The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene

I was sixteen and had finally acquired what you might call a social life — in other words regular weekend activities involving members of the opposite sex — when it was suggested by the gatekeepers of said activities (the girls) that we should all go to see Richard Gere in the 1984 film version of The Honorary Consul at the Kensington Odeon.

While it might in some ways have been a girl's film — thanks in no small part to the now familiarly naked torso of Mr Gere — but Greene's novel is essentially a man's book, a book about men making their way within a culture of machismo, men belaboured with the memories of dead fathers (and in some cases dead great grandfathers), men that frequent the local brothel in search of so much more than 'relief', and men willing to suffer poverty and pain in the pursuit of a vocation, be it politics, literature or the right measure of whisky.

It's not hard to see why Greene was so pleased with this late work. It's less tortured and tortuous than The Power and the Glory — Catholic guilt-lite if you like — and yet possesses a depth which it wears rather lightly as he cloaks it in the shiny outer-garment of a first rate thriller plot.

At least until the last 40 pages or so where it morphs into a rather dismal cassock and the Catholic trauma comes to the fore in this final, less worldly section, most particularly in the person of 'Father' Rivas, sadly little more than a cipher for Greene's own battle with the notions of hope, sacrifice and sin and a God who ought to be pitied as well as worshiped.

It's all a bit over-egged, but I did like the exposition of a God in need of redemption: "I believe God is suffering the same evolution that we are, but perhaps with more pain," León suggests to Eduardo at one stage when the game is almost up. (Take note too of Aquino the Marxist's position: "Of course God is evil. God is capitalism. Lay up treasures in heaven - they will bring you a hundred per cent interest for eternity.")

Anyway, as I recall the movie was of course a lot more interested in this plot than it was in character. I hadn't seen a Richard Gere movie before this one, so had little in the way of expectation except that I'd been told to expect some cooing from our female companions. I couldn't say he was at all mis-cast as 'cold fish' Eduardo Plarr, but from what I remember now, Michael Caine didn't quite achieve the nuanced performance of Fortnum that Greene's text calls for.

I've had this first edition hardback copy for many years, since the day I found it on my father's bookshelf. He denies ownership and we have concluded from the name signed on the page inside the cover, that it must have belonged to a long passed friend of my mother's who rather foolishly opted to lend it to her.

Milking La Tetita

Just when we thought Justin Bieber was the most annoying thing to emerge from the 'yutubeh', along came this...



Wendy followed up her breakthrough Huayno smash with Cerveza, both clips viewed by over 3m people, though judging by the comments beneath them, not universally well received.

Undeterred, the Peruvian teen has taken her rechinazos folclóricos around the globe, appearing live with Calle 13 and Jiggy Drama. The invite to WOMAD might take a while yet.

Personally I think the arpista in the backing group ought to consider a solo career, though he might need a stage name as he currently answers to that of Hugo Chávez.

The Spanish media in particular has been taking the Miguel, the hosts of Sé Lo Que Hicisteis going so far as to compose their own traditional Iberian ditty in response to Sulca's threat to show up in the old imperial heartland:



I'm quite partial to this dark beer trance remix of Cerveza:

Le Spectacle?

Chilean President Sebastián Piñera was last night interviewed on La Noche by Claudia Gurisatti. Still visibly throbbing with satisfaction deriving from the San José mine rescue, Piñera dismissed the remarks of Miguel Bosé, who just the other day claimed to be profoundly irritated, not in fact by Gurisatti, though she is humongously irritatting, but by the way the miners' predicament had been converted into a reality TV show.

Huh? So it's OK for musicians to use contrived spectacle to achieve political ends, but not actual politicians? Piñera rightly went on to point out that it would have been much harder for him to drum up support for the significant changes, improvements perhaps, to Chile's laws affecting labour conditions and mine safety in general, had there not been a degree of stage management in his government's response to the emergency.

