"With his death, the last of the Latin American Boom's great stars has gone."

I'm reading "Mario Vargas Llosa: Giant of Latin American literature dies at 89" (BBC).

His first novel, The Time of the Hero, was an indictment of corruption and abuse... based on the writer's own time as a teenager at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy, which he described in 1990 as "an extremely traumatic experience." His two years there made him see his country "as a violent society, filled with bitterness, made up of social, cultural, and racial factions in complete opposition". The school itself burnt 1,000 copies of the novel on its grounds, Vargas Llosa claimed.

His experimental second novel The Green House (1966) was set in the Peruvian desert and jungle, and described an alliance of pimps, missionaries and soldiers based around a brothel.

The two novels helped found the Latin American Boom literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The Boom was characterised by experimental and explicitly political works that reflected a continent in turmoil....

The fact that I'm wondering if the things said to be "a real program" are perhaps not actually real — that says enough.

I found this because it's easy to find things tweeted by Elon Musk in the last 24 hours:

pic.twitter.com/VyFYXCDG9p

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 5, 2025

I am reminded of the old "Golden Fleece Award":

The Golden Fleece Award (1975–1988) was a tongue-in-cheek award given to public officials in the United States for squandering public money....

One man controlled this award: Senator William Proxmire. His idea of what sounded stupid ruled. You had to be careful about how your research project looked, at first glance, to a politician who wanted to make a general point about out-of-control federal spending.

"The rabbi presented him with a children’s book titled 'Jewish Traditions and Customs,' intended to discourage Villanueva from any notion of converting."

"'The book would make clear who was Jewish and who was not, why a highland Peruvian, a cholo, was not, and could not be, Jewish'.... But when Villanueva opened the book, what he found was a revelation. It described precisely the way he and his followers were already living, and he arrived home delighted, the mystery solved at last. Guess what, he told his congregation: They were Jewish! They’d been Jews all along!... Is it a matter of bloodlines? Tradition? Observance? Faith? But Villanueva was neither aware of nor interested in religious gatekeeping.... In one memorable scene, Villanueva and his congregation return to the rabbi in search of circumcision (not the metaphorical kind) but are turned away; their only other option is a surgeon who will perform the procedure for the hefty sum of $60 apiece. One imagines that many men would simply (and perhaps relievedly) abandon the enterprise at this point, but Villanueva would not be deterred: Three years later, he and a dozen followers were back with cash in hand."

From "One Man and His Followers Sought Salvation. Did It Exist? 'The Prophet of the Andes' tells the story of Segundo Villanueva, a quixotic spiritual seeker who led hundreds of followers from Peru to Israel" (NYT).

Here's the book: "The Prophet of the Andes."

ADDED: That last link goes to Amazon, where there is this blurb from Judith Thurman: "If Gabriel García Márquez had written the Old Testament, it might read like Graciela Mochkofsky's staggering true account of a humble Peruvian carpenter's spiritual odyssey from a shack in the Andes, via the Amazon, to the Promised Land of Israel with a community of devoted followers."

"The [coca] economy has collapsed. We plant coca because it is a solution for our survival. But now, no one is buying it."

Says a Peruvian cocalero, who, we're told, farms coca "for traditional indigenous uses," quoted in "The coronavirus has gutted the price of coca. It could reshape the cocaine trade" (WaPo). I don't really understand how he's the victim of the supposed global market collapse if he's only providing for traditional indigenous uses, but I do accept the proposition that coca farming in Peru is "a solution for... survival."

Are we, the readers of WaPo, supposed to feel bad about the collapse of the coca market? I think so, because the article goes on to say that drug trafficking will come back after the lockdown, but the big operations — the "supersized cartels" — will survive and prosper, and as usual, we are prompted to care about small business... including, apparently, small criminal businesses.

The comments at WaPo find their own path and — surprise! — make it about Trump: "This will be hard news for Trump supporters. If meth and heroin supplies are disrupted, a part of the economy they actually participate in will be taking a hit"/"Notice trump isn't sniffing his runny nose as much as he used to"/"Finally! Something to explain trump's impatience to reopen the country - it's screwing with his cocaine trafficking logistics. Shoulda knowed."

How crazy is America right now? We've had low-level crazy for a while, and then they put us under house arrest for 3 months and they've hidden the faces behind masks, then we all watched video of a mind-bending murder, which was the go-ahead to pour back into the streets en masse and express ourselves — suddenly, emotively, violently — and all the while we were starving for our usual drugs.

How crazy is America right now?

Quite insane.

Crazy, but the other side is much worse than my side.

More or less the usual American-style craziness. Keep your bearings. We'll be okay.

We're actually quite sane, just blowing off some steam. Things will work out.

