Not the Worst of Times: Covid, Slavery, Global Capitalism, Industrialization

      . . . . . Such thunderstorms last night, Thor level storms, as they woke me twice out of my Omicron vax reaction stupor.  Maybe our drought is over?

It took about 7 - 8 hours post the early AM jab more or less, around about 8 - 9 PM that the reaction to the new vax began to manifest, with the usual fatigue.  Even so, as I'd slept badly, and got in only about 5 hours of sleep the night before, I wasn't sure.  But at 10 I gave up resisting, took Tylenol and retired, while el V read me to sleep from Howard French's Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War (2021), a long historical study of what the European extraction economy of resources including population, meant for the

development of capitalism and European industrialization, particularly England's* 

Me had already started feeling a bit achy and chilled.  Woke about 3:30 very achy and chilled, took another Tylenol, drank a gallon of water, and lay there paralyzed for quite some time, mildly hallucinating. More quickly than in the past, the Tylenol did its job, and I only woke because my bladder woke me -- which meant I also drank then, another gallon of water (gallon is rather an exaggeration). About noon I woke feeling more like a person than a disassociated alien in the world.  Now drinking splendid tea and looking forward to breakfast and another Tylonel.  By about 3 PM I'll probably decree the reaction is finished with.

All in all this reaction was several degrees milder than the last two reactions, particularly the one before this. Been jabbed 5 times now for covid.  I suppose will do it again mid-December?  It's clearly worth it, being vaccinated, and I'll keep doing it, and masking.

I have books at the library, which I may attempt to pick up, but I probably won’t work out today, as feeling a little weak, and that electrical shock effect across my back, which has always manifested after the reaction is manifesting at the moment.  Plus have things to organize regarding the trip to New Orleans.  Then must return again to NO almost at once, to do a talk about the contributions of Caribbean slavery to the first globalization and world economy.

In many ways the last weeks have been rough, from the various anxieties around the Colombia trip to Cali and the Buenaventura Pacific Coast, then el V's staph eye infection manifesting in Bogóta, after the Travelers all flew home (nobody got covid -- the protocols were strict, except one, who acquired it, naturally on the plane when returning, but it was very mild).  Everyone had a the most splendid experiences, musical, people-to-people, and even natural -- whales among those -- sounding while on the boat to an island off the coast!  One of the young ladies then continued on alone on her explorations, heading off by bus to Cartegena.

But here at home the whole family in the Midwest got covid, from the baby to the elderly -- from a grandkid's preschool, where a teacher came down with it.  It wasn't  good for everybody.

Before that, our very dear friend, K, had to have sudden, RIGHT THIS MINUTE IF YOU WISH TO LIVE, brain surgery.  Thank all the lordessas the non-cancerous tumor was finally discovered, and discovered just in time -- the tumor was displacing the space in the cranium that the brain occupies.  The surgery was most successful, he's recovering well, but it's a long road, and it's been very painful. So They have him on opiates, which he, characteristically sniffs at, as "a most inelegant drug," and hates it.  But this is also good in a way, because he was determined to stop using the stuff as soon as possible. But the blinding headaches that come and go (the tumor was removed via the nasal passages, which means breaking his nose among other things) kept him from sleeping, so he still needs to resort to them at night sometimes during the week. But he's good, and he sounds wonderful!  The tumor's progress was insidious and going on so gradually that the changes in him he racked up to 'age' and so did we.  But all that aging is gone now, and he's as he's always been -- though in pain, etc. -- and that is WONDERFUL.

Then, our friend, the wonderful Gwendolyn Midlo Hall died, after a long and most important career, that changed how we see and do history (among other things, she created database historiography). 

All the names (107,000) recorded in Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s Louisiana Slave Database were engraved on 216 granite slabs, mounted on 18 walls.

Her ashes will be buried at the Whitney Plantation Museum, at the Allées Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, that she contributed so much to bring into existence.

Hmm, it seems I'm still quite out of it, as They Say, meaning a little foggy and weak, and o that electrical shock pain across my back is really not what one wants to be feeling.

* What Dr. Deveraux completely missed in his overview on Unmitigated Pendantry recent entry, as to why England industrialized so quickly -- and WHEN IT DID -- is the African Atlantic slave trade, and slavery itself throughout its imperium from the first days.

