmet with a face-plate & that sort of thing? Or wd that be an Italian soldier? Having the 1st victim be an atavistic one created an unexpected spin that had to be resolved. the corpses increase w/ no obvious explanation:
"And now this: two dead men and a plane ticket to New York to keep him from sticking his nose in where somebody thought it didn't belong. But if they didn't want him to get involved, then why the hell had they gone and dumped a dead Roman in his bathroom, and then sent him a photograph of this other guy?" - p 8
Detectives are like obsessive-compulsives seeking closure. They must know. That's the way they work - or, at least that's the way they work in novels. In real life they probably fake evidence just to get pd or are perfectly happy to stop investigating something if they get pd to stop, etc.. It's hard for me to believe that (m)any of these novelistic heros have ever existed. I have a friend who worked for a detective agency. His boss wd send him out to test people's phones to see if they were tapped. My friend didn't know the slightest thing about that. He'd pretend & the detective wd give the client a report that their phone wasn't tapped. Maybe that's more common. These days what do detectives do? Background checks thru some online service that they pay for?
This is one of those 'exotic character' novels where the people are unusual & that helps keep the story interesting:
"The Filipino enjoyed passing on his art, and you were a good disciple. After the course in gymnastics, you went on to karate, and from there (once again the hand of fate) to the esoteric secrets of the escape artist, magician, and daredevil. The Filipino had once worked as an assistant to an Indian contortionist, touring bars and clubs in California, and he knew some unusual and wonderful tricks. So unusual and so wonderful, in fact, that you would spend entire sleepless nights contemplating the subtleties of escape from a sealed coffin, from a straightjacket, of the dangerous motorcycle jump through a ring of fire.
"A year and a half passed in strenuous training, and then one day the Filipino disappeared." - pp 38-39
I reckon that Taibo knew he had a winner when he thought of having the novel revolve around his hero avoiding getting killed & then finally failing to do so. There're plenty of plot twists in this but that No-Happy-Ending business must've been enuf of an Ace-Up-The-Sleeve to keep this novel short & breezy. I love it when I read something that I know was inspired:
"The first shot hit the stack of papers. Thousands of words flew in all directions, leaving the smell of fresh ink in the air." - p 88
Beautiful. Instead of immediate blood & guts the reader gets "thousands of words" flying in all directions. SO, our hero investigates more & more:
"This shadowy, violent organization had shown evidence of its existence before. The first time was during the Ayotla Textile strike, when a paramilitary group appeared out of nowhere, shooting and beating the picketers before the laughing gaze of the police." - p 103
"The official explanation wrote the whole thing off as an unfortunate clash between antagonistic student groups. But then there were the photographs of the army-issue M1 rifles, and the riot police allowing the armed men to pass unopposed, and the tape recordings from the police radio frequency, over which police officers directed the Halcones' attack." - p 107
Taibo is always on the side of the strikers & protesters & against the side of the death squads & paramilitary groups. I'm w/ him there. Even tho this is fiction it does get those juices flowing in the direction of imagining the real-life counterparts.
But, WAIT!, maybe this isn't so fictional after all:
"The Corpus Christi Massacre, Corpus Christi Thursday Massacre, or El Halconazo (The hawk strike, so called because of the participation of a group of elite Mexican army soldiers known as Los Halcones) was a massacre of student demonstrators in Mexico City on June 10, 1971, the day of the Corpus Christi festival."
[..]
"Los Halcones (The hawks) was a black operations army group that was trained in the United States. The group was created in the late 1960s to repress demonstrations and prevent other large popular movements such as the student movement of 1968 from rising again. Their first attack against the students took place on October 2, 1969, a year after the Tlatelolco Massacre. Their initial duty, as told by the government to the public, which was not aware of their name nor their real purpose, was that there was going to be a police group that ensured the security of the recently inaugurated Metro. The members of Los Halcones were identified with nicknames and its members were of various backgrounds, including sports clubs, the police, and thugs for hire "porros" who were provocateurs created to counter and watch universities. After the Halconazo, the number of Los Halcones members increased exponentially in the UNAM and IPN); militaries, which were referred to with the nicknames "maestros" (teachers) or "paisanos" (countrymen). These militaries had at their command dozens of halcones, the vast majority of whom had participated in the Tlatelolco massacre, as well as gang members and criminals. The latter were released from jail under the condition that they form part of the new shock group with payment." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_Christi_massacre
Waddya know.
Yep, that's the way Taibo & his Spanish counterpart, Montalban, rolls. For me, then, these novels become political education about Mexican politics. Note that "Los Halcones (The hawks) was a black operations army group that was trained in the United States" - cd that be at Fort Benning? Our hero speaks to a friend:
""I might not be back for a few days . . . If I don't come back, I want you to have my books on the Spanish Civil War. They're on the bookshelf in the hallway. I inherited them from my father."" - p 117
That's the sort of detail I like. The author knows that these bks are important. W/o making such provisions they might just get thrown away. Knowledge lost. Other people might just cut the pages up for collages. Knowledge lost.
"Héctor, who had never exactly thought of himself as a man on a collision course with authority, saw the State as something akin to the witch's castle in Snow White, from which emerged not only the Halcones, but other things too, like his own engineering degree, or the crap you saw on television. There were no gray areas there. It was all one big infernal machine that it was best to keep as far away from as possible." - p 139
Ah, yes, the state. Trump & his billionaire cronies wd like to do away w/ aspects of it, the aspects that provide checks & balances for their greed & White Supremacism. Then again, they'd like to keep the state b/c it enables them unprecedented access to power. Funny how that works.
