'A Novel, Healthy and Curious Diversion'

The athletes are lined up. 

And he's off. 

After months of absence, the guinea pig races, with all of their drama and excitement, are back along La Septima. I'd wondered whether misguided animal rights folks had gotten them run off (the guinea pigs seem healthy and well-treated), but Juan, the pigs' trainer told me that he and his dad had been racing their animals in Barranquilla.

In fact, Juan said that he and his father are the only ones in Bogotá, and perhaps the world, who do public guinea pig races. Juan said his father invented the sport about 20 years ago. Juan himself has been doing racing the animals for six years.

Which bowl will he choose?

Juan carries on a constant, repetitive refrain, pointing out that this is a "novel, healthy and curious diversion" which won't break your bank. He also informs the public that guinea pigs, known as cuy, are eaten in the Colombian Department of Nariño. (They are also food in Peru and Ecuador.)

The races, of course, aren't really races. Bystanders put coins, usually of 200 pesos, on the overturned colored bowls, each of which has an entranceway cut into its side. Juan urges one of the animals to advance. The animal is supposed to race into one of the bowls, presumably attracted by the darkness. Sometimes, however, the pigs stop halfway, or apparently can't decide which bowl to enter. So, Juan urges another animal forward. When a pig enters a bowl, whoever placed a coin on that bowl wins five times the amount bet.

Nobody's sure how guinea pigs, which are rodents, got their name. Perhaps Europeans once thot they came from Africa, instead of the Andes. Or, Guinea may be a corruption of Guyana.

An undecisive guinea pig. 

There he goes. We have a winner!

Time to line back up little guy. 

 

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The Gasoline Price Trap

Expensive vehicles block a street in the ritzy La Merced neighborhood. Do they deserve fuel subsidies?

Pick the most important: Cheap potatoes, shoes, light bulbs or gasoline?

Doesn't fruit deserve subsidies?

Unless you like going hungry, walking barefoot or living in the dark, then it's not gasoline. But, apparently some Colombians want to believe it is.

And that's turning a well-advised policy of stabilizing gasoline prices into a subsidy. According to El Espectador, Colombia's gasoline price stabilization fund is 3 trillion pesos in the red - and that was last month. Since they didn't raise the price of gasoline this month and inflation marched ahead, the deficit must have grown.

Subsidizing gasoline, which pollutes and causes global warming, generates traffic jams, is often used frivolously, and is consumed disproportionately by the wealthy, makes little sense, environmentally, economically or in terms of quality of life. But it is popular.

Those evil multinationals. But let's subsidize them!

Anybody who visits Venezuela can see how gasoline subsidies become fundamental national policy - and how destructive they are. When I lived in central Caracas, traffic on the street in front of my home sat still, bumper-to-bumper, all day long. Pedestrians passed the stalled cars and buses trapped in perpetual trancones. And, if you think Bogotá's pollution is bad, you should check out Caracas, where nobody cares about fuel efficiency or keeping their cars tuned.

And that was back in 2005, when Venezuelan gasoline still cost a few cents per gallon. Since then, Venezuela's inflation has galloped along, while the price of Venezuelan gasoline has stayed fixed, slashing the price even further.

Besides damaging the environment and quality of life, Venezuela's almost-free gasoline is also sinking

A mural on the National University campus in Bogotá calls
for cheaper fuel. Would they volunteer to give away
university infrastructure funds?

the nation's economy, by forcing the government to spend billions of dollars annually on subsidies - which go mostly to the wealthy. It's so bad, in fact, that Venezuela is actually importing gasoline from the United States to give away to wealthy car owners. How's that for a anti-Yanqui revolucion for the poor?

Colombia is, thankfully, still a long way from Venezuela's disastrous gasoline policy. But I suspect that Venezuela also started a few decades ago out with a tiny gasoline subsidy intended to buy votes - and then got scared of raising prices. Decades later, gasoline's still free, the government is hemorraging money, and politicians are terrified of raising prices.