French's book is just one of many, including ours, in the last decade, decade and a half -- and even before -- that goes into detail about the African-Atlantic slave trade, New World slavery and how this is the road to industrialization and global capitalism.  Never in the history of the world had so much wealth been produced so rapidly -- and all by extracting it from others, right down to the rights to their own bodies, and appropriating it for themselves.  Yet there are always that multitude of the smartest bros in the room who get very angry when this is pointed out, because industrialization only happened because we are such smart engineers and scientists, and, o ya, we have a superior of way of doing everything.  Never a thought given as to how any of this from the 16th through the 19th centuries was financed -- or even, that it had to be financed.

Lordessa are the Brits in their fairy tale rewriting their Royals' history pretending none of this went on, and went on under her reign too.

Postmambo Colombia Music Seminar - Trailer. And HORSES!

      . . . .  I keep forgetting to put up the trailer for the Postmambo Colombia Music Seminar, which is coming right up.

People are so looking forward to this trip, for a multiple of reasons.  As activities are outdoors, the restaurants are open sites, travel within the area will be open to air, and the group is small enough that people can can move --masked -- in separate vehicles -- people feel secure.  The weather is terrific now too.

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     . . . . It's been non-stop busy here.  Even this weekend of splendid weather -- about to break for the more usual July of 90+ temperature and humidity -- it was a small, local arts community in New Jersey, with its own gorgeous theater, where the organization provided a showing of Tierra Sagrada to its community.  Trying to decide whether to go to Lisbon in the fall, for the annual WOMEX conference, where Tierra Sagrada will be part of the film festival.  Plus there was the 4th of July uptown in our friends courtyard garden, el V's bd at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where we got to view the just opened exhibit, Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color.  These were reconstructions of pieces that we've always seen a white and bare of any color at all.  On occasion, the original, as we have it, was shown next to the reconstructed color pieces.  I took this occasion to use the Android's camera for the first time.

Northern Bowman, Persian or Scythian

The city's exploding with music events, with musicians coming in from Latin America, particularly.  Last night it was Brasil, at Central Park's Summer Stage.  It was the most successful event the series has had so far this summer.

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     . . . . Non stop anxiety here due to the raging covid numbers, and the fool of a mayor who succeeded the previous fool of a mayor.  All the officials gravely intone -- finally forced to admit that the numbers in the hospitals alone has us in extreme high risk category for infection -- we should maybe consider wearing masks indoors.  We are surrounded by people having to deal with this, while their beloved relatives are in hospital with other conditions and then contract covid from the staff, and they are not allowed, then, to see their relatives.  Which means they can't keep monitoring how their relatives are being treated.  In one case, there is a doctor who insists on giving the patient an epilepsy med.  She doesn't have epilepsy, and it turns her into a zombie -- and thus incapable of protesting anything they do or don't do for her.  Why yes, we just received two new boxes of high quality masks from amazilla.

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      . . . . Non stop rage and despair on most other fronts.  What fools -- when not just outright evil, which there is no doubt most of them are  -- these jerkwaddies who have counted coup on the country, and what greater fools are us, who have allowed it and done nothing.

A map of Persia, indicating major settlements, regions, and mountain ranges, as well as the march of the Ten Thousand (dotted line).

     . . . . I take consolation from Xenophon's Anabasis -- the March of the 10,000 -- and Tom Holland's Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West (2005 -- so author's filled with 9/11 Clash of Empires interpretation of everything).

Additionally, I have become immersed in the splendid novel, Grand Hotel Europa, from Dutch author, Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, originally published in Europe in 2018, and translated and published here this last month. The presiding genius of Grand Hotel Europa is Clio, as the lost lover, muse of European history, particularly Italy and Central Europe's. Though not exactly historical fiction, it's difficult to imagine someone who takes historical fiction seriously not being at the very least intrigued by the novel.  It's very long, so I fear its beguiling aspects may begin to pale at a certain point, but if this is the case, I have not yet reached that point.  Michele Hutchisson's translation fulfills the shimmering, yet transparent beauty of the prose, which wins as much admiration as the reader can provide.

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     . . . . Watching Indian historical epics, during long hot nights, which not only sends me constantly looking at my World Atlas -- such a huge book, it is fortunate the bed is near my screen -- while marveling at the integration of elephants as not only known and usual, but essential elements of the societies in such a variety of ways -- but teaching me about a whole new breed of horse, the curly-eared Marwari warhorse.

These horses appear to have been bred originally -- perhaps starting in the 13th-4th centuries, post the Mongolian-Turcic conquests of Central Eurasia -- in northwestern India, crossing some Arab stock with 'native' equines and the horses of the Mughuls and the  Khanates.  They became signature horses of the various northern kingdoms such as Jodhpur (Marwar) region of Rajasthan, and by the 17th century then, the horse of the kingdoms of Maratha Empire, which at its zenith covered all of Central India, most of the western seacoast, the Doab, that fertile land between the Ganges and its greatest tributary, the Yamuna.  I think it was the Brits who called it "Hindustan."

These horses, while large and powerful, thus warhorse, also need far less water and forage than most horses.  This is more than useful for an empire that encompasses extensive desert and rough infertile ground. The mares typically are larger than the stallions.  They have loyal and courageous natures, are said they would not leave their rider even when he was killed in battle.  It is also said that when engaging an army that used war elephants, fake elephant trunks would be fastened to their bridles, which confused the elephants into thinking the horses were baby elephants, allowing the riders to attack the elephant unexpectedly. The favorite coat for the cavalry warhorse is said to have been 'pinto', as we see in the painting above.

So it is again, when all else fails, horses still give me delight.

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     . . . . Listening via streaming to a Cali, Colombia radio station.  It is all over the music festival Postmambo will be attending, among other activities.  The things we can do these days ....

Postmambo Seminars Presents

June 16, 8 pm Eastern, Postmambo Movie Night presents:

Elder's Corner, directed by Adesiji Awoyinka, who will join us on Zoom for conversation afterward. From the press kit:

    From the colorful, celebratory sounds of Juju to the politicized urgency of Afrobeat, Nigerian musicians have spearheaded some of Africa's most prominent musical movements. Oftentimes, their work formed the backdrop against which the nation blossomed. So what happened to the pioneering artists who rose to prominence during the country's halcyon years - and continued to endure when it faltered?

If you haven't been to a Postmambo Movie Night before, here's how we do it. It's easier to do than it is to describe. 

    1) We assemble on Zoom, then migrate as a group to Vimeo to watch the movie.  (I'll give you the Vimeo link in the Zoom chat.)

    2) Once we're on Vimeo, I give the 5-4-3-2-1 countdown, and we all start watching in sync. When it's over, we migrate back to Zoom.

==>Please be on time. (It's hard to sync you in if you don't start with us.) Log in before 8 pm Eastern, please.

This is really easy, but occasionally people who don't have experience with these platforms encounter problems. We don't want anyone excluded! If you don't think you have the tech savvy, or want to do a tech check beforehand, e-mail me and we'll get together privately and talk you through it. 

**************** HOW TO DONATE ***************

You don't have to pay to attend. Don't feel bad if you can't. But we can only continue if we are supported, so we very much appreciate your donation of any size. We're self-funding, so your participation is crucial. I suggest a contribution of $15 for this one event, or $150 to express ongoing support for the series, but we'll happily accept whatever amount you can donate.  Payment options:

1) Zelle. This is our preferred way to receive money, if your bank offers it. Tell them to send it to postmambo@gmail.com.  (It will ask you to confirm by showing you the name PLEAS.)

2) Paypal (be sure to check "sending to a friend" or else they charge a commission): ned@qbadisc.com

3) cashapp $nedsublette

4) Venmo @Postmambo-Studies

4) Paper check via USPS.  E-mail me and I'll send the info. 

Thank you if you have donated, y'all know who you are, and once again -- thank y'all for making our sessions possible.

* * *
July 14: Postmambo Sessions presents a conversation with Dr. Gerald Horne, Moores Professor of History at the University of Houston and author of more than three dozen books, including Jazz and Justice: Racism and the Political Economy of the Music (Monthly Review Press, 2019). I might also have to ask him about his new one, The Counter Revolution of 1836: Texas slavery & Jim Crow and the roots of U.S. Fascism (International Publishers, 2022).

August 11: Postmambo Sessions presents a conversation with T.J. English, historian of organized crime and devoted music fan who co-led our beyond-splendid 2019 Havana Nocturne Postmambo Cuban Music Seminar based on his best-selling book of the same name. We'll talk about his brand-new title (pub date Aug. 2) Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld.

