Communicating Arts - Main Web Site"At this time, we know that more than twenty thousand Indigenous are walking directed to a small town called Chunchi, enter the Highlands of Chimborazo province, the heart of the mountains, walking during the day and night, with cold and rain, this is the largest indigenous protest of the history and the beginning of a civil war in Ecuador."
As I type this before midnight, March 14, 2012, it's about 60-deg.F. and raining in Chunchi, Chimborazo Province, Ecuador.
In relation to the above quoted statement, that's about how much I can get from the web.
Through my correspondent, I have photographs of the recent march supporting the interests of Ecuador's indigenous and criticizing the state's projects to mine without ample environmental protection, but nothing more than Hollywood would create "for atmosphere" by way of crowds and signage, not that they're not real, but in the same set from a kind of frontline, I don't have the newsies gift of digitally captured altercations, guns, or wreckage.
On the web, Al Jazeera featured the march without drama, and what might be gleaned from Google-translated friendly coverage seems altogether benign.
However, the unsettling themes in Central America's struggles may nonetheless be simmering along beneath the surface of the latest in crowd coverage.
On Ecuador and Hezbollah: Puder, Joseph. "Latin America: Iran's New Front Against the U.S." Front Page, February 7, 2012.
On Ecuador and heroin: Ramsey, Geofrey. "Ecuador Poppy Field Find Highlights Shifting Heroin Production. InterAmerican Security Watch, November 23, 2011.
On Ecuador and FARC: Times Topics. "Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC)." The New York Times, November 7, 2011.
While the Catholic Church may expect it has a Catholic country in Ecuador and urban Ecuadorans may expect their rural counterparts to mirror their own political sentiments (and that may be, but who knows?), my correspondent as well as the maps leave much room for conflict, the former by complaining about the unconverted pagan, the latter by telling of yet a sprawling natural frontier far from anchored by high speed highways, strip malls, and, perhaps, military and police barracks.
The State of Ecuador has presence throughout Ecuador, no doubt -- that's how poppy fields fall into the hands of those whose duty it is to destroy them -- but it may lack for the omnipresent control and security so completed and smoothly adjusted in North America and Europe as to go largely unnoticed and unremarked except as a do-good benefit praised for fighting crime, roping in assorted crackpots on the far left and right who manage to make war plans and arm themselves, and sleuthing out the shadows creeping from beneath the dark robes the Muslim Brotherhood has woven into of a broadly distributed and poisonous language program with "realpolitik" ends.
Rafael Correa's state-that-would-be-99-percent-good-in-all-things would have to be much smaller to be so, and so it may be so with its cities, international trade, and good enough infrastructure to function where the same has been concentrated, but as much may leave for unsavory incursion whole regions of semi-autonomous and as yet unsettled -- and not altogether Christian -- space.
Just as there now a historic mistake in trying to blame all Indigenous people for trying to provoke a coup state in Ecuador and to support FARC army, are the religious leaders, who studied in the Soviet Union and they are atheists, but they use these religious traditions indigenous to try to manipulate indigenous people, they have clay pots filled with water, earth and fruit to offer the gods, capture Christian churches and do ceremonies and rituals of worship fake gods and nature within the churches of the village and cities that fall under your [SIC] control, then, the indigenous people remember your [SIC] old traditions and practice again and they far away of the Christians faith.
Many of my fellow Americans would say to my correspondent, "So?"
But then too the funk of darker forces might drift in to bother the night air.
Somewhere tomorrow in Ecuador, someone may be cultivating poppy, moving drugs overland for eventual shipping by "fast boat" or even "narco-submarine" (see NPR. "Ecuador Seizes Drug-Running Super Submarine." April 20, 2011) while the Indigenous gather together to march on Quito for clean water and respect, and Iran, ever interested in uranium as well as establishing a base for infuence in the western hemisphere, works at elbowing into Ecuador's still open physical and political frontiers (see Warrick, Joby. "Iran seeking to expand influence in Latin America." The Washington Post, January 1, 2012).
So how much may one unfunded communicator know -- or gather -- from how distant a chair, even one comfortably "connected with the world" via broadband?
I want to know what is going on this Thursday, March 15, 2012, from midnight to midnight, in Chunchi, Chimborozo Province, Ecuador.
I want the photographs captioned and a Skype connection to the photographer offered; I want to see the video, perhaps time stamped, and, say, somewhere between four minutes and four hours away from the event recorded.
That day is coming.
Big Media will see it -- is seeing it -- first.
I'm certain little media -- my kind of media -- will experience something like the same (but different) soon enough.
# # #
Comments