v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Important Investigative Reporting on Ecuador at Substack

 

An important investigative piece by Ryan Grim and José Olivares on the recent activities in Ecuador at Dropsite:

Three bullets to the head ended a presidential campaign, sending a South American nation and parts of Washington D.C. reeling. Fernando Villavicencio, a charismatic Ecuadorian politician, had been rising in the polls in the August 2023 snap elections by promising to take on the corrupting influence of violent, organized drug cartels. Less than two weeks before the election, as the candidate walked among a cheering crowd towards his car at a campaign event, an assassin shot him dead.

The brazen killing rocked Ecuador and brought international attention to the nation’s election. Villavicencio's supporters quickly blamed leftist Rafael Correa, president from 2007 to 2017, and his party for the candidate’s assassination, without evidence.

Then, the U.S. government got involved: First, the State Department announced a multimillion-dollar reward for information leading to those who planned the killing, and later, the FBI sent a team of agents to investigate the assassination.

Now, leaked private messages said to be sent by Ecuadorian Attorney General Diana Salazar, and reviewed by Drop Site News and The Intercept Brasil, reveal why the U.S. invested so many resources to investigate the candidate’s assassination: according to the messages, Villavicencio was a U.S. government informant. And Salazar, who was in close contact with  the U.S. ambassador, helped shape a public narrative that the leftist party was to blame for the killing—a maneuver that successfully kept the Correaistas from returning to power and dramatically accelerated the Ecuadorian state's staggering descent.

The sensitive revelation is one of many that comes from the series of leaked chats between a former Ecuadorian assemblymember and an account he says was Salazar.

Drop Site is the first English-language outlet to obtain complete access to the explosive chat records that reveal the inner workings of a politically motivated  attack on the leading leftist political party, all with the blessing of the U.S. 

Some of the messages have been reported on by the Ecuadorian media, which has buried the story. The foreign press has largely ignored the leaks, which provide a rare and intimate look into an example of the underhanded, U.S.-backed right-wing playbook. This playbook has, over the last decade, duped much of the media, promoted reactionary movements and anti-political sentiments, rolled back social gains, and wreaked political havoc in Brazil, Peru, Guatemala, Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, Honduras, and beyond. Former president Donald Trump has also flirted with it, by attempting to use the U.S. Justice Department to go after political adversaries.

The Salazar messages are now the subject of an investigation by Salazar's colleagues and she is currently facing impeachment for “breach of duties” within the National Assembly, a process primarily led by the left-wing political party. In May, a Florida-based criminal attorney, representing an Ecuadorian man implicated in one of Salazar’s investigations, wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee and the Justice Department, claiming that the messages “violate several federal laws” in the U.S. The attorney recommended the U.S. blacklist Salazar for revealing “highly sensitive and confidential information” from U.S. law enforcement agencies.

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Interview with Albarrán Cabrera

 

From Global Voices, an interview with this duo photographers who fashion unique images via photography:

Omid Memarian: Notions of memory and identity figure prominently in your photography. What's your personal connection with these themes and how are they reflected in your work?

Anna: Everything we are is memory. When dealing with anything related to science, you draw on what scientists have already discovered to understand the world. Regarding identity, you are who you are because of your memories. You are your first anniversary, you are your mother’s memories, you are the memories of your school days. You are all this. Even the way we conceptualize time to understand reality is based on memory. This is more evident in people who suffer from memory loss. For them, time does not exist.

We hope that our photographs trigger subconscious associations in viewers based on their memories. We even prefer that the viewer interpret the photograph in a way totally different from what we had originally imagined. Thus, they will create a new set of ideas for themselves.

Memory is the thread that weaves all of our series. “The Mouth of Krishna” is the core series. It is the result of all our learnings so far. It is related to how our memories keep our reality consistent, how we categorize what we perceive and how we interlink it.

From time to time, we realize that some concepts gain more importance and then this generates a new portfolio. Thus, “This is you here” studies the concept of identity and how it is created based on our memories.

“Kairos” revolves around the idea of how humans perceive time. Time is not something tangible, it’s just a property of the universe. We create the concept of time with the help of our memories, and we divide it into past, present and future.

OM: You have spent a lot of time in Japan. How does this particular geography connect to your worldview of art and culture?

Angel: Japanese culture is very important for us and our work. This culture, as many others, is subject to many stereotypes and enormous misconceptions. At the beginning, you can fall into the trap of its aesthetics and philosophy. But once you study the language, its people and history, you discover the reality about this country: the good, bad and horrible things that any country has. And yet, there is still something fascinating: Japan offers us a completely different interpretation of reality compared to our Western conception. We all live in the same world, but it is interpreted from many, and totally diverse, points of view.

The Western world is obsessed with symmetry and perfection. We understand beauty shaped by universal laws, granting great importance to the perfect and the eternal. Japanese aesthetics are, however, very different. They see beauty in the impermanent, the imperfect, the rustic and the melancholy. They long for what is not eternal, slightly broken, modest and fragile.

OM: The aesthetic aspect of your work is very bold. In a world in which classical depictions of beauty have been pushed aside, how is your work being received in the art world?

Anna: Beauty is a very complex topic. It is not only difficult to define what beauty is, but also to deal with it. Prettiness worries serious people a lot. They are afraid that beauty will make you forget what life is really like. But as the philosopher Alain de Botton stated: “We need pretty things close to us not because we are in danger of forgetting the bad stuff, but because terrible problems weigh so heavily on us, that we’re in danger of slipping into despair and depression…The art a country or a person calls ‘beautiful’ gives you vital clues as to what is missing.”

We do not consciously look for beauty in our work. We search through the mystery of the unknown to experiment with the beauty of discovering.

OM: You have done nature photography in both Europe and Japan. What differences do you see in these two series of works?

Angel: As Westerners, we are surprised and amazed by the aesthetic and philosophical interpretation that the East has developed about the world. It seems very different from ours and yet, both Western and Eastern schools of thought have a simultaneous origin. Reviewing the pre-Socratic Greek thinkers of the Miletus school, we can find in their line of thought a common motivation with the Oriental culture: nature.

Oriental thought, and even more specifically, Japanese thought has not lost this ancestral contact with nature, maintaining it throughout the evolution of its culture. The ideals and concepts of Japanese aesthetics are mainly influenced by religion. In both Shintoism and Buddhism, the Gods are not the creators of nature, but nature is an individual entity. In our Western tradition, the Judeo-Christian concept of a creator or God broke this link and made us separate ourselves from the traditional aesthetic ideals of ancient Greece. The meaning of terms such as Wabi-sabi, Miyabi, Shibui or Yuugen originally existed in our Western culture but they did not evolve as in the Japanese case. We are gladdened by the fact that this common root is present in our work: usually viewers cannot differentiate between the images taken in Japan from those taken in other places.

Shutaro Matsui's Music

A young trumpet player I discovered on Spotify by accident. Mature and technically gifted.

Juan Manuel Castro Prieto-Photographer Whose Book I found in Mexico

From Mexico City

Five days in Mexico City from the 50 years when we met in 1974. Who would have thought.

Vallejo Nocturno 2024-Ciudad de Mexico

No Laughing Matter Anymore

From Michelle Goldberg's editorial about Vance and his "unhumans":

“The great American counterrevolution to depose the Cultural Marxists must occur on all terrains of society they currently possess and on those they aim to seize,” write Posobiec and Lisec, adding, “It is achievable but only with the resolve of Franco and the thoroughness of McCarthy.” (They mean Joseph McCarthy, another of the book’s icons.) Compare that to what Vance said on the alt-right podcast “Jack Murphy Live” in 2021, when he argued that Republicans, upon taking power, should purge their opponents the way Iraq’s government once purged members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.

 

And a persons commentary to the OpEd:

I was born in 2001. I was six months old when the Twin Towers went down. I grew up with a love of history instilled into me by my late grandfather, who passed away in my freshman year in college. Because of him, I recognized what was coming when, at the age of 15, I watched, voteless and voiceless, as angry old men and women who looked fondly upon the 'Good old days' of McCarthy and Jim Crow propelled Donald Trump into office in a desperate attempt to preserve a flawed America.

I could already see where we were headed.

Four years later, halfway through earning a history degree, I canvassed for Democrats and cast my vote for Joe Biden, knowing what another Trump term would bring. When others celebrated Biden's victory, I remained silent, knowing how quickly our enemy would shed the trappings of democracy if they proved inconvenient. When J6ers stormed stormed the Capital Building, I was shocked but unsurprised. My very first time participating in the democracy I was raised to revere ended with a crowd of my elders attempting to silence my voice because they didn't like the hat they were hearing.

I think that was when I knew that movements like that don't disappear overnight; that I would be fighting this exhausting battle for the rest of my life. Daunting as it seemed, I promised myself I wouldn't shrink from it.

Now the man who would be VP endorses the notion that I'm not even human. Untermensch.

I am getting so tired of being right. But tired or not, I will still fight.

The Anarchist Position

From a new biography by robert Barsky of Noam Chomsky and his admiration for Orwell's Homage to Catalonia:

When Chomsky was in his teens he read Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” “which,” he told me in 1995, “struck me as amusing but pretty obvious”; but in his later teens he read “Homage to Catalonia” “and thought it outstanding (though he overdid the POUM role I felt, not surprisingly given where he was); it confirmed beliefs I already had about the Spanish Civil War.” “Homage to Catalonia,” Orwell’s description of the Spanish conflict, which he wrote after completing a stint as an active member of the POUM militia, is still a book to which people (including Chomsky) who are interested in successful socialist or anarchist movements refer, because it gives an accurate and moving description of a working libertarian society. The “beliefs” that it “confirmed” for the teenaged Chomsky were related to his growing conviction that libertarian societies could function and meet the needs of the individual and the collective.

There were three left-wing groups active on the scene in Barcelona during the 1930s: the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, or POUM; the socialist PSUC (Partido Socialista Unificado de Catalunya), which was dominated by Stalinists; and the anarchist CNT-FAI (Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores-Federacion Anarquista Iberica), which honored Rudolf Rocker as “their teacher” on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Orwell joined the POUM militia at the end of 1936 as a means of entering Spain to write newspaper articles. His description, in “Homage to Catalonia,” of the POUM line sets up an oversimplified but provocative relationship between bourgeois democracy, fascism, and capitalism:

Bourgeois “democracy” is only another name for capitalism, and so is Fascism; to fight against Fascism on behalf of “democracy” is to fight against one form of capitalism on behalf of a second which is liable to turn into the first at any moment. The only real alternative to Fascism is workers’ control. If you set up any less goal than this, you will either hand the victory to Franco, or, at best, let in Fascism by the back door. The war and the revolution are inseparable.

Orwell maintains that revolution is the only way to remove from power the oppressive business-based ruling class of the type that has dominated the West since World War II. This concept is a difficult one to grasp for those of us who have been programmed, in large measure by the mainstream press, to think that battles must involve two opposing forces — one good and one evil. World War II is often portrayed this way: the Allied side is taken to represent freedom and democracy, while fascism and Nazism are considered synonymous with totalitarian oppression. Chomsky knew early on that there were other ways to conceive of contemporary political structures. He tended to lean towards the left-libertarian interpretation of events, and concluded that neither side deserved the support of those interested in a “good society.” How “good” is the society that drops atomic bombs on Japanese civilians, or reduces German towns to rubble? Isn’t there an alternative?

This subject is still hotly debated, even among members of the libertarian left. Norman Epstein, who has been active in leftist movements for many years and who is otherwise generally sympathetic to Chomsky’s position, here dissents by taking exception to Orwell’s paraphrasing of the POUM line. He emphasizes that “fascism is not simply another name for capitalism. It is a form, and a particularly brutal one, which capitalism takes under certain historical circumstances (including today in many third world countries under the sponsorship of U.S. capital) which is different from bourgeois democracy. Someone like Chomsky is allowed to function under bourgeois democracy but not under fascism.” But we must recognize the similarities between a fascist agenda and that of the so-called democratic West if we are to understand where Chomsky is coming from in his political works, and to do so we have to engage with the anarchist position that he had begun to develop in his youth.

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Daido Moriyama Speaks

Reading is a Positive Activity

 

From 3%, an excerpt from Vilas-Matas Montao's Malady:

April 21

“I’m absolutely convinced that publishing being in the hands of businessmen is just a passing episode.”

—-Carlos Barral

Every year’s the same at around this time. The number of illiterates in this country is on the increase, but this seems to be unimportant, there are more and more Book Days and it’s up to me to explain why we have to read. Yesterday, on the radio, I was invited to explain to listeners in two seconds why they should be encouraged to read. For them literally to be encouraged, I replied. I was going to add: and at the same time to achieve the spirit’s salvation, Musil’s ideal. I didn’t say this, it struck me as excessive and also I’d have overstepped the two-second limit.

I am no longer so rigidly literature-sick. Or, rather, I begin not to understand why I must advocate reading. Let every illiterate in this country do what he wants, of course. Besides, I hate virtually the whole of humanity and I spend the day planting mental bombs against all those businessmen who publish books, those departmental managers, market directors on the wire, and economics graduates. I plant mental bombs against them and against their disciplined followers and the rest of the world in general. So I wonder why I should lend them a hand and recommend that they read books if I only wish them ill, if I only want their stupidity to grow and for them to crash, once and for all, as they travel on the train of ignorance that we all pay for, but that one day they will pay a high price for, falling into the bottomless pit of failure, taking themselves elsewhere, into a different industry. What’s more, I loathe them so much that I’d be delighted if they were obliged to read, if a perfidious decree appeared from somewhere, a drastic order to become acquainted with books, and suddenly this country’s cities turned into libraries of forced, chaotic, daft intellectual activity.

In this way the failure of these haughty illiterates’ lives would be twofold. On the one hand there would be the already in itself resounding failure of all life, to which would be added that brought about by contact with literates—nobody doubts by now that to be a writer is to tail—not to mention with books, those astonishing “extensions of memory and imagination” that we take to beaches and cause to fail, not by reading them but by burying them in an unconscious great book of sand, very different from Borges’s.

This would be my revenge for the calls to advocacy that always arrive at around this time and for the constant doubts that plague me and drive me wretchedly to say that no one can be advised to read, but also drive me to think that really, however much I don’t like it, I should advocate reading, albeit only in a stylized way by saying, for example, that there’s nothing to say, except that, without literature, life has no meaning. But, of course, I can only convince those who read of this. And the fact is many of those who read believe it’s an obligation, and they are almost more dangerous than Pico’s moles because they convey an obvious sensation of boredom, they seem not to have read that memorable statement by Montaigne: “I do nothing without joy.”

With this statement, Montaigne wished to indicate that the concept of obligatory reading is a false one. If he came across a difficult passage in a book, Montaigne left it. The point is he saw in reading a form of happiness. Like Borges, who said that a book must not require effort. Borges agreed with Montaigne, though he loved to quote Emerson, who contradicted Montaigne and, in a great essay about books, asserted that a library is a kind of magic box. The best spirits of humanity are imprisoned in this box by an enchanter, and they’re waiting for our word to come out of their silence. We have to open the book, then they awake.

That said—I wish to distance myself from any new temptation to advocacy—the company of literature is dangerous, so much so that I’m really not sure I should applaud people I value for reading a lot and getting so involved in books; you see, I wish them well, and anyone who has read Kafka, for example, is perfectly aware “how much exces­sive anxiety for nothing” (to quote Pessoa) there is in literature.

As Magris says: “Kafka was perfectly aware that literature distanced him from the territory of death and enabled him to understand life, but leaving him outside. Just as it enabled him to understand the greatness of his Jewish father, a model man, but did not exactly enable him to be like him.”

Precisely because literature enables us to understand life, it leaves us outside it. It’s hard, but sometimes it’s the best thing that can happen to us. Reading and writing search for life, but they can lose it precisely because they’re focused entirely on life and on the search for it.

It may be the melancholy of the evening in which I am writing, but the truth is I’m talking about an inextricable knot of good and evil, of light and shade inherent in reading and literature. All this is hard, why fool ourselves? It’s a difficulty that, according to Gombrowicz, good literature has as the product of an instinct to sharpen spiritual life. There are times when I would recommend reading to my worst enemies.

Precisely because literature enables us to understand life, it tells us what can be, but also what could have been. There is nothing sometimes farther away from reality than literature, which is constantly reminding us that life is like this and the world has been organized like that, but it could be otherwise. There is nothing more subversive than literature, which aims to return us to true life by exposing what real life and History smother. Magris knows this very well, he is deeply interested in what could have been, had History or human life taken another course. Anyone who’s interested in this is interested in reading. This is not advocacy. After all, there are times—like now—when I wouldn’t recommend reading even to Pico’s moles, even to my worst enemies.

And in Argentina

From Jacobin:

“One of Milei’s biggest adversaries has been journalism,” Gonzalo Sarasqueta, the director of political communications studies at Spain’s Universidad Camilo José Cela, who studies populist rhetoric in Latin America, told Jacobin. The other has been the state. “What’s better than killing two birds with one stone, taking apart the media and attacking the state?” he said of Milei’s dismantling of Télam.

The attacks against Télam fit into a broader political communication strategy of defining the enemy and setting the narrative, Sarasqueta said. “He’s fighting against singer Lali Espósito much as Donald Trump fights against Taylor Swift.”

Since Milei took office, the impact on media has been notable. Argentina’s ranking in the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index has dropped by twenty-six places. In December, journalist and feminist Luciana Peker left the country after feeling threatened in Argentina. Milei has regularly demonized not only progressive and state-run media but also private outlets like Clarín and La Nación — preferring instead to use social media to broadcast his message, Sarasqueta explained.

“All the media does for him is distort the message, and this is a very Gramscian interpretation,” Sarasqueta said. “They are part of the cultural battle, and they defend interests that are against the interests of the majority of the people, of the people that Javier Milei defends.”

Télam employees worried about the long-term impacts of this strategy on the country’s press ecosystem.

Eliaschev, the Télam editor and trade unionist, noted that Télam was a key way of transmitting information from the capital to Argentina’s provinces, economically impoverished regions that overwhelmingly voted for Milei. The death by a thousand cuts strategy meant that these regions were the first to lose access to the news.

Nonetheless he remained hopeful that under a new government, Télam might be able to come back from its embers.

“The important thing to highlight is that the government did not manage to close the Télam agency, but they had to transform it,” he said. “Let’s say they managed to shrink it, but there is still a public news agency.” That, at least, is a reprieve.