From Sam Anderson’s “A History of Hooch“, a review of Iain Gately’s Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol (6 July 2008):
Aztecs liked fermented sap, but had a legal drinking age (52) higher than their average life expectancy – although every four years they’d hold a New Year’s festival called “Drunkenness of Children,” at which all citizens, including toddlers, were required to drink.
The Aztecs and their New Year’s Festival Read More »
From Celeste Biever’s “Language may shape human thought” (New Scientist: 19 August 2004):
Language may shape human thought – suggests a counting study in a Brazilian tribe whose language does not define numbers above two.
Hunter-gatherers from the Pirahã tribe, whose language only contains words for the numbers one and two, were unable to reliably tell the difference between four objects placed in a row and five in the same configuration, revealed the study.ÂÂ
…
For one, two and three objects, members of the tribe consistently matched Gordon’s pile correctly. But for four and five and up to ten, they could only match it approximately, deviating more from the correct number as the row got longer.
The Pirahã also failed to remember whether a box they had been shown seconds ago had four or five fish drawn on the top. When Gordon’s colleagues tapped on the floor three times, the Pirahã were able to imitate this precisely, but failed to mimic strings of four or five taps.
Language shapes thought Read More »
From Victor Bogado da Silva Lins’ letter in Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram (15 May 2004):
You mentioned in your last crypto-gram newsletter about a cover that makes a license plate impossible to read from certain angles. Brazilian people have thought in another low-tech solution for the same “problem”, they simply tie some ribbons to the plate or the car itself; when the car is running (speeding) the ribbons fly and get in front of the plate making it difficult to read the plate.
A cheap, easy way to obfuscate license plates Read More »
From Mary A. Dempsey’s “Fordlandia” (Michigan History: July/August 1994):
Screens were just one of the Yankee customs transported to Fordlandia and Belterra. Detroit physician L. S. Fallis, Sr., the first doctor sent from Henry Ford Hospital to run the Fordlandia medical center, attempted to eradicate malaria and hookworm among Brazilian seringueiros (rubber gatherers) by distributing quinine and shoes. The quinine was accepted but shoes were an unwelcome novelty. It is an exceptional photo that shows the shirtless seringueiros, machetes in hand, shod only with floppy rubber-soled sandals; their children went shoeless. The jungle dwellers also found Fordlandia’s two-family homes hopelessly hot and ugly and the idea of bathrooms repulsive. Even today, plumbing is a rarity in the jungle.
At the same time, Ford’s 6:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. work schedule was unpopular with plantation employees accustomed to slashing trees several hours before dawn, then resuming the work at sunset for piecemeal pay. But the promise of free housing and food, top-notch health care for the workers and their families, and a salary of thirty-seven cents a dayâ€â€double the regular wageâ€â€kept the seringueiros on the job. …
Generally, the company-imposed routine met hit-and-miss compliance. Children wore uniforms to school and workers responded favorably to suggestions they grow their own vegetables. But most ignored Ford’s no liquor rule and, on paydays, boats filled with potent cachacaâ€â€the local sugar-can brewâ€â€pulled up at the dock. Poetry readings, weekend dances and English sing-alongs were among the disputed cultural activities. …
Former Kalamazoo sheriff Curtis Pringle, a manager at Belterra, boosted labor relations when he eased off the Dearborn-style routine and deferred to local customs, especially when it came to meals and entertainment. Under Pringle, Belterra buildings did not contain the glass that made the powerhouse at Fordlandia unbearably hot, and weekend square dancing was optional. Alexander said Henry Ford balked at building a Catholic church at Fordlandiaâ€â€even though Catholicism was the predominant Christian religion in Brazil. The Catholic chapel was erected right away at Belterra. …
Alexander said of the long-closed but impeccably maintained facility that once boasted separate wards for men and women, thirty nurses, a dentist, three physicians and a pharmacist, who also administered anesthesia during surgery.
More on Fordlandia Read More »
From Alan Bellows’s “The Ruins of Fordlândia” (Damn Interesting: 3 August 2006):
On Villares’ advice, [Henry] Ford purchased a 25,000 square kilometer tract of land along the Amazon river, and immediately began to develop the area. …
Scores of Ford employees were relocated to the site, and over the first few months an American-as-apple-pie community sprung up from what was once a jungle wilderness. It included a power plant, a modern hospital, a library, a golf course, a hotel, and rows of white clapboard houses with wicker patio furniture. As the town’s population grew, all manner of businesses followed, including tailors, shops, bakeries, butcher shops, restaurants, and shoemakers. It grew into a thriving community with Model T Fords frequenting the neatly paved streets. …
But Ford’s effort to transplant America– what he called “the healthy lifestyle”– was not limited to American buildings, but also included mandatory “American” lifestyle and values. The plantation’s cafeterias were self-serve, which was not the local custom, and they provided only American fare such as hamburgers. Workers had to live in American-style houses, and they were each assigned a number which they had to wear on a badge– the cost of which was deducted from their first paycheck. Brazilian laborers were also required to attend squeaky-clean American festivities on weekends, such as poetry readings, square-dancing, and English-language sing-alongs.
One of the more jarring cultural differences was Henry Ford’s mini-prohibition. Alcohol was strictly forbidden inside Fordlândia, even within the workers’ homes, on pain of immediate termination. This led some industrious locals to establish businesses-of-ill-repute beyond the outskirts of town, allowing workers to exchange their generous pay for the comforts of rum and women. …
Workers’ discontent grew as the unproductive months passed. Brazilian workers – accustomed to working before sunrise and after sunset to avoid the heat of the day – were forced to work proper “American” nine-to-five shifts under the hot Amazon sun, using Ford’s assembly-line philosophies. And malaria became a serious problem due to the hilly terrain’s tendency to pool water, providing the perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes.
In December of 1930, after about a year of working in a harsh environment with a strict and disagreeable “healthy lifestyle”, the laborers’ agitation reached a critical mass in the workers’ cafeteria. Having suffered one too many episodes of indigestion and degradation, a Brazilian man stood and shouted that he would no longer tolerate the conditions. A chorus of voices joined his, and the cacophony was soon joined by an orchestra of banging cups and shattering dishes. Members of Fordlândia’s American management fled swiftly to their homes or into the woods, some of them chased by machete-wielding workers. A group of managers scrambled to the docks and boarded the boats there, which they moved to the center of the river and out of reach of the escalating riots.
By the time the Brazilian military arrived three days later, the rioters had spent most of their anger. Windows were broken and trucks were overturned, but Fordlândia survived. …
In 1933, after three years with no appreciable quantity of rubber to show for the investment, Henry Ford finally hired a botanist to assess the situation. The botanist tried to coax some fertile rubber trees from the pitiful soil, but he was ultimately forced to conclude that the land was simply unequal to the task. The damp, hilly terrain was terrible for the trees, but excellent for the blight. Unfortunately no one had paid attention to the fact that the land’s previous owner was a man named Villares– the same man Henry Ford had hired to choose the plantation’s site. Henry Ford had been sold a lame portion of land, and Fordlândia was an unadulterated failure. …
Be that as it may, Ford’s perseverance might have eventually paid off if it were not for the fact that scientists developed economical synthetic rubber just as Belterra was establishing itself. In 1945, Ford retired from the rubbering trade, having lost over $20 million in Brazil without ever having set foot there.
Henry Ford’s debacle in the jungle Read More »
From Mica Rosenberg’s “Guatemala forces end 10-year prisoner rule at jail” (The Washington Post: 25 September 2006):
Guatemalan security forces took over a jail run for over 10 years by inmates who built their own town on prison grounds complete with restaurants, churches and hard-drug laboratories.
Seven prisoners died when 3,000 police and soldiers firing automatic weapons stormed the Pavon prison just after dawn on Monday.
Corrupt guards would only patrol the prison’s perimeter and run the administration section while an “order committee” of hardened inmates controlled the rest. They smuggled in food, drink and luxury goods.
“The people who live here live better than all of us on the outside. They’ve even got pubs,” said soldier Tomas Hernandez, 25.
Pet dogs, including a whining puppy, roamed the deserted prison grounds after the raid. One inmate kept a spider monkey captive, national prison officials said.
But with army helicopters clattering overhead, police backed up by armored cars transferred Pavon’s 1,600 inhabitants to another prison, ending their lives of ease.
The inmates who died were killed in a shootout at the two-story wooden chalet of a convicted Colombian drug trafficker knows as “El Loco,” or “The Madman.”
Blood was splattered on the house’s walls and floor. The Colombian had a widescreen television and high-speed Internet.
Pavon was one of the worst prisons in Guatemala’s penitentiary system, where common criminals, rival “mara” street gangs and drug traffickers often battle for control.
Police had not been into Pavon, on the edge of the town of Fraijanes, since 1996.
It was originally built for 800 inmates as a farm prison where prisoners could grow their own food. But the prison population grew over time and inmates began to construct their own homes on the grounds.
Guards let prisoners bring in whatever they wanted and inmates set up laboratories to produce cocaine, crack and liquor inside Pavon. …
Inmates extorted and kidnapped victims on the outside by giving orders via cell phone. …
They also killed Luis Alfonso Zepeda, a convicted murderer who headed the “order committee.”
Zepeda earned around $25,000 a month from extortion, renting out prison grounds to other inmates and drug trafficking, police said.
His son Samuel lived illegally inside the prison to help run the crime empire, even though he was never sent there by a court. …
Inmates ran at least two churches, one Catholic and the other Evangelical, and restaurants serving typical fare like stews and tortillas.
Stores controlled by the prisoners sold soft drinks and potato chips brought in from the outside.
A prison completely run by the inmates Read More »
From Robert Sherrill’s “100 (Plus) Years of Regime Change” (The Texas Observer: 14 July 2006):
Kissinger, then secretary of state, was certain he detected the odor of communism in the election of Salvador Allende Gossens to the presidency of Chile. …
Chile was one of the most stable countries in South America, with a high literacy rate, a relatively large middle class, and a strong civil society. But millions of its people lived in desperate poverty, and Allende made no secret of his ambition to lift that class – and to do it by controlling some of the giant corporations operating in Chile but owned by yanquis.
