Where Analog Went to Die

Wander to the back of this narrow, dark, crowded centro comercial on Carrera 9 and Calle 22 and you'll feel like you've walked backed decades - acoustically speaking, at least. 

There are cassette players which you thot went out with The Kinks, a turntable which might have played The Beatles' Yellow Submarine the year it came out. Stacked against the walls are old reel-to-reel players, with a few eight-track tape players squeezed in there. Nearby, for good measure, sits a typewriter, ready for that person in rebellion against everything digital.

Who might buy these old machines, along with the stacks of LPs, tapes and even vacuum tubes, I can't imagine. But the owners of the little repair shops evidently hold out hope that some Bogotano somewhere is still holding onto a machine with a vacuum tubes which will need those tubes replaced sooner or later. 

And when that happens, this is the place - and perhaps the one and only place left. 

 

The 'Museum of Telecommunication and Electronic Media.'

A mystery machine.

Those LPs offered lots of space for bathing beauties.

But, how does this Olivetti connect to Facebook?

What you're looking for is in there somewhere.

Vaccuum tubes anybody?

The center's entrance.

A neighboring business shows off its neon. 

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Blood Emeralds?

An emerald seller displays some inexpensive stones on Bogotá's 'emerald corner.'

Victor Carranza with a big find.

Colombia is emerald country. It produces more than half the world's supply of the stones - and high quality ones.

But the story of these green gemstones, which are mined primarily in Boyaca Department, near Bogotá, is tinged blood red.

Women admire emeralds in the window of
Bogotá's Emerald Trade Center.

Details of that history are spilling out in recent declarations by imprisoned paramilitary leaders. They say that Victor Carranza, the fabulously wealthy emerald king, or 'Emerald Czar', worked with right-wing death squads, even collaborating in two massacres of campesinos in 1997.

Carranza denies the accusations. And, impressively, the multiple court investigations against him have always been shelved. Carranza is a legend. Despite having only a third grade education, he rose from humble roots to amass a fortune in emeralds and ranching. The world's two largest emeralds belong to him. But while Carranza and a few others have built emerald empires, innumerable guaqueros, or informal miners, live in misery sifting thru the waste piles around their mines.

A street in Bogotá's emerald district,
in La Candelaria, the historical center.

The emerald industry has long been a violent one. The 'Green War' between emerald kings in the late 1980s left more than 2,000 dead before the industry's kingpins made a peace agreement which consolidated their control over the industry. Late last year a spate of killings in Boyaca generated fears that another emerald war was brewing.

Carranza, 77, has survived a half-dozen assassination attempts, (including at least one bombing), legal investigations and the 'green war.'Now, Carranza appears likely to die of his incurable cancer before either the courts or his rivals get him.

Children dig for emeralds. (Photo: Canal Azul)

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Press Freedom Gets More Defenders

The Inter-American Press Association at a meeting in Venezuela, whose president has not signed the declaration protecting press freedom.

Tomorrow, Colombian mayors and governors are to sign the Declaration of Chapultepec, which commits them to respect and defend freedom of the press.

Pres. Santos signed the declaration last year. It's no mystery why this rush to sign

Passers-by look at a newsstand in central Bogota.

this 1994 declaration, has only happened recently. After all, previous Colombian Pres. Alvaro Uribe had a sort of paranoia about the press, which he apparently often suspected of collaborating with guerrilla groups.

The declaration includes high principles of protection for the press, including bans on censorship, and a prohibition against punishment of journalists for publishing news, restrictions on press circulation and others.
If only freeing the press were so simple as signing a non-binding declaration. Dangers to journalists continue in Colombia - Jineth Bedoya, who in the year 2000 was kidnapped, beaten and raped while investigating the murders of prison inmates, continues receiving threats. But governments and big business also have more subtle weapons for controlling media coverage, such as providing or withholding advertising or access to news sources.

I haven't seen strong evidence of such pressures here in Colombia, but they may very well be taking place. (Laudatory news coverage of certain fossil fuel corporations, for example, makes one wonder whether the journalists are receiving more than their salaries for their efforts.) But several leftist government in the region, including Ecuador, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Argentina, have used lawsuits, legalisms and bureaucratic mechanisms to intimidate and shut down the media.

Coincidently, these nations' presidents don't appear to have signed the declaration.

In a way, that's encouraging, since it suggests that the declaration does mean something.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Colombia's New Cocaine?

The molecular structure of H2CB, or pink cocaine, on the right.

Just what Colombia needed - now it's also making synthetic cocaine.

That's according to news reports that a synthetic drug called 'pink cocaine' invented in Holland is being manufactured in the Zona Cafetera and the Norte del Valle. The stuff, whose chemical name is H2CB, is said to be relatively easy to make, transport and hide.

If this is true, and not another legend-from-the-Colombian-jungle like the Roundup-resistant coca bushes Wired magazine wrote about a few years ago, then it's got a significance far beyond being yet another criminal enterprise.

Where is it? "The Conjurer," by Hieronymus Bosch,
shows a shell game and a pickpocket.

Have you ever watched those swindlers playing the shell game on a sidewalk? No matter which shell the poor victim looks under, the ball's somewhere else. That's what the War on Drugs often feels like: a nation makes progress, as Colombia has against cocaine, only to have the industry shift somewhere else, like Peru, and the violence migrate to Mexico.

But this brings something more like a pardigm shift. If this 'synthetic cocaine' is really easier to manufacture, transport and hide than normal cocaine while being more profitable, it just might accomplish drug warriors' goal: reduce the traditional cocaine industry - but by replacing it with something even worse.
By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Bogotá's Horsecarts: Still Rolling Along

A horse and cart await the return of their owner,
who's inside the recyclers' association's office in La Candelaria. 

A horsecart waits patienly in the evening in La Candelaria. 

Yes another deadline is about to pass by with Bogotá's horsecarts still on the streets. The city government had vowed they'd be gone by Feb. 1, and replaced by motorized tricycles or something similar. Now, City Hall promises they'll absolutely, definitely be gone by September - except that the new deadline will get pushed back, too.

I'm not crying about it. The horsecarts add a sort of bucolic touch to Bogotá. And they also demonstrate that you can get around without an internal combustion engine, altho. few car drivers are likely to trade in their vehicles for horsecarts.

Of course, many of these urban horses are abused and underfect,, altho other zorreros cart owners really love their animals.

The city evidently doesn't have the budget to give the horsecat families the motorized scooter's they've promised them. Neither are there enough willing families to adopt the retired animals.

A scavenger carrying a load of carboard
could use a good horse. 

The survival of the horsecarts, called zorreros, might be good for reasons other than the fact that they add an interesting element to the city. They're also a way of life for their owners, who are humble families who survive by scavenging and selling things or by hawking items from the carts.

A horsecart waits for its driver to have lunch in the red light district.

A horsecart near the Central Cemetery with downtown Bogotá and the Eastern Hills in the background.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Coca Leaves Finally Get a Little Respect

Coca leaves and other products for sale on a Bogotá plaza. The salesman said these were imported from Peru.

Altho technically banned, Colombia's indigenous peoples
 cultivate and market coca leaf products.

For thousands of years, coca leaves have been chewed by Andean indigenous peoples, who also attribute to them religious significance. But then Europeans took coca leaves home and figured out how to extract a drug, which millions of people, particularly north Americans, proceeded to get themselves addicted to.

In 1961, to protect addicts in rich countries, the United Nations prohibited cultivating and chewing the leaves.

The prohibition seems wildly unfair. After all, even during U.S. alcohol Prohibition, grapes were still legal (and were marketed with instructions about how to turn them into an inebriating liquid). Coca leaves contain such a tiny amount of the cocaine alkaloid that they give users just a slight pick-me-up.

Vendors claim that coca products
cure all manner of ailments.

In 2009, to protest the U.N. prohibition, Bolivian Pres. Evo Morales, a one-time coca farmer who still heads a coca farmers organization, withdrew his country from the United Nations Convention on illegal drugs. The prohibition, he said, equated traditional coca leaf farmers with "narcotraffickers and drug users."

The other day, the U.N. readmitted Bolivia - with a special clause permitting coca leaf chewing. Incredibly, 15 countries objected to the exception for coca leaf chewing. And leading the opposition was, of course, the United States.

It's a tiny crack in the drug prohibitionism, and it begins to repair a huge historical double standard. After all, the same 1961 treaty which prohibited indigenous peoples' ancient traditions also included a specific exception for the Coca Cola Company, which adds a cocaine-free coca leaf extract to its soft drink.

But the exception doesn't include the other Andean nations, including Colombia, where indigenous people chew coca leaves and many people buy teas, cookies, ointments and drinks made from the leaves. And, there's of course no mention of the many millions of people all over the world who would surely like to try such coca leaf products, whose makers claim they provide all sorts of health benefits.

So, for the foreseeable future, these leaves, which could provide another export for Colombia and help relieve the country's beleaguered farmers, will remain technically prohibited.

Related Blogposts:

Taking a Courageous Stand Against...Leaves

Good Riddance to 'La Mata que Mata!'
By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The Spilled Sandwiches Strategy

Oh, no!



Quite a tragedy!

Among the many ways to separate well-intentioned people from their money, the spilled food tray might be the most ambitious.



So, one day you happen to be walking down a street behind a guy carrying a tray of drinks and sandwiches, apparently hurrying to supply some office, an art gallery or something.

Oh, the terrible tragedy of it all!

But, suddenly the man trips, scattering the food across the sidewalk. He kneels and sobs tragically. His whole afternoon's work is lost, not to mention the ingredients and the delivery contract.

Sympathetic to the man's bad luck, you reach into your pocket and pull out a few bills. 'Tough luck. Hope you do better the next time, guy.'

Attracting a crowd (and my dog). How can we help?

But stop for a moment and take a look at that food. The 'sandwiches' are just pieces of cheap white bread stuck together with a bit of butter or mayonaise. And the 'drinks,' if you could taste one, would be colored water, I bet.

A helping hand.

I've spotted guys like this in central Bogotá and other cities several times. Theirs might be the best panhandling theatrics, surpassing the guy with the trained beggar dogs, the folks with the exaggerated body lesions and even the cold-hearted man I once met who'd apparently injured his dog to pry donations out of dog lovers 'for food and medicine for the poor animal.'

The food spilling manuever must be pretty effective to make it worth all the trouble in preparation and the cost of the materials, altho I bet the guy gets discarded bread, which he reuses over and over. Water's free and mayonnaise is cheap.

Another theatrical beggary I've noticed recently around Bogotá are guys armed with shovels and hoes to give themselves an industrious, hard-working appearance. 'Give me money, since I'm ready to work, as you can see.' Sure, they look out of place amidst the cement and asphalt, which require a jackhammer instead of a shovel. But I imagine there's an unconscious psychological effect.

I've also seen more energetic version of this, in which a man stands by a pothole and industriously fills it - probably only to empty it again after you've past by.

Even if you don't feel sympathy, consider giving them a coin for ingenuity and acting.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours