Boards of Memory

When Juan Manuel Echavarría traveled thru the Montes de Maria region in 2010, in a community depopulated by Colombia's conflict, he came upon a schoolhouse abandoned by the fleeing residents. Inside, he entered a classroom - and found the teacher's final lesson still on the blackboard.

That haunting experience started Echavarría  and a friend on an oddysey across the remote region, where they visited more than 100 abandoned schoolhouses, photographing more than 200 classrooms as memorials to disappeared schoolchildren, families and whole communities.

According to Verdad Abierta, from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, nearly 50 massacres took place in this bucolic hill country just a few hours outside of Cartagena, mostly committed by right-wing paramilitary groups against landless campesinos.

Echavarría's work, named Rios y Silencio, preserving a history Colombia hopes not to repeat, is on now  thru Jan. 7 at Bogotá's Museum of Modern Art.

The museum has, incidentally, done a good job of becoming bilingual.

A mule outside of a school, apparently waiting for a child who long ago went away.

An abandoned chalkboard in a deserted school conserves its final lesson.

Photos of abandoned schools in the Museum of Modern Art.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The Mysterious Lady of Lourdes Plaza

For weeks - or perhaps months - this young woman stood very quietly on Lourdes Plaza in Bogotá's Chapinero neighborhood, transmitting some mysterious message.

From whence she came - or who put her there - she offered no clue. And she left her message - if she carried one - open to interpretation: With her uplifted skirt, was she making a statement about men's tendency to objectivy women? Something about women's endurance despite adverse conditions? Was she carrying out sort of stationary, inanimate performance art? A permanent temptation for men to misbehave, in the era of Harvey Weinstein and ex-U.S. President George Bush? Or, was she doing nothing at all?

And now, she's gone. Stolen, perhaps, or removed by her creator. And we'll never know why she came and went.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Crack Down on Guns!

'Popeye,' one of Pablo Escobar's killers, shows off a tool of his trade.

Years ago, working on a construction site in Texas, I met a tall Texan in his 50s who had just gotten out after ten years in prison. He was a good-natured man who I doubt would have stolen a wallet if he'd found it on a park bench. Rather, he'd gone to prison for killing a stranger.

Homicides in Colombia by guns
(light blue) and knives (dark blue).
Altho knives are much more common,
guns kill many more people.
(Source: El Tiempo) 

He told me that he and his father had pulled into a gas station somewhere in Texas and started filling their tank. Unbeknowest to them, the rule was 'pay before you pump,' and another man was in the office paying for the gasoline that my acquaintance and his father were pumping.

The other man, believing that these two were stealing his few dollars worth of fuel, did what Texans do: He pulled out his gun and ran toward them. My acquaintance, seeing the stranger coming at him with pistol pointed, pulled out his own gun and shot the other man dead.

One man died and another did ten years in prison - at huge cost to society - because of a misunderstanding over a few gallons of gasoline. If they had not been armed, they would have argued briefly and resolved the situation with a handshake.

Those sorts of routine, deadly confrontations - even more than mass shootings like the recent ones in Texas and Las Vegas - are why Colombia is right to tighten its gun control laws.

The correlation is clear: Number of guns and number of
gun massacres, the U.S. is in a class by itself.
(Source: New York Times)

According to a recent study by the Fiscalia, reported by El Tiempo, 7 out of 10 homicides in Colombia are committed by firearms.

"Firearms have a preponderant role in lethal violence in Colombia," the report said.

Bogotá can add one more fatality with the death this week of Daniela, a university student shot in the head by a mugger on her way home in April. She lingered in a coma for seven months while her family and friends agonized. The killer has not been caught.

Firearms are smuggled illegaly into Colombia from the United States, Central America and Europe. But others are purchased here legally, only to be used criminally. Of the almost 86,000 firearms seized by authorities between 2014 and '16, almost 20% had been purchased legally in Colombia but made their way to criminals.

What's more, the proportion of firearms confiscated from members of criminal organizations captured or killed has plummeted in recent years, from 94 guns for every 100 members of such organizations in 2010, to only 19 per hundred in 2015. That might mean that the organizations are getting better at hiding their guns, switching to other weapons, such as knives, or that corrupt police are confiscating but not reporting weapons in order to sell them on the black market - and back to criminals.

And that happens frequently. I once covered the crime beat for a small town newspaper in Mississippi. One of the most frequent items stolen in home burglaries were guns - perhaps legally purchased, but now in criminal hands.

As in the U.S., the large number of firearms in private hands in Colombia turns minor confrontations deadly. In the city of Cali, 42% of homicides result from such confrontations rather than contract killings. In Bogotá, the proportion is 21%, in Medellin, 14%, according to El Tiempo.

To tighten up access to firearms, the Fiscalia offers the example of Japan, which has only a tiny number of gun homicides. There, in order to obtain a permit to own a gun, a person must pass a written test, a gun handling test and a psychological examination.

In Colombia, a person must, among other things, show the results of a psycho-physical evaluation and explain why he or she needs the weapon for protection from threats.

Related: 

The Axis of Killing

A Gun Sale Gone Wrong

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Digging for an Emerald in Downtown

Those men you see every weekday along Calle Jimenez near Carrera 7 are emerald traders.

They show off, price and trade emeralds every day, right out in public. 

And, surprisingly, things rarely go wrong.