Topping his hit list, besides consumer-product companies like PepsiCo Inc., were the world’s two largest copper mining companies, Kennecott Corp. and Anaconda Mining Co., and International Telephone and Telegraph Co., all owned by U.S. interests. Allende wanted the Chilean government to take them over. …
Kinzer’s account of these rebellious years ends with the death of Allende in La Moneda, the presidential palace and traditional seat of Chilean democracy. He had been president for 1,042 days. He refused an offer of free passage out of the country and committed suicide.
So Kissinger and Nixon and Rockefeller and their friends got what they wanted: a Chile run by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who took office after the coup of September 11, 1973.
Why the US toppled Chile’s government Read More »
From Robert Sherrill’s “100 (Plus) Years of Regime Change” (The Texas Observer: 14 July 2006):
At roughly the same time Secretary of State Dulles was destroying democracy in Iran, he was also busy destroying democracy in Central America, and once again it was on behalf of a renegade industry: United Fruit Co. …
“Few private companies have ever been as closely interwoven with the United States government as United Fruit was during the mid-1950s,†writes Kinzer. For decades, Dulles had been one of its principal legal counselors. (At one time Dulles negotiated an agreement with Guatemala that gave United Fruit a 99-year lease on a vast tract of land, tax free.) Dulles’ brother – Allen, the CIA Director – had also done legal work for the company and owned a big block of its stock. So did other top officials at State; one had previously been president of United Fruit. The head of our National Security Council was United Fruit’s former chairman of the board, and the president of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development was a former board member.
These fine chaps and their numerous colleagues in our government were, not surprisingly, very upset when between 1944 and 1954, Guatemala entered what would be known as its “democratic spring,†denoting the presidencies of Juan José Arevalo and – after the first peaceful transfer of power in Guatemalan history – Jacobo Arbenz.
What those two did was nothing less than breathtaking. Under Arevalo, the National Assembly was persuaded to establish the first social security system, guarantee the rights of trade unions, fix a 48-hour workweek, and even slap a modest tax on the big landholders – meaning three American companies: a huge electric monopoly, a rail monopoly, and, of course, United Fruit, which controlled the other two.
Arbenz was even bolder. He persuaded the National Assembly to pass the Agrarian Reform Law, which gave the government the power to seize and redistribute uncultivated land on estates larger than 672 acres. United Fruit owned more than 550,000 acres, about one-fifth of the country’s arable land, but cultivated less than 15 percent – while many thousands of Guatemalans were starving for land. So in 1953, Arbenz’s government seized 234,000 uncultivated acres of United Fruit’s land, for which the government offered in compensation (one can imagine the vengeful hilarity this must have stirred in Arbenz’s circle) a paltry $1.185 million – the value United Fruit had declared each year for tax purposes. …
Arbenz was forced into exile and replaced by Col. Carlos Armas, who promptly canceled reforms and established a police state.
Why the US toppled Guatamala’s democratic government Read More »
From Robert Sherrill’s “100 (Plus) Years of Regime Change” (The Texas Observer: 14 July 2006):
[Stephen Kinzer’s] Overthrow is an infuriating recitation of our government’s military bullying over the past 110 years – a century of interventions around the world that resulted in the overthrow of 14 governments – in Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, Chile, Iran, Grenada, Afghanistan, and … Iraq. …
Most of these coups were triggered by foreign combatants and then taken over and finished by us. But four of them, in many ways the worst of the lot, were all our own, from conspiracy to conclusion. American agents engaged in complex, well-financed campaigns to bring down the governments of Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile. None would have fallen – certainly not in the same way or at the same time – if Washington had not acted as it did.
Each of these four coups was launched against a government that was reasonably democratic (with the arguable exception of South Vietnam) …. They led to the fall of leaders who embraced American ideals, and the imposition of others who detested everything Americans hold dear. They were not rogue operations. Presidents, cabinet secretaries, national security advisers, and CIA directors approved them …. The first thing all four of these coups have in common is that American leaders promoted them consciously, willfully, deliberately, and in strict accordance with the laws.
14 governments the US has overthrown in 110 years Read More »
From Alex Bellos’s “Coke. Guns. Booty. Beats.” (Blender: June 2005):
In the slums of Rio De Janeiro, drug lords armed with submachine guns have joined forces with djs armed with massive sound systems and rude, raunchy singles. Welcome to the most excitingâ€â€and dangerousâ€â€underground club scene in the world. …
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is the glamorous city of Carnival, the statue of Christ the Redeemer and Copacabana beach. But the poorest fifth of its residents – about a million people, many of them black – live in the favelas, the claustrophobic brick shantytowns that cover the hills and sprawl chaotically out for miles into its outskirts. In the favelas, the city police have effectively relinquished control to armed drugs factions, who run their territory according to their own strict codes. Estimates put the number of