* * *

Come with us!  There's still time to join us, but it's coming up soon.  August 15-22: Postmambo is off to the Pacific region of Colombia for the Postmambo Colombian Music Seminar with co-host Dr. Michael Birenbaum Quintero. It's time to register and book that flight.  Trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-Xk-CQGtMA

Feb. 1-6, 2023: For the Funk Of It, live in New Orleans. Registration is open now. Write me . . .

* * *

La Lucha

     . . . . Oyez, Oyez. Breaking News: Essential information for persons wishing lives of success and satisfaction, that this is so is so announced by The Media --  lip gloss is back.  As it is written, so let it be done.

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READING so far this month, begins with finishing off Guy Gavriel Kay's All the Seas of the World (2022). This is an inert, monotonal narrative, content to lie page flat. There is no differentiation in voices of characters, or the pacing. The pages, however, are stuffed with  ponderous ponders about random acts changing lives and events and characters, as well as the female protag’s constant pondering on her past as a slave, which involved sexual violation from a master she quite liked – but she killed him, by the means he trained her to do and the weapons he gave her. This all happens before the book opens. She never tells us why she killed him, or why she killed him when she did, until almost the end, which is pretty anticlimactic.  Also because he dissed her by ordering her have sex with somebody beneath her.  A stable hand, I think, who smelled like shit.  That pissed her off so much, that then she killed him. This all has already happened, as mentioned.  We begin our journeys with people who are very successful and rich due to their abilities to plot and scheme, to kill or have others kill on one's behalf, which killings change or move along each others’ lives as they interact. Their, then, interconnecting circles of wealth, agency and power, expand to intersect and ally with other rich, powerful, successful characters, which make them ever more wealthy and powerful.  Plus we are led to believe they deserve this because they worthy wielders of power and choosers of life and death for others. The author's vaunted ‘quarter turn’ from history and real locations is frustrating because one is always thinking of the real places and history. The author’s pretense at fantasizing by quarter turns the Romance languages, which turn the places and words into mush and meaningless – when the real thing has meaning -- has only become more intolerable as the books grind on. Everything irritating in this author's works from the gitgo was foregrounded and dominant in this one. This is particularly the case for a reader who has read the same popular histories for the 15th and 16th century Mediterranean, the Turks and the Ottoman Empire as the author has read.

Jennifer Haigh's Mercy Street (2022) is first contemporary set novel I can stand in a long time. Something as counter to the smug sorts such as Julian May Jonas's Vladímír (2022) or Victor LaValle's The Changeling (2017) as one get.  Haigh has no trouble finding ‘something to write about, unlike Jonas's novelist stand-in protagonist laments. Haigh's narrative is straight forward, no tricks, no structuralist maneuvers, no up author’s own ass interiority solipcist ponderous ponderings. Just a range of characters, particularly female characters born in poverty, who stay in poverty – often due to early pregnancy, set mostly in Boston around winter 2015 i (we were in Boston  several times that winter, and recall the endless snow and storm vividly) and New England. An abortion clinic is the connection among the characters who are clinic staff, their lives, the people they know who aren’t the patients -- their all important weed dealers, the patients, the antiabortionists.  It's real w/o being in the least misery porn or hopeless. It is the most realist, realistic, realism contemporary novel with a lot of women I've encountered since maybe the 70's and 80's.

As far as the ongoing READING ALOUD TOGETHER BEFORE LIGHTS OUT, after nearly 10 weeks, this past Monday, we finished The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories. (2007) Edited by Robert B. Strassler. A New Translation by Rosalind Thomas. “The most densely annotated, richly illustrated and most user-friendly edition of the Histories ever to appear.”  So user friendly is this edition that not only did we read aloud all the appendices, we also read aloud the glossary. We are currently following the Landmark Herodotus, with The Landmark Xenophon's Anabasis (2021), dited by Shane Brennan and David Thomas.  "... the definitive edition of the ancient classic--also known as The March of the Ten Thousand or The March Up-Country--which chronicles one of the greatest true-life adventures ever recorded."

For engrossing non-fiction READ ALONE, I'm treating myself to another Roger Crowley title, Conquerers: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire (2015).  Anyone with an interest in the history of the "Christians" confronting the realities of Muslim empires, Crowley is essential.  His 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West (2005) is the best depiction of the Fall of the Red Apple to the Ottomans.