Usually, I try to avoid spoilers. No Happy Ending gives me an excuse to not do that for a change:
"He'd almost reached the cover of a newspaper kiosk on the corner when a shotgun blast caught him in mid-torso and lifted his torn, broken body into the air." - p 175
No Happy Ending was published in 1981. Return to the Same City was published in 1989. It only took Taibo 8 yrs to reverse the No Happy Ending. if only real life were like that.
¿No iba a moverse entre dos nostalgias paralelas?
Con Adiós, Madrid, última novela de la serie Belascoarán, concluye la saga del detective mexicano más conocido en nuestro país y el mundo.
Una gran novela policiaca en un escenario sorprendente.
—L'Express
> Défunts disparus, par Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Par Delphine PERAS, publié le 04/07/2012 à 17:00. —Chouette, une enquête inédite d'Hector Belascoaran Shayne ! Depuis Cosa facil, en 1992, on ne se lasse pas de ce détective privé mexicain borgne, jouant "l'éternel participant dans des histoires qui n'étaient pas les siennes". Celle qui l'embarque cette fois est particulièrement gratinée : il s'agit de prouver que l'instituteur et syndicaliste Medardo Rivera n'a pas tué un certain Lupe Barcenas, pour la bonne raison que… ce dernier est toujours vivant ! D'autant que, le jour du meurtre, l'assassin présumé se trouvait à 80 kilomètres de là et participait au baptême de son filleul en présence de 250 témoins. Mais des arguments aussi costauds ne suffisent pas à arrêter la machine judiciaire, kafkaïenne au dernier degré. A moins que les autorités locales aient monté le coup pour en finir avec l'activisme de l'instituteur. Reste donc à retrouver le fameux mort-vivant… Inspiré par l'authentique révolte des enseignants à Oaxaca et au Chiapas dans les années 1980, Paco Ignacio Taibo II n'a rien perdu de sa verve pour tomber à plume raccourcie sur un système politique mexicain pourri jusqu'à la moelle. On s'indigne, on s'amuse. Et on en redemande.
—L'Express
The author uses a mixture of sharp insight, humor, and keen observation into the minds of youths to create an effective backdrop that contrasts the bloody events as they unfolded.
This was not the first time we had been beaten up by the cops. It was one of the Mexican state’s demented customs to give the students a bit of stick every now and again, just to show them who was boss. The year before, police had assaulted Vocational School 7, and the 1965 Vietnam demo had been broken up with batons, wounding fifty people. I was one of them, earning myself a three-inch gash over the left eyebrow, where a plainclothesman slugged me with a metal bar rolled up in a newspaper. In Sonora, too, the year before, the army had been sent in, and all of us had heard stories of what had occurred two years earlier at Morelia University. All the same, this was different: what were they cooking up now? In the meantime, we ended that night at a christening, summing up with difficulty the events of the day but happy to find ourselves still in one piece. We showed each other our cuts and bruises. Fear, for now, was gone.
On Tuesday, blinded by their overweening arrogance, the authorities launched the army against Preparatory 1. The school’s entrance, dating to colonial times, was struck by bazooka fire; there was shooting, and hundreds of arrests. A group of students took refuge on the roof as the soldiers, with bayonets fixed, entered the courtyards of their school, where there are murals by Orozco, Revueltas, Siqueiros, and Rivera. For a time everything took on symbolic force. They had blasted the historic doorway of the preparatory to pieces. With bazookas. The famous door. But then we were beyond symbolism, thanks to the photos, which showed blood pooled amid the splintered wood.
Some words about feminism of the day, written in the 1990s:
Jaime’s daughter would grow up in a worse world. Very soon her father would be in prison. But to be a woman in ’68 was no bad thing. For thousands of sisters the times offered a chance to be equal. Sixty-eight antedated the new feminism. It was better than feminism. It was violently egalitarian—and if it wasn’t always, it always could be. One man, one woman, one vote—and one collection box, one stack of fliers, one level of risk . . . That it mattered little whether you wore a skirt or pants was a given. Being a man then was better too, because those women existed.
They were great. And gorgeous, really gorgeous. They wore their undeniable beauty without fuss—and without makeup. Any role model worth the name was supposed to be cinematographic, but in those days Anita Ekberg and Sophia Loren, even Kim Novak’s honeyed glances and Elke Sommer’s poutiness, had ceased to operate. The sixties generated its own points of reference at more than twenty-four frames per second: miniskirts, a well-thumbed Simone de Beauvoir novel dangling from the hand, fishnet stockings, velvet hairbands, ponytails, bangs, plaid skirts, boots with blue jeans, and candlelight dinners with white wine and smoked ham.
I have been stuck in that moment every single day since. I was certainly there when, three years later, I met Paloma. And I think I am still there when I watch my sixteen-year-old daughter brushing her hair in these distant nineties.
I could never say it as well as Monsiváis: “Days without sleep, unforgettable dreams.”
Overall, a near-hypnogogic-yet-strangely-lucid recollection of events where the Mexican government had hundreds of humans murdered to keep the “rabble-rousers” down.
Lo curioso de este libro es el formato de "viñetas", pequeños relatos independientes. Muchos de ellos, de hecho, harían espléndidas minificciones. Aunque este libro está hecho, más que a pinceladas, a brochetazos algo burdos, nunca dejan de hacerse presentes el humor y el compromiso del autor. Tal vez no sea su libro más completo, pero sí es una gran opción para regalar a algún adolescente interesado en la historia.
Links
Officiële startpagina (Spanish)
Wikipedia author page: Spanish (Spanish)
Wikipedia author page: English (English)
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