Colombia's policy is supposed to be to sell its oil and gasoline at world prices. Perhaps that

The National University is renovating its old
engineering building. Is cheap gasoline more important?

sounds unfair for an oil exporter - but it's the same policy the country has for, say, bananas, shoes and sweaters. And, the profits from petroleum products, both domestically and thru exports, mean money for schools, police and hospitals. (If the government spends the money badly, well, that's a separate issue.)

The International Monetary Fund recently issued a report about global gasoline subsidies, finding that such subsidies are give-aways to the rich, who get six times as much of the subsidy per-capita than do poor people.

A bus spouts fumes on Carrera Septima.
Does it deserve subsidies?

Nevertheless, and absurdly, gasoline subsidies have become a big populist cause, as this mural in La Universidad Nacional shows. Did the painters reflect on the fact that the cheap gas they're asking for would benefiting disproportionately the wealthy, or that cheaper gas would mean less money for the National University, whose buildings are crumbling and whose students are demanding a teaching hospital?

Imagine how it warms the hearts of executives at CEMEX, Bavaria and Coca Cola companies - all foreign owned - to know that leftist, anti-globalization students at La Nacho are calling for subsidized fuel for these companies' trucks and factories.

And, do these leftist street artists really trust big corporations to pass their savings onto their poor customers instead of pocketing bigger profits?

Update: The Wall Street Journal has a long, really damning article about Venezuela's gasoline subsidy, which has pushed the price of gasoline there down to 0.4 U.S. cents per liter!

The most damning points:

* Veneuzela's per-capita gasoline consumption is six times that of Colombia! And, since in both countries most people do not own cars, the ones hogging that subsidy are the monied classes.

*The International Energy Agency estimates that the subsidy cost Venezuela $27 million in 2011, or 8.6% of its gross domestic product. In comparison, Venezuela spent 3.25% of GDP on health care and 5.1% on education.

It's stealing from the poor to give to the rich!

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The End of an Era for Emeralds?

Victor Carranza with one of his giant emeralds.

The death of Victor Carranza, known as the emerald czar, may mark the end of a wild chapter in Colombia's emerald industry, marked by sudden fortunes, larger-than-life personalities and explosions of violence.

Born in 1935 in Boyaca, Carranza built an emerald empire, using both legal and illegal means. During his long career, he was also linked with narcotrafficking and paramilitarism. But, magically, multiple legal cases against him were mysteriously shelved again and again.

"Media such as El Tiempo investigated and repeatedly denounced these facts, but prosecutors took no strong measures," El Tiempo observed dryly .

Carranza's enemies and business rivals also tried to murder him many times. The so-called 'Green Wars' between emerald czars in the 1960s and '80s killed thousands - but not Carranzo. In the end, it was prostate and lung cancer that got him.

A street in the impoverished town of Muzo,
home to some of the globe's richest emerald mines.
(Photo: El Tiempo)

Carranza's rise from poverty to an emerald empire probably will not be repeated. Today, the industry is becoming corporatized - Carranza himself was in partnership with a Houston, Texas mining company in Muzo, Boyaca, the epicenter of world emerald mining. In recent years, as the easily-found stones have been cleaned out and mines have gone deeper, making a living as a guaquero, or wildcatter, has become more and more difficult. The poor people who sift thru mine tailings for emeralds the mine missed say the stones are becoming scarcer and scarcer.

An emerald-dealer friend has told me about the old days, when he and a group of other miners would head out into the wilderness and start digging, looking for a vein of emeralds. Sometimes they'd get lucky; sometimes, the mineshaft would collapse, burying the miners inside.

Colombia is still the world's largest producer of emeralds, and its stones are of particularly high quality. However, this industry, worth more than $100 million per year, and the source of huge fortunes like Carranza's, has left the majority of the residents of Muzo in poverty.

With Carranza's death, officials in Boyaca's emerald region fear that the violence could restart.

Lessons for Another Violent Colombian Industry?

As troubled as the emerald business has been, it looks decidedly peaceful compared with another Colombian industry: illegal drugs. And there might be a lesson in that.

El Espectador reports that during the Green War of the 1960s the emerald industry was mostly illegal. In 1973, the government shut the illegal mines and auctioned them off. One of the major buyers was Victor Carranza.

After that, the industry remained relatively quiet for decades, until narcotraffickers invaded the region in the 1980s, according to El Espectador. Violence raged again until the emerald miners, with the intermediation of the region's catholic bishop, signed a peace treaty in 1990.

A fragile peace has held ever since, altho several recent killings have the emerald region on edge. Recently, 20 emerald miners signed a peace treaty intended to head off possible confrontations. Carranza himself has been an advocate for peace - which is, after all, good for business.

Some observers now fear that Carranza's death could destabilize things and trigger another Green War. But Msr. Luis Felipe Sánchez, the bishop of Chiquinquirá, told El Tiempo recently that things have changed. There's less money in the region now, and more government control, he said. Also, there's less coca, "which produced more violence than did the emeralds."

Bishop Luis Felipe Sánchez has overseen peace
treaties among emerald miners. (Photo: El Tiempo)

The similtarities between emeralds and cocaine are obvious: both are valuable, highly-desired commodities dealt in by aggressive, less-than-scrupulous businessmen. But there's one fundamental difference: emeralds are legal, while cocaine is not. Because of that difference, the government can try to mediate emerald conflicts; Emerald miners can sue each other instead of killing; And religious leaders can endorse peace treaties.

Update...

Today's El Tiempo has two articles with interesting details about Carranza, including how he starting out in a small town carrying sacks of potatoes for his mother, who worked in a local market, and eventually headed Forbes magazine's list of the richest Latin Americans. As a young man, Carranza supposedly spent several years in prison for killing a man who tried to steal his emeralds. He would later spend several more years in detention - and then be absolved and compensated by the state.

Carranza and his immediate family employed 100 bodygaurds, according to El Tiempo, 20 of whom lived in Carranza's luxury apartment in north Bogotá. Carranza's bedroom could be entered only by entering a secret code which unlocked the armored door.

Carranza was implicated in massacres, paramilitarism and drug trafficking, but none of those charges ever stuck. In the end, he worked for peace in the emerald business - obviously, for a man who controlled 40% of the industry, peace meant profits.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Talking Trash

Teaching passers-by to classify their trash for recycling.

This weekend, city workers campaigned in La Candelaria to get people to classify their garbage for recycling. Thousands of people signed a statement promising to do it.

It's an important issue, both for conserving resources and extending the life of Bogotá's dump, Doña Juana, which is near filling up.

And here's the result....See any sign of classification?

A probably homeless trash picker looks for something he can use, eat or sell. He's doing the real recycling. 

What's in a name? Bogotá's 'Zero Trash' campaign, emblazoned on this garbage truck, hasn't quite happened yet. 

Unfortunately, getting people to recycle requires big cultural shifts...or imposing economic penalties. Just repeating a bunch of slogans won't do it.

Vistors fill these recycle bins in the National Park with random mixture of trash. 

Just try to recycle this stuff!

But Bogotá could take real steps to reduce the amount of trash it generates, with policies that have succeeded in other countries.

Disposable drink bottles. A deposit on such bottles could finance their recycling...and prompt soda companies to continue making returnable bottles. 

Not so long ago, almost all drinks were sold in bottles which the customer returned to the store for reuse. It's a sensible, traditional and environmentally friendly system - but drink companies are phasing out reusables and replacing them with disposable bottles, shifting the burden onto society. Why don't officials pressure the companies with legal or economic measures to increase the use of returnable bottles?

These bottles will be reused again and again.

Styrofoam plates never biodegrade. Shouldn't their makers and users have to pay for the burden on society and the environment? Why not replace them with a plastic bowl that gets washed and reused?

A woman hails a taxi outside a supermarket. Her purchases are in plastic bags which will soon be in
the landfill or floating in the ocean, where sea animals choke to death on them. 

Plastic bags, usually used once and then thrown away, constitute a huge portion of Bogotá's trash. In Ireland and other countries small taxes on plastic bags have reduced their use by 90%.

In one of Bogotá's traditional markets reusable plastic sacks, made out of plastic sheeting, hang for sale. 

Recycling advocates with a barrel of plastic throwaway plastic bottles. But should these bottles exist at all? 

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

A Visit to the Escuela Taller de Bogotá

The carpentry workshop. 

Cooking students carry supplies up stairs.

The Escuela-Taller, or School/Workshop of Bogotá, is something this city needs much more of. It provides free courses, lasting about 1 1/2 years, for young people from impoverished and vulnerable backgrounds in cooking, carpentry, woodworking, construction and other areas.

It's located on Calle 9 between Carreras 8 and 9, just around the corner from the Palacio de Nariño and the much better known Escuela de Artes and Oficios Santo Domingo, which is located just around another corner and teaches traditional handicrafts. That school belongs to one of Colombia's richest men, who named it after himself, and charges for its courses.

The furniture in the school's cafe are all different styles
because they are the results of student projects. 

In contrast, the Escuela Taller's classes are all free, thanks to support from the governments of Spain, Colombia, the United States and other institutions. In fact, Hillary Clinton visited recently to see the results of U.S. foreign aid.

Carlos, one the othe school's outreach and social workers, showed me around. He described the careful background reasearch done on prospective students to make sure they really need the free education and that they will take advantage of it. Many of the students come from Bogotá's poor hillside neighborhoods or from places like Ciudad Bolivar. Even tho classes and materials cost them nothing, the time and bus fares can be a real sacrifice for the youths. And, their families' poverty and sometimes violent neighborhoods mean they have to deal with lots of other issues. Still, about two-thirds of those who enroll complete the courses, Carlos said.

Carlos, one of the school's social workers and my guide.
He said they do careful background checks, including home
visits, to make sure that potential students are both
motivated and genuinely needy. 

The building itself was renovated by the school's students. It had been a convent for nuns belonging to the adjoining Santa Clara Church, now a museum of religious art. The nuns were cloistered, Carlos said, which meant that once inside the convent they never left again. The house had a garden in what's now the patio, and renovators even discovered graves. Carlos wasn't sure whether the remains had been removed, but I heard no reports of ghosts.

For many young people, who don't have the aptitude, interest or the years to devote to a sit-down book-reading higher education, manual skills like those taught at the Escuela-Taller can open the door to a fulfilling and constructive career. The city just needs more places like this.

The building is called the Casa del Venado, altho nobody seems to know why. Perhaps it has to do with the town the builder hailed from back in Spain. Restorers discovered these deer images on the walls of the main family room. 

The cafe/bakery, on Calle 9, is open to the public. 

Projects in the wood turning workshops

The building, once part of a convent, has been thoroughly restored and repaired. 

Restoration continues. 

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Jorge Isaacs Gets his Google Doodle

Today's Google Doodle shows a scene from the novel Maria.

Colombian novelist Jorge Isaacs got a bit of attention today thanks to a Google doodle, comemorating the 176th anniversary of his birth.

You've undoubtedly seen Isaacs (born 1837 and died in 1895), and would like to see more of him, since he's on the 50,000 peso bill. (But I'll bet you a fifty that Isaacs' face will be off of there soon after Gabriel Garcia Marquez dies.)

Isaacs' best-known work was the romantic novel Maria, which serves as a sort of historical and social document, thanks to its descriptions of life and social relationships in the 19th-century Valle del Cauca. That sort of romanticism long ago fell out of favor in serious literature, and Maria probably isn't read much anymore except in high school and university literature classes.

 

Isaacs' home in Cali, crumbling away.



But Isaacs' life may have been more memorable than his novel. The son of a Jewish Englishman from Jamaica, Isaac failed in business and became a soldier, politician and journalist, in addition to novelist and poet. For a brief two months, from February to March 1880, he was even the president of the Sovereign State of Antioquia, which was a part of Colombia despite its name.

While Google has honored Isaacs, Colombia has neglected him. His home in Cali, where he finished writing Maria, is falling to pieces.

(All images come from Wikipedia)

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

This is a portrait of Jorge Isaacs, not of Mike Ceaser.