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CURRENTLY WATCHING the Netflix continuation reboot of Borgen (2022), the popular here, and in the UK, former Danish series, featuring Danish politician, Birgitte Nyborg.  Perhaps what interests this viewer the most is how the Russians in this series are already bad guys due to Ukraine, though obviously, when the series was being written and shot, the invasion hadn't happened yet.  I see this awareness of Russia's intentions toward Ukraine, as well as what thugs they are everywhere, thus are made villains earlier in many television programs, particularly in British crime series.  Here also, in, for instance, the Amazon Prime Bosch.  Quite a change from the days of The American, where Russians protagonist spies here in the US are overtly working to destroy the US, were lauded as The Best Evah!  It's about family!   (But the Russians never evah fooled John le Carré.)

PREMIERE - CRITICS SCREENING of the Afro-futurist sf musical set in Rwanda, Neptune Frost.  It's not like anything else.

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GENERAL DAILY WORK ACTIVITY  tends to revolve around the now, nearly completed, complete with the 5:1 professional movie theater sound technology, Tierra Sagrada.  So far, in various stages of production and editing, it has been viewed on one of our Postmambo Movie Nights, at the Big Ears Film Festival in Knoxville back at the end of March, at the King Juan Carlos theater at NYU.  It is now scheduled for some churches and colleges in New Jersey and Connecticut.  El V's taking it to Cuba later this month to show it to the people who are in it.

Activity also around going to New Orleans next month, to prospect for next winter's Postmambo Travelers trip, and in August to Colombia -- Cali and environs -- the Pacific coast, which may be the most African spot in the Western Hemisphere, though certainly Haiti and Bahia can give that designation a run for the title.

Speaking of Brasil (Bahia), the country's largest publishing house, which also owns a chain of bookstores, has acquired the rights to translate all our books into Portuguese and publish them there.  

Speaking of the UK, an old radio piece that el V created for public radio back in the day, got picked up for a program on the BBC-- it was wild listening to it via BBC on line.

Speaking of New Orleans, el V's working out how to manage Cornell University's orchestra getting there, staying there, eating there, working with NO musicians, and getting home again, for the spring semester.

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Memorial Day was a great get-away, company, food and weather had us spending from 3 PM - to nearly midnight in friends' courtyard garden -- with nary a mosquito bite!  That was the longest span of hours away from our apartment since covid (yes, everyday more people we know have it, people who are vaxxed, generally careful, some of them have gotten break through covid three times already)  unless we were out of NYC all together.

Knowing our work matters, our friends, keep us going despite the weight of fury, bitterness, depression, despair. 

Biblioburro

In Colombia Books profoundly matter. In today's NY Times.

[ “I started out with 70 books, and now I have a collection of more than 4,800,” said Mr. Soriano, 36, a primary school teacher who lives in a small house here with his wife and three children, with books piled to the ceilings.

“This began as a necessity; then it became an obligation; and after that a custom,” he explained, squinting at the hills undulating into the horizon. “Now,” he said, “it is an institution.”

A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Mr. Soriano’s Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys. He created it out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia. ]

This is a mission filled with a danger and sacrifice, which is not untypical of a librarian's mission, one way or another.

The slide show is not to be missed.

Colombia in a Bubble

Center for International Policy
"Colombia in a Bubble"

[ They did a good job of keeping it under wraps. We heard nothing about Condoleezza Rice’s visit to Colombia until it was announced on Tuesday. (Not surprisingly, nobody at the U.S. embassy mentioned it to us when we were in Bogotá last week.)

Only yesterday did we see a list of the ten Democratic members of Congress who will be accompanying the Secretary. This made it impossible to prepare any briefing materials or lists of suggested questions to ask.

Those ten members, who will spend about 24 hours in Medellín, are:

a.. Eliot Engel (D-Bronx/Westchester, New York), the Chairman of theWestern Hemisphere Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee;

b.. Jane Harman (D-El Segundo/Wilmington, California);

c.. Solomon Ortiz (D-Corpus Christi/Brownsville, Texas);

d.. Alcee Hastings (D-Ft. Lauderdale/West Palm, Florida);

e.. Jim Moran (D-Alexandria/Reston, Virginia);

f.. David Scott (D-Jonesboro/Smyrna, Georgia);

g.. Rick Larsen (D-Everett/Bellingham, Washington);

h.. Melissa Bean (D-Schaumburg, Illinois);

i.. Ron Klein (D-Ft. Lauderdale, Florida);

j.. Ed Perlmutter (D-Lakewood, Colorado).

Three of these ten (Bean, Moran and Ortiz) were among the fifteen Democratswho voted for the Central American Free Trade Agreement in 2005. Two (Moranand Ortiz) have voting records that reflect support for Plan Colombia over the years, while six (Engel, Harman, Hastings, Scott, Larsen and Bean) have tended to vote for amendments to cut military aid and increase economic aid to Colombia. The other two, Klein and Perlmutter, are in their first term.

CIP’s Colombia Program is not an active participant in the Free TradeAgreement debate - our expertise is security and human rights, not economics. (We share Human Rights Watch’s view, however, that the U.S.government should use the pending agreement as “leverage to press Colombia’sgovernment to effectively confront impunity and break the paramilitaries’power.”)Beyond the FTA, though, we worry that some of these ten Democrats might come back to Washington with a skewed view of Colombia, and U.S. policy toward Colombia, after their two highly staged days there. Over the years, we’ve seen trips like these distorting the views that members of Congress hold about Colombia, a country about which they probably don’t think too often. Normally thoughtful members of Congress, prefacing their remarks with “I’ve been to Colombia, I’ve talked to the Colombian people,” go on to declaim about the wonders of Plan Colombia and President Uribe’s hard-line policies. “I don’t know what you’re going on about, Plan Colombia is working,” they will say to congressional colleagues who have paid longer, unofficial fact-finding visits to less-charming regions of the country. “I think you’re being overly negative.

”We ask the members of Congress in Medellín today: please return toWashington wanting to know more. You’ve only heard half the story. After one day in the Secretary of State’s bubble in Medellín being shown just what they want you to see, you’ve “been to Colombia” as much as a Cancún springbreaker has “been to Mexico.” Your intellectual curiosity should be provoked, not satisfied.

Incidentally, while in Medellín it’s a shame that you won’t be meeting with any of the following people. These uninvited individuals and groups could have given you a much fuller idea of how complex the situation really is inColombia, and what the true consequences of your aid and trade decisionswill be.

a.. Medellín has been a center of paramilitary activity, and lately has hosted many of the confessions that top paramilitary leaders have given to prosecutors as part of the “Justice and Peace” demobilization process. Being in Medellín would have offered a great opportunity to speak to the paramilitaries’ victims, who stand vigil outside these prosecutorial sessions. You could have taken a moment to hear of their desire to know what happened to their loved ones, to see a measure of justice done, or to win the return of lands that were stolen from them. You could have pondered why nearly all who aided and funded the paramilitaries who victimized them remain not only unpunished, but unnamed.

b.. You could have met with the overworked, underfunded prosecutors and investigators in the “Justice and Peace” unit of Colombia’s Prosecutor-General’s office (Fiscalía), to find out what their needs are -everything from manpower to security to the ability to uncover mass graves -and how the United States could be supporting them.

c.. You could have met with relatives of civilians who were detained by the Colombian military, only to show up dead, presented as guerrillas killed in combat. Colombia has seen a rash of these “extrajudicial executions” in the past few years [PDF], and the Colombian Army’s Medellín-based 4th Brigade is alleged to be one of the worst offenders.

d.. Medellín is the capital of a department (province) called Antioquia. In 2006 Antioquia, according to the UN, was fifth among Colombia’s 32 departments in production of coca, the plant used to make cocaine - more than 15,000 acres were detected there that year. Being in Medellín would have offered an opportunity to speak with coca-growing families, to find out why they chose to plant the crop, and what economic options remained after U.S.-funded spray planes fumigated them.

e. You could have met with members of indigenous nations living just a few hours’ drive from Medellín, such as the Embera-Katío. Beset by theconflict and by people who would evict them to profit from their land, these nations’ cultures, languages and traditions face the very real possibilityof extinction.

f. You could have spoken to Medellín’s ombudsman (Personería) or to respected NGOs like the Popular Training Institute (IPC) to get an overview of the city’s complex security situation, including concerns that new armed groups, fueled by the drug trade, may be asserting themselves in the poor barrios that ring the city.

g.. You could have met with Medellín-based negotiators and accompaniers of the ongoing, promising peace process with the ELN guerrilla group. Theywould have explained the possibilities and challenges that thesenegotiations face, and how the United States could be supporting them.

We are pleased that the ten Democratic House members accompanying Secretaryof State Rice today have taken an interest in Colombia. We encourage them to remain engaged, and to seek a much broader spectrum of views and facts, after they return to Washington. ]