South of the Border (2009)

In this documentary, written by Tariq Ali, but essentially presented as the work of Oliver Stone, the renegade film director meets the bane of Fox News and NTN24 and attempts to get beyond the big American warning sign saying 'dictator'.

Chávez is shown as the leader of a popular rebellion in South America which has chosen as its targets American IMF-led imperialism and predatory capitalism in general.

The most exposition-heavy parts of the movie look at the 2002 coup-attempt in Venezuela and the US role in this. The failed golpe is held up as a credible explanation for Chávez's subsequent bolshiness and authoritarian tendencies.

Stone then goes on to meet several other South American leaders including (poignantly) the Kirchners, as well as Evo, Correa, Lula, Lugo and the younger Castro, all of which are presented as the support crew for Venezuelan-led Bolivarianism. Strength in numbers is the new circumstance of South America's new anti-elite, Stone suggests.

Now, standing up to US bulleying is probably a good thing. But the makers of this film have clearly fallen into the trap of suggesting that many of the significant issues facing the region — poverty, development, impunity, drugs, political freedom — are all somehow just the effluent from a misguided US foreign policy. This smacks of American exceptionalism in its reversed-out, leftist guise.

The end result is a movie which isn't really interested in the particular local narratives and their considerable variation across the spectrum of Bolivarianist indignation. The target market for the film is clearly the mass of open-minded but ignorant Americans who might otherwise be wondering if Evo's breakfast habits mean they can get a real high from their morning cocoa. It's a shame that it presents an essentially fair, but still rather partial view of the 'revolution' taking shape in the bottom half of the hemisphere.

That said, fans of larger-than-life Hugo — especially those like myself who are more inclined to question his political achievements on the ground — will enjoy this unbalanced movie primarily for the portrait it provides of this sincere if occasionally oafish Presidente.

I particularly loved the part where Stone encourages him to ride a kid's bicycle around the site of his childhood 'mud hut', and when said bike duly crumbles depositing his large frame into said mud, Chávez jumps up with a nervous laugh and exclaims "oh no, I'll have to pay for that!".

Grade: B (+-)

Isla Presidencial, fit the fourth

Isla Preidencial, fit the third

Isla Presidencial, fit the second

I'm posting this because I rather like the fact that the makers tipped me off that the second episode was now available!

Isla Presidencial

Here's the trailer for the drole animation created by some young Venezuelans and showcased last night on the Bayly show. If that has whetted your appetite, and you are already fretting about the imminent winding up of Lost, here's the first full installment of Isla Presidencial:

Meros orgullosos

Listening to the various representatives of the Chilean government speaking in the aftermath of Sunday's earthquake, you'd think it was their primary concern was to ensure that it occurs to nobody in the wider world to compare them with Haiti.

It's like watching a cyclist come of his bike in the park and land face first on the concrete. He stands up with an obviously bloodied face and when you go over and offer to help he says something like "No, I'm fine really...it's just a scratch, I've been practicing my emergency face forward dismounts. It wasn't as bad as it looked at all....not at all like that poor black guy who crashed into a tree a while ago....did you see him? Boy did he look messed up..."

Meanwhile it's only a matter of time before some desperate mother searching for nappies for her kids in Concepción gets blown away by one of those gun-toting householders local news crews have become fascinated with.

NASA has reported that the monster quake threw the Earth's rotation out by 8cm, which means that Sunday was a slightly shorter day than it had planned on being. Does this mean they'll have to reset that atomic clock in Greenwich?

The image below shows how the quake's tsunami energy dissipated across the Pacific, giving one a clear idea how both Japan and Australasia 'dodged the bullet' last weekend.

Handy guide to regional leadership

The 'Unity' summit in Mexico failed to live up to its name yesterday when a full on pelea threatened to break out between the leaders of Venezuela and Colombia. It all kicked off when Chávez accused Uribe of sending sicarios over the border to have him whacked. Uribe responded by puffing out his chest and demanding that they settle this like men.

Jaime Bayly reported last night that Evo Morales had hidden beneath a table during the 'desmadre', but the Bolivian President later appeared before gathered reporters in order to deliver further jibes at his Colombian counterpart's expense...from a safe distance: "Uribe sólo llega a la foto y al almuerzo."

In case you hadn't noticed, the quality of leadership across Latin America is patchy at best, and while activities such as setting up regional clubs which exclude the gringos or standing firm beside Argentina against Britain's imperialist Queen, do indeed deliver telegenic moments of apparent camaraderie, the truth is that they are usually so glad to get away from issues of legitimacy back home, that the release of tension will often manifest itself as fraternal strife at these kind of diplomatic junkets.

Anyway, here's my handy guide to the region's Presidents and Prime Ministers, which reflects my subjective opinion on their qualities as both politicians and human beings:

Brazil	Lula	Good Bloke
Peru	Gárcia	Baboso
Chile	Bachelet / Piñera	Good Blokette / Jury’s out
Argentina	Fernández	Babosa
Ecuador	Correa	Good Bloke
Colombia	Uribe	Baboso
Uruguay	Vázquez /Mujica	Good Bloke, but looks like a plastic surgeon / Good Bloke
Paraguay	Lugo	Baboso - aka "El cura braguetero"
Bolivia	Morales	Baboso
Venezuela	Chávez	Extra Baboso
Guyana	Jagdeo	Good Bloke
Suriname	Venitiaan	A saaaber
F. Guiana	Sarkozy...en effet	Bon Oeuf
Panama	Martinelli	Baboso
Costa Rica	Chinchilla	Potential Good Blokette
Nicaragua	Ortega	Once a Baboso, always..?
El Salvador	Funes	Potential Baboso
Guatemala	Colom	Good Bloke
Honduras	Lobo	Baboso
Belize	Barrow	Not sure
Dom. Republic	Fernández	Borderline Baboso

Update: Attentive readers may have spotted that I accidentally left Raul Castro and Felipe Calderón out of this table, class-act babosos both. (Most of Mexico is in North America however.) Meanwhile Guatemala's former patán-in-chief Alfonso Portillo has elected to pull a sickie in order to avoid extradition to the US.

"Reina de Inglaterra, a ti te hablo"

Latin America's heads of state are meeting today - in Cancún of all places - to discuss how they can reduce the influence of the USA in the hemisphere. It seems that the basic idea is to create a new playgroup from which the Yanks and Canucks can be excluded, thereby reproducing the gratifying sensation of hurting their feelings.

Meanwhile Chávez made one of his little speeches yesterday directed at H.M. the Queen no less, tuteandola and insisting that las cosas han cambiado, such that this time Argentina won't stand alone. He was of course referring to the possibility of a retro-style war between the UK and the Argies, who might just be tempted into another ill-considered act of aggression against the English-speaking, right-hand driving Falkland islanders, now that a British firm has commenced drilling for oil in the waters around Las Malvinas.

No matter that Argentina's claim over the islands is as credible as Guatemala's over Belize.

King Juan Carlos and his missus Sofia were also treated to a bit of ad hoc disrespect this weekend just before the start of the basketball Copa del Rey when spectators in the Bizkaia Arena in Bilbao chanted 'fuera! fuera!' at them during the singing of the Spanish national anthem.

El niño terrible para Presidente

One small but significant change that occurred in this household during my absence was a re-jigging of the evening TV viewing schedules around the 9pm Bayly show on NTN24.

V has always been drawn to public figures with starkly unconventional outlooks on the world. That the Hispanic media consistently refer to this bisexual, right-of-centre novelist* and political commentator as "strange" was good enough for her in this instance.

These days Bayly is using his current affairs celebrity to launch his candidature for the Presidency of Peru next year. Last night's show was dedicated to an interview he conducted with his novia, Silvia Nuñez del Arco Vidal, a would-be writer just out of college, now being offered up to the nation as their future first lady.

Golden-haired, fair skinned Silvia is "una delicia" who has cured him of his impotence, the 45-year-old Bayly admitted during their discussion. It struck me that the whole thing had been staged primarily in order to cause her father the most exquisite form of paternal pain.

When the couple recently went to Miami on holiday to catch a Ricardo Arjona concert, Bayly was briefly held by police after their hotel manager reported that he'd checked in with an under-age girl.

Silvia has a book in the oven and has therefore resisted Bayly's plea that she should have a bun in it. "Writing a novel is like giving birth..." Hers is due in April, but I suspect Vargas Loser needn't lose any sleep over the impending competition. Nor perhaps need he fret about this other upper-class hack achieving the political milestone he fell just short of, as Bayly is the sort of character who tends to get up the noses of dirt poor indios and the Miraflores set in equal measure.

He is at his funniest when he deconstructs the speeches of Hugo Chávez. The other night the arch-clown announced a series of measures to limit the use of electricity in Venezuela, which he blamed on el Niño! (...but not el niño terrible! ). These were encased in so many layers of bureaucratic conditionals that even Chávez faltered as he tried to explain them and had to keep re-reading from his notes. The people of Venezuela are going to be thrown into a permanent state of domestic paranoia over their utility bills, the Bolivarian leader's regular tormentor suggested.

Bayly is a bit like a Latin American Charlie Brooker, but he could learn a thing or two from the latter about brevity and not over-labouring his best gags. V and I have agreed you could improve his nightly show immensely simply by giving him a slot half the size at 30 minutes.

Here's Bayly on Hugo's performance in Copenhagen:



And here's Charlie Brooker on US News Networks:



* Jaime Bayly wrote La Mujer de mi Hermano and other works with homsexual/bisexual themes, such as the semi-autobiographical No Se Lo Digas a Nadie.

TV viewing diary - Amazon with Bruce Parry

I've already sounded off a bit about Parry's seemingly rather partial presentation of the lifestyles and impact of indigenous groups living in the Amazon basin. But in truth the middle episodes of this series were excellent, with Parry's congenial and receptive nature ideally-suited to encounters with marginal, micegenated groups such as the enterprising yet illegal miners of Grota Rico and the Ribeirinhos of the Mamiraua reserve.

His willingness to show the sophisticated side of life in Manaus was also refreshing. You rarely come across any commentators on TV (or even in guide-books) who are prepared to engage with upper-middle class life in Latin America as anything other than essentially immoral and parasitical.

However, it was "timbeeer" again in the last episode in which Parry finally arrived on the Atlantic shoreline. "I'm nackered," he concluded, before delivering a string of platitudes about communities, both Amazonian and global. In the final analysis the great river belongs to neither in quite the same legalistic sense as it does to the government and people of Brazil, and the programme would have been improved by a bit more focus on that dimension.

I felt a bit sorry for the last bunch of indigenes whose hospitality the Beeb took full advantage of, because they'd obviously been misled into believing that a BBC2 audience in the UK could make a major difference to their relative position in the game of Amazonian interest groups.

Police discuss wages policy in Brazil

Yikes, this hasn't happened yet in Antigua...but we live perilously close to the main police station!

Amazon with Pruce Parry

In scenes reminiscent of a northern English town after closing time on Friday night, part two saw Parry joining the Achuar Indians of the Peruvian Amazon in one of their regular communal vomiting sessions. (Non-UK readers may instead recall the puking puppet in Team America.)

V joked that these 'vomitindios' were probably all drinking sweet papaya juice while the poor unwanted gringo was made to down four litres of the 'piss one chango' recipe for Ayahuasca...para que no le quedan ganas de regresar!

While the programme is revealing of the potential impact of globalised business - legal and illegal - on Amazonian communities, it also attests to a somewhat hypocritical streak of prejudice against modern life in general. Parry, making use of planes, choppers and all sorts of outboard motors on his journey 'from source to sea', at one stage describes a puddle of crude oil oozing from a drilling facility as "really not great stuff". 

Nor, once he had come down off the Andes, did we get to see much of the extraordinarily diverse wildlife that Parry has periodically mentioned - in fact in this week's episode, the only evidence of the great river's fauna were a barbecued monkey and some hapless catfish that the Achuar extract from the river by deoxygenating it using local leaves. This poisoning of the river is impermanent and fully sustainable Parry reassured us, unlike of course, the over-keen harvesting activities of the outsiders. 

And this perhaps is the problem I have with this kind of British TV  documentary - when a white American man dances with a snake, he is a figure of ridicule, but when it's a member of one of these museum communities, a rather phoney reverence for tribal superstitions of all kinds kicks in. 

I like my travellers to be a bit more judgmental, with a sense of what they could teach as well as learn. Parry however follows the mold of other affable BBC nomads like Michael Palin and Louis Theroux - though of course the irony with the latter's films is that he affects his own brand of receptive relativism, convincing his hosts of his fascination for their sub-cultures while discreetly holding them up to the most acrid and knowing kind of mockery. 

Passing another Achuar township further down Parry noted that this lot had been less wary of commercial intrusion and thus now benefitted from jobs, electricity and TV. "But what had they lost..?" Don't you just hate it when presenters toss that little rhetorical question into the mix and then make little effort to answer it.  

Nobody really wants an L-Dopa-style of development for these indigenous peoples - the kind familiar from the history of the United Fruit Company elsewhere in the hemisphere - bonanza followed by devastating burn-out. Nevertheless, who are we to say that the Achuar would be wrong to aspire to a life with more to it than war, wife-beating, fish suffocation and serial chundering? Some sort of long-term exposure to the globalised world and its values is surely inevitable and in a sense desirable. It should however be based on an exchange which emulates intercourse not violation - consensual sex rather than rape. 

Boulangerie

Our favourite Hispanic TV programme these days is Boulangerie with Bruno Gillot and Olivier Hanocq, two fantastically incomprehensible Frenchmen who own a Buenos Aires bread-shop with an 'artesanal' wood-fire oven dating back to 1911 - L'Epi.

Last Sunday they showed us how to make a ham sandwich with a leisurely nine hours preparation time! (Pain Faluche and a home-cooked leg of ham.)

Here's a clip someone has uploaded to YouTube. They're speaking Spanish, though you'd hardly know it. (That they learned it in Argentina just adds to the fun.)

There would appear to be a whole gang of these Gallic exiles in BA...clearly a global mecca for people with silly accents. (see also...)

Global Warming in action

30,000 lbs of meat and a lot of smoke!

You are the last!

Te-te-te metiste conmigo pajarito...

Quantum of Solace = $690?

V passed on a great story last night about the mayor of a small town in northern Chile called Sierra Gorda who discovered that the crew for the new Bond movie were filming on his patch and trying to pass it off as Bolivia. He gathered a posse of two hundred men and drove out to the location at Baquedano in a big truck and proceeded to disrupt the shoot for several hours.

Things got even worse when the production team tried to make him go away for $690.

The mineral-rich Antofagasta region has been in dispute since Chile snatched it after warring with Bolivia between 1879-83 and the two countries have yet to restore diplomatic relations it seems.

Mayor Carlos López was later quoted as saying: "I also disagree with national territory being used as locations to represent other countries...even in a fictional film, unfortunately friendly, neighbouring countries use decisions like this to make unjustified claims."

Remesas

The credit crunch in the US is starting to affect economies further south in an interesting way: the flow of dollars remitted by Latin Americans to their home countries has begun to weaken.

In Mexico for instance, these remesas represent the second largest source of 'foreign investment' while in Haiti they account for a third of the local economy. The weakness of the Dollar and a slow-down in the US construction industry are aggravating factors.

Yet as the currencies in countries like Mexico and Guatemala largely share the fate of the Dollar, travel writers are starting to sing the praises of such destinations, because their money hasn't lost its purchasing power down there to quite the extent that it has elsewhere.