But, today, a disaster! A trader dropped a valuable emerald - and it went straight down into the sewer!

The emerald is down there, somewhere.

But where is it?

A homeless man, undoubtedly hired for a pittance, goes to work digging up the mud and carrying it away.



The odor from the fetid mud and sewage wasn't very nice.

Where is that little stone?

Passers-by are not amused.

Sifting thru the mud and trash, bit by bit.

Astonishingly, the trader found his stone, which someone told me was worth 30 million pesos - about U.S. $10,000. Wonder how many pesos the homeless man took home?

Neighboring businesspeople will not forget this.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

'Land, Peace, Bread' - and Tragedy

'Land, peace and bread.' Sounds great, doesn't it?

Every day, countless people pass by this mural on 26th St. not far from the Universidad Nacional, but I bet few recognize the catastrophic significance of what the dove is advertising.

'Land, peace and bread,' such beautiful sentiments, was the slogan of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which introduced the world to communism and its famines, totalitarianism and mass-murder. Because the Nazis gave right-wing fascism such a bad name, communism's sins are less well known. But The Volokh Conspiracy, a libertarian blog, uses the commonly cited figure of 100 million communist murders, including the Ukranian famines, Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cambodia's Killing Fields.

Nevertheless, the dream lives on, to a greater or lesser extent, in places like the nearby Universidad

The communist 'Voz' magazine celebrates
the Russian Revolution.

Nacional, whose marchers often carry images of Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara. But one doesn't have to look any further than Venezuela to see the impacts of a sort of socialism and a planned economy: People there are hungry, medicines are unavailable, crime has skyrocketed and Venezuela just entered hyperinflation. Meanwhile, its incompetent government is turning more and more authoritarian. Many thousands of Venezuelans have fled to Spain, Florida and Colombia - depriving the country of its most talented and educated young people. (Which why communist nations had a habit of building walls around themselves to keep their people in.)

It also provides a hint of what might have happened here in Colombia if the FARC had somehow obtained power. The mural was commissioned, incidentally, by the government of Bogotá Mayor Gustavo Petro, a one-time leader of the M-19 guerrilla movement.)

The paradoxical thing, of course, is that communism is based on wonderful ideals: equality, cooperation, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. And on and on. Unfortunately, the tools those governments used to reach those goals - such as totalitarianism and forced collectivization of farms - clashed terribly with human nature.

If only communism were possible, then this would be a much better world. But it isn't, unfortunately.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Timeless Trouble

This handsome clock in the Parque Nacional was donated by Bogotá's tiny Swiss community. However, despite periodic repairs and Switzerland's clockmaking reputation, it does not work.

While many northern hemisphere states and nations are turning their clocks back an hour to adjust to shorter winter days, here in Bogotá, where the days barely vary, many clocks, and perhaps time itself, stand still.

Two clocks in Chapinero: the mechanical one on the left stands still, the digital one on right, works.

The Omega clock in the Plaza de Toros has stood still for a long time, perhaps as a commentary about the backwardness of bullfighting.

The clock on Bogotá's Cathedral is one of the few that move.

The clock on the Las Nieves Church, whose name means 'the Snows', stands frozen in time.

The clock on the El Tiempo building, whose name means 'Time' usually works. But today it appears to have returned to the beginning of time.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Why Can't They Leave It Behind?

Juan Pablo Escobar, now Sebastian Marroquin.

Shortly after narco kingpin Pablo Escobar was shot to death on a Medellin rooftop in Dec. 1993, his wife and two children fled, first to Mozambique and then to Buenos Aires Argentina, where they have lived since, under different names.

In Argentina, by many accounts, Juan Pablo became a successful architect, designing projects both there and in Bogotá. He has also participated in a film, Sins of My Father, about the killings committed by his father, and written a memoir about growing up as the son of the planet's biggest and most violent drug kingpin. He's even launched an 'organic' clothing line, utilizing images from his father's career. He has also earned money from his father's name, including consulting on projects about the Medellin cartel, which generated a public dispute with the makers of Netflix' Narcos series because it did not consult him.

All in all, it seemed that Juan Pablo, now married with a son, was doing well. His Wikipedia entry (which sounds like it was written by him) states that:

'Although [Juan Pablo) and his family continue to make money on the rights to Pablo Escobar's name and likeness (such as selling clothing bearing his likeness for extra income), and have tried three times (unsuccessfully) to register Escobar's name as a brand,^[3] Marroquín prefers not to be linked with his father, which includes mention of his previous name; he is also determined to dissociate himself from the Medellín Cartel and the illegal drug trade in Colombia.'

So, it seems strange that the younger Escobar - now Sebastián Marroquin - would use his old contacts to arrange deals between Colombian narcos and Argentine businessmen. And even stranger that that narco would be an ex-associate of the Cali cartel, Pablo Escobar's mortal enemies. But that's exactly what Argentinean authorities now allege, based on newly discovered documents which show that Marroquin charged a percentage commission on the deals.

Marroquin and his mother were arrested once before in 1999 on money laundering charges, but released because of lack of evidence. This time, the evidence seems stronger.

Is there something in the Escobar genes which drives family members to risk their freedom and reputations in pursuit of 'easy' money, which they apparently don't even need?

Juan Pablo had been his father's press contact, and his 10-minute phone call from Bogotá's Tequendama Hotel enabled a search squad to triangulate the elder Escobar's location.


By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours