"What is left, instead, after Chávez? A gaping hole for the millions of Venezuelans and other Latin Americans, mostly poor, who viewed him as a hero and a patron, someone who “cared” for them in a way that no political leader in Latin America in recent memory ever had. For them, now, there will be a despair and an anxiety that there really will be no one else like him to come along, not with as big a heart and as radical a spirit, for the foreseeable future. And they are probably right."
— Jon Lee Anderson, a postscript for Hugo Chavez: http://nyr.kr/13F3j3s
(Source: newyorker.com, via newyorker)
"The physical agility and unexpected “fakes” lauded by Brazilian commentators were descended directly from manifestations within popular music and folklore, whether the sway of the hips originating in carnival, the sinuous steps samba brought into being, or the dodges and feints that came from capoeira. In this way, the legitimacy of soccer in Brazilian culture supported itself on an already established element of national identity: astuteness and improvisation. Music gave soccer what modernist intellectuals had detected in it in the 1920s: namely, the criteria and the sources of brasilidade. The link between music and sports, however, was not an isolated fact restricted to Brazil. Anthropologist Eduardo P. Archetti, in his recent book Masculinities: Football, Polo and the Tango in Argentina (1999), shows that an analogous process of nationalization of foreign sports by way of music occurred in other Latin American countries. In Cuba, baseball, imported from the United States, was incorporated into the discourse of nationality through its adaptation to the typical Cuban music style: salsa. In Argentina, national identity was linked to soccer through an association with the tango."
— Bernardo Borges Buarque de Hollanda, In Praise of Improvisation in Brazilian Soccer: Modernism, Popular Music, and a Brasilidade of Sports
Those who are already practicing “state building” in Iraq and have distinguished themselves in corruption and pervasive violence, but need further training from American experts or regional counterparts? And what is exactly meant by “external state building?” The language in the press release and the code words (military training, strategic and regional cooperation… etc) are reminiscent of the discourse and practices of the notorious School of the Americas (SOA). The sixty thousand alumni of the SOA went on to terrorize and massacre civilian populations in their countries and have included eleven military dictators from Noriega (Panama), Galtieri and Viola (Argentina), Alvarado (Peru), to Suarez (Bolivia) and others who became “some of the worst human rights abusers in Latin American history.”
sinan antoon on the baghdad campus of the school of the americas
