Crazy for Love: El Café de los Locos

El Negro Chivas in front of el Café de los Locos.

Manuel González Guzmán and friend.

The ambitious law student went crazy after his girlfriend betrayed him. The widow was driven crazy by her husband's death in one of Colombia's many civil wars. The fast runner who chased streetcars fell in love with his sister - until she escaped from him on a streetcar. He went crazy and chased streetcars trying to find her. The son of high society loved cheese and a woman. But she left him on the altar, driving him crazy.

All went crazy for kinds of love. 

These four semi-legendary characters of La Candelaria are on display in new café, appropriately named 'Café de los Locos,' located in the Hotel Continental's shopping area, just off of Jimenez Ave.

The café, just one week old, is the brain-child of journalist Manuel González Guzmán, and won several historical and cultural recognitions. When I visited, the café was vacant, but that hopefully will change when neighboring stores are rented and open.

El Bobo del Tranvia

'El Bobo del Tranvia', or 'The Fool of the Streetcars,' loved chasing streetcars and also fell in love with his sister, who fled from him on a streetcar, driving him crazy. He then pursued streetcars with more fervor, hoping to find his sister on one of them. In the end, El Bobo helped direct the city's streetcar system.

The café's interior reflected in a mirror.

'El Bobo' close up.

La Loca Margarita

La Loca Margarita's (The Crazy Margarita) husband died fighting for the Liberales under Rafael Uribe Uribe in the Thousand Day's War. She possessed the ability to predict the future and predicted Uribe Uribe's 2014 assassination in alongside Congress, in La Candelaria. That killing drove her completely mad, and, dressed in red, she roamed La Candelaria denouncing the Conservative Party.

Manuel Quijano y Figueroa, known as Pomponio.

The son of a wealthy family, Pomponio loved cheese and a woman, who left him at the altar. Driven crazy, Pomponio nevertheless eventually became a capable letter deliverer.

El Negro Chivas.

El Negro Chivas was an Afro-Colombian man from El Chocó, who traveled to the capital to study law. Soon after his arrival, however, his parents died and his fiancé left him for a white man. Crazed with fury, Chivas turned his anger against the sun, at which he yelled until his eyes were burned out.

The patio at the end of the commercial center provides a peaceful, secluded spot to sit.

Most of the shops are vacant and for rent.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Flying Above Problems

The Torre Colfondos, on Calle 67 and Carrera 8 in Chapinero, will not have a commuters heliport - for now.
(Photo: Panoramio)

Imagine the convenience of flying quickly and smoothly high above the noise and congestion of central Bogotá between Bogotá's business center and El Dorado Airport.

Such a service would come, naturally, at a high price for the commuter - but perhaps a much higher one for the city.

High above Bogotá, a commuter helicopter takes off.
(Photo: Aviatur)

Aviatur has been proposing using the commercial heliport on top of the Torre Colfondos, on Calle 67 and Carrera 8, for commuter flights from the surrounding business district to the airport. In the face of neighbors' protests about noise pollution, the company announced today the suspension of the plan, but that they would seek another location.

Helicopter commuting is already established in many big, traffic-choked cities. Liberty Helicopter, of New York, for example, offers eight-minute flights between New Jersey and Manhattan for $200.00 per day, replacing a one-hour ferry boat commute.

For elite bankers, stockbrokers, politicians and others, an hour may be worth $100.00. By the same token, the wealthy live in isolated, protected communities, send their kids to private schools and vacation on private tropical islands, far away from the problems which afflict the rest of us.

Congested streets? Why, we just fly over them!

Crime in the streets? That's why we live behind walls in a private community!

Pollution? Poverty? Dirt and hunger? We don't even have to see those things!

All of this might be well and good (besides the tremendous environmental impact), except that it insulates the wealthy and powerful - often society's decision makers - from society's real problems.

Once Bogotá's elite fly over the city's noise, pollution and traffic jams, they'll care less about working to solve those problems.

As a result, those problems become less likely to be solved.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The 'Miracle' Metro

A jammed Bogotá road. Is a subway the solution?

It will reduce commute times, traffic congestion, pollution - and even crime and health problems, while saving Bogotá millions of dollars.

