2024-01-21 05:22:03
The ideal of the shock-type experience is the catastrophe Walter BENJAMIN, Book of Passages “The problem, brother, is that an eleven-year-old child can shoot you dead there.” One hears this phrase from the lips of the chronicler and novelist Esteban Michelena, in the peaceful and welcoming environment of the Spanish Bookstore in Quito, and it is difficult to believe that they are talking to him about the same country, to which he is coming for the first time. A land of people as warm and friendly as few I have ever known, a city that, while still participating in the proverbial Latin American indiscipline, is not perceived as hostile at all. MORE ‘PASSAGES OF THE XXI’ news Si Adriano in Utrecht news Si The Iraqi night Traditionally, Ecuador had a reputation for being a haven of peace in the middle of a turbulent continent, due to its situation between a Colombia shaken by guerrillas and drug trafficking and a Peru which has not been precisely characterized by avoiding turbulence. Something has changed, and there are still months before the prison uprising against the Government of President Noboa, with the subsequent declaration of internal conflict and the authorization of the Army to fire on members of criminal gangs, shows the world in the first days of 2024 the fracture that cracks the foundations of the country. Michelena speaks, born in Quito in 1963, from Esmeraldas, a city in the north to which he has strong ties, and capital of the province of the same name, bordering Colombia, which for some time, like Guayaquil, has been the main port from Ecuador, has been taken over by drug trafficking mafias as an exit point for Colombian drugs to Panama, from where they are reshipped to the United States and Europe. Related News standard No Two suspects arrested in the murder of the prosecutor who was investigating the assault on a television in Ecuador The Police are confident of arresting two other people in the next few hours Because, let’s not forget, it is the wealthy and at the same time restless citizens of the developed world the one that pumps the flow of dollars and euros that keeps the machinery of this criminal industry at full capacity. A monster that subverts the social order of a city, bringing its kids from the earliest age to hitmen paid by criminal organizations, and that is even capable of putting a country like Ecuador in check, whose State has seen and he has wanted them, using all his resources, to stop the coup for the moment. Tragic realism “They changed our timbales for shrapnel,” Michelena mourns bitterly, alluding to the popular music, with African roots, characteristic of Esmeraldas. In his latest novel, ‘The Past Does Not Forgive’, a fiction set in that land, with the real background of the surreptitious but overwhelming infiltration of drug traffickers, he sings a torn elegy to that loss of joy at the hands of violence and fear. . Tragic realism, he calls it, and in its pages he describes the law of silence that has allowed metastasis to take over the social fabric. He puts it on the lips of the black Daddy, a dark character who summarizes it in these terms: «The screwed thing in this dreamy little town is that whoever knows something about someone, he also knows that they know something about him. They understand me? Therefore, everyone better keep quiet. So, all flat, all small.” Or what is the same: everyone even and with their mouths closed. This is how evil ends up taking hold. Above, A large square presided over by the Monastery of San Francisco, in the historic center of Quito. On these lines: the Middle of the World Monument, where the yellow line marks the line of the equator (left) and The inner courtyard of the former Archbishop’s Palace in the capital of the country LORENZO SILVA A similar diagnosis is formulated by Rubén Darío Buitrón, another of the writers and journalists with whom the traveler converses in Quito, and who, like the rest of his interlocutors, conveys an impression of affability and intelligence. Just a few days after the outbreak of January 2024, in an article titled Did we really not see it coming?, he asked: “Were we not able to see that poverty in the countryside, migration to big cities and Would any hope that the country gives to young people end up being the seed of an army of hitmen in the hands of drug trafficking? Welcome to the adventure of reading. Although this time, on the adventure of reading the tragedy that kills us.” Reading them both, one wonders how it is possible that the scene of this tragedy is the place that he keeps in his memory after the trip. The sky of Quito, a city located almost three thousand meters high, is the clearest and most luminous that you have ever seen in any city. At the foot of the volcanoes that watch over it and from time to time disturb it with eruptions and earthquakes, its white or colored facades shine under a powerful sun that not even the clouds that move above it ever completely overshadow. Guayaquil, taken over by drug trafficking The main port of Ecuador is the departure point for Colombian drugs to Panama, from where they are re-shipped to the United States and Europe. Through the old city, so well cared for that it attracts attention, one walks with the feeling of going back in time and at the same time admired by the graceful survival of the traces of the Spanish presence. You can feel the wealth and strength of viceregal Quito in the cathedral building, in the sumptuous church of the Company of Jesus – or La Compañía, simply as Quito people know it –, in the monumental convent of San Francisco, in the palace of the Royal Court, today the Government, or in the Archbishop’s palace, converted into a shopping center with restaurants that take advantage of its covered patio. In the modern expansion, with wide avenues, the brand new metro stations or the Iñaquito shopping center draw attention, where the Librería Española has another store that offers travelers the opportunity to chat for more than two hours with a reading public. generous and insightful. Time and again, a cordial and cultivated Ecuador comes across, demanding a more prosperous and just society. Seeing how the violence of the most vile impulses shakes him produces a painful unease. The tourist’s game North of Quito passes the equator line, and on the same line you can visit Mitad del Mundo, a charming and quiet recreational park with a monument erected on the divide that divides the planet into its two hemispheres. The tourist’s game is to place one foot on each side, to feel for a moment straddling the two halves of the globe. Beyond the game, Ecuador finds itself these days divided in a dramatic way by the opposing realities that make up our world: the abrupt inequality between rich and poor, the pulse between justice and organized crime, and the inextricable plot in which those two divisions intersect and feed each other, to the constant detriment of the weak and persistent profit of the powerful, with the result of ending up becoming law, as the sophist Thrasymachus said, what suits the strongest. And to push so many outcasts, in their desperation, to destructive nihilism. Sometimes the fortitude and stoicism with which those affected by this accumulation of abuses accept their fate is impressive. Without the smile that is installed on her face leaving her face, Andrea, a Quito native who studied in Barcelona, says how funny it seemed to her that upon arriving they warned her of the danger of the carelessness that operated in the subway. “That’s all?” She –she says that she asked them–. «In my land there are no carelessness; There, if they want to rob you, they attack you with a stake pierced with nails. As for the Quito metro – built, by the way, by a Spanish company – there is no danger of being robbed in any way. Months after its completion, it has not yet entered service. There are those who say that due to lack of qualified personnel to operate it; others, due to unresolved deficiencies in the system to ensure ticket collection. One would like to believe that the pothole where Ecuador runs aground today, where a good part of Latin America runs aground, is not a kind of curse, as the Colombian Mauricio Villegas suggests in ‘The old malaise of the New World’: the inheritance of the so-called “Creole liveliness” «, a culture where the laws were only nominal and the advantage players usually prevailed. One would like to believe that under the transparent sky of Quito another project is possible.
#sky #Quito
The sky of Quito
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