 

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Mayor Jaime Rolando Urbina Torres of Tantará, Peru got into a coffin and played dead as the police came to arrest him for violating the law of curfew and social distancing.

"It is not clear exactly where he and his friends were drinking, or why there were open caskets close at hand," The Daily Mail reports.

In happier days:



I don't know what's going on in that picture. Is he giving us the finger? "Siempre contigo" means "always with you." But what is "CLODO"? Wikipedia has an entry for that sequence of letters, but it's got nothing to do with Peru... or corn. It's quite French, but we see that "clodo" is slang for "homeless":

Committee for Liquidation or Subversion of Computers (CLODO) (in French: Comité Liquidant ou Détournant les Ordinateurs; 'clodo' being a slang word for the homeless) was a neo-Luddite French anarchist organization, active during the 1980s, that targeted computer companies. In 1980, after a series of attacks in the Toulouse area, they released a statement to the French media in which they explained their motivations. It read, "We are workers in the field of data processing and consequently well placed to know the current and future dangers of data processing and telecommunications. The computer is the favorite tool of the dominant. It is used to exploit, to put on file, to control, and to repress."...

"Just don’t … This is not a recommended travel destination for 2019. I understand many people just wanna spend 2 weeks of their boring enough life in a place they think would be cool..."

"...and take a bunch of the same photos their neibours Instagramer wannabe friend’s dog also have. If that’s you, you will fit right in with 500 other moms and pops with their Canon point and shoots. You will be fighting for a spot on the plato with 500 other selfie duck faces, Lululemon yoga pants, and brim hats they just brought from the market at Aquas Calientes which also sell fluffy alpaca faces. Cool. Wake up, to the locals, you are nothing more than the 5000 other money trees. To the Peruvian tourism board, you just happily handover another $150 out of your already over budget Peruvian holiday. All these because maybe you watched some stupid Instagram influencer or YouTuber hyping about everything they see. Do you own research, don’t come to Machu Picchu because you saw a photo on your friends’ feed, or Google tell you it’s a must go location. It’s not."

Wrote Mm Ww, quoted in "The best 1-star reviews of the Seven Wonders of the World" (WaPo).

"A truck driver inexplicably plowed over a 2,000-year-old site in Peru, damaging the designs."

This damage to one of the "greatest enigmas" in the world has not been explained, but in 2014 the site was damaged for reasons that are not a puzzle at all:

Greenpeace activists left a line in the rainless desert that the government said would last “hundreds or thousands” of years during a stunt to place a message calling for renewable energy and their logo next to the geoglyph of a hummingbird.

The article (with photographs) is in The Washington Post. I invite you to guess what troubles WaPo readers more, the seemingly crazy destruction by a lone truck driver or the deliberate destruction by an activist organization.

Trick question! The top-rated comment is: "And the despicable republican party murders our public lands, our national treasures by opening them for exploitation by the fossil fuel, mining, lumber, cattle interests."

"The Mashco had a ritual greeting: they hugged visitors, put their heads on their shoulders, and then felt inside their clothing, as if to ascertain their sex."

"For perhaps forty minutes, the two groups mingled: the Mashco touching and probing, and the Nomole team acquiescing, mostly in good humor. The Mashco women approached Flores and, as she giggled, touched her breasts and stomach... When I asked Flores about the women, she put a hand to her mouth in embarrassment. 'They felt my breasts and stomach and said to me, 'You’re pregnant, aren’t you?' When I said, ‘No, I’m not,’ they said, ‘Tell us the truth! Don’t you have milk?’ When I said no, Knoygonro squirted her milk in my face, to say, ‘I do.’ ”

From "AN ISOLATED TRIBE EMERGES FROM THE RAIN FOREST/In Peru, an unsolved killing has brought the Mashco Piro into contact with the outside world," by Jon Lee Anderson in The New Yorker.

After serving her 20-year sentence in Peru, Lori Berenson, now 46, is returning to the United States.

Was she gone long enough for you to forget who she is? Do the words Túpac Amaru jog your memory?

She was reviled by many Peruvians who saw her as a meddling, arrogant outsider and a terrorist. In America, her story was often seen as a cautionary tale of a talented young idealist who paid a heavy price for getting involved with militants in a faraway country.

Oh, those Americans who had a soft spot for Ms. Berenson, did they think about how we feel when talented young idealists from foreign countries come here and "get involved with militants"?

Berenson was the "daughter of middle-class professors" and elite enough to have atttended MIT.

Column bemoaning "human safaris" to photograph people of the Amazon who have lived beyond contact from the outside world...

... is illustrated by a photograph of people of the Amazon who have lived beyond contact from the outside world.