Those are some of the claims made by backers of a 15 trillion peso Bogotá subway line in a recent study by the company Teknidata, hired by the city's Urban Development Institute, the IDU.

A Bogotá bus belches smoke. Has anybody
thot of enforcing emissions laws?

But many of those claims look dubious from a glance at Latin American capitals such as Mexico City, Santiago, Chile and Caracas, Venezuela, all of which have much more extensive subway systems than Bogotá could have for decades - and still suffer from horrific pollution and traffic jams.

The reason is simple: Induced traffic demand. Opening up road space, by either building more roads or taking cars off of the roads using mass transit, will reduce traffic jams....for a while. But new drivers, seeing that wonderful open asphalt, will decide to make more trips. So, traffic ends up just as bad, or even worse.

This is not to say that a subway's a bad thing. In fact, it's an excellent thing for the many thousands of people who use it every day to get where they're going quickly underneath the traffic jams.

Will Bogotá's metro look this good?

But the question for a cash-strapped city isn't whether a metro would be a good thing (a space port, after all, would also be a good thing), but whether it's the most cost-efficient way to accomplish the city's goals. And a subway looks rather like the most expensive way to maybe achieve its goals:

Reduce traffic congestion? Rather than spending trillions of pesos digging up the city for a subway, Bogotá could reduce congestion AND make money by creating a London-style congestion charge. Such a charge would raise the cost of and thus disincentivize driving. More people car-pool, take buses, ride bikes or simply don't make that unnecessary trip, and traffic jams are reduced (and so is pollution).

Reduce pollution? This one's almost too obvious to be worth explaining. Bogotá has a bad air pollution problem. Bogotá also doesn't bother to enforce emission laws. Wouldn't enforcing the law be a good first step toward reducing pollution, rather than pretending a subway will do it a decade from now - by which time the city will be inundated with many thousands more polluting vehicles?

As for reducing crime, the newspaper article doesn't bother to explain this, and I won't try.

Bogotá's leadership is fixated on building not only any metro but the most expensive kind; a subway. And not because it's the best transit option, but - it seems to me - because other big cities have subways, and Bogotá wants to feel important. Incidentally, subway construction will also mean huge, juicy contracts for infrastructure companies.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Good-bye Land Mines?

A campesino who lost his right leg to a land mine.
(Photo: Campaña Colombiana Contra Minas)

The other morning, Edilberto and Marlon Alexis González Mina, ages 9 and 10, were walking to school near the village of Tandil Alto Mira in Nariño Department, when they stepped on a land mine.

The explosion killed the two boys, making them the latest of the 11,000 people injured and killed by mines since 1990 in Colombia, the only nation in the Western Hemisphere where land mines are still being planted. Colombia is the world's third-most mined nation, behind only Afghanistan and Cambodia.

Colombia's guerrillas plant home-made land mines to protect themselves from pursuing soldiers and to guard coca leaf fields. But they don't return to remove the devices, so the mines remain waiting silently to kill or maim the unfortunate person (or animal) who steps on them.

So it was positive news ten days ago that the military and FARC guerrilla negotiators agreed to work together to find and remove the thousands of land mines after they sign a peace treaty.

A mural on an abandoned Bogotá building
memorializes land mine victims.

More than a few 'ifs' and 'buts' remain, however. The peace agreement looks likely, but is no sure thing. And neither is the obedience of the many guerrilla units to directives from their leaders. Meanwhile, the ELN guerrillas, who are not in the peace negotiations, presumably continue planting land mines. And, in any case, the guerrillas can't possibly know the locations of all of their mines, which a government official estimates are distributed across 688 municipalities.

The guerrillas fashion their mines using explosives sometimes laced with screws and feces in order to maximize the injuries and infection. These artesanal mines can wait underground for 50 years for someone to tragically step on the wrong spot.

Colombia may finally free itself of the nightmare of land-mines, but not for a while yet.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

An End for the Old Buses?

Soon to be gone? Ancient buses wait on Carrera 10.

Bogotá officials say - once again - that those old buses wheezing and groaning along our avenues squealing their brakes and belching smoke will be gone in a few months.

Of course, they've been promising this for years, and yet they're still here. And this latest promise has a huge 'but': It'll only happen if two of the near-bankrupt SITP subcontractors can get on their feet financially, which will require a miracle.

There are good reasons to get those old buses off of the streets: They pollute and contribute to a street-congesting surplus of public transport. But the buses are also profitable, and so their influential owners want to keep them rolling - and polluting.

A recent headline in El Tiempo announcing the elimination of the old buses...

And a similar story from 1996 announcing the disappearance of the old buses...

An old bus belches its way along Carrera 10.

But if reducing pollution is the city's goal, then they should get rid of the dirty buses, whatever their age. And that might mean shutting down TransMilenio....

A TransMilenio buses issues a cloud of smoke in La Candelaria, along the Eje Ambiental.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

A Venezuelan Threat to Whom?

Nicolas Maduro: Hapless leader
or threat to Washington?

“I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, find that the situation in Venezuela....constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States, and I hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat." 

Give us a break. Venezuela is near being a failed state. It's economy's going down the tubes, its government's turning increasingly corrupt, authoritarian and repressive, and Venezuelans' lives are becoming tougher and tougher.

Venezuela is a threat...to Venezuelans and probably to Colombians and other neighbors. But an 'extraordinary threat' to the U.S.'s national security and foreign policy?

Venezuela was perhaps once a threat to U.S. foreign policy - back when Chavez was alive and admired, and when high oil prices gave Caracas a full wallet to buy and influence foreign heads of state. But today Venezuela is widely seen as the basket case it is and has been reduced to begging support from its few allies. Caracas is in no position to rally anybody against the U.S. Even Venezuela's long-time ally Cuba has pivoted toward Washington.

Venezuela's worst-case - and increasingly likely - scenario is a larger scale repeat of its its 1989 Caracazo social explosion, when riots led to thousands of deaths. The difference is that today the economy is even more distorted and the country even harder up than back then, so things might be even worse, and Venezuela could emerge from the crisis as a full-fledged dictatorship.

But that dictatorship scenario is a threat to Venezuelans rather than to the U.S. As many will recall, Washington got along just fine with dictators and strongmen in Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Peru - not to mention China and Washington's blooming friendship with communist Cuba. Or maybe I missed Washington's crack-down on Saudi Arabia for being a dictatorship, not permitting free speech or religious practice, and furiously repressing women, dissidents and religious minorities.

And, the Washington officials who denounce Venezuela should keep in mind that they are financing the behavior of Caracas, which still sells most of its oil to the U.S.

The Caracas Chronicles blog speculates that Venezuela could emerge as a base for Islamic terrorism - which is an absurd, wild-eyed scenario for a highly-Catholic nation still dependent on U.S. Or turn into a narco-state. But the U.S. has long co-existed with state-tolerated drug trafficking, and will continue losing the War on Drugs until it abandons failed prohibitionist policies.

On the other hand, Obama's declaration plays right into Venezuelan Pres. Nicolas Maduro's rantings about the U.S. conspiring to invade and overthrow him. After all, declaring a nation an 'extraordinary threat' sounds like a great justification for invasion.

Venezuelan Pres. Maduro didn't hesitate to exploit the new diplomatic crisis, which he called "the most aggressive, unjust and harmful blow against Venezuela." Maduro announced that he would introduce an enabling law into the National Assembly giving himself additional powers to deal with the situation. Those familiar with Venezuelan politics tknow that means more quasi-dictatorial powers for Maduro.

Disturbingly, Venezuela's Ambassador to the Organization of American States said during a television interview that a sharpshooter's bullet makes a different noise when passing thru the skull of a government opponent, because "the sound is much less, like a crack, because the cranium is hollow and the bullet passes thru rapidly."

A comforting comment for opponents in a supposedly democratic nation.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

A Warning Shake

Office workers on an unscheduled break today along Ave. Jimenez.

Bogotá's office workers received an unscheduled break this afternoon when an earthquake centered on Santander, near the Venezuelan border, was felt in Bogotá. There were no reports of injuries or serious damage in Bogotá, altho some towns in Santander reported widespread structural damage.

The mild quake served notice that, altho earthquakes are rare here, they do happen, and can be powerful. Bogotá is built on a wetland, and the next powerful quake which hits here will inform us about the structural integrity of its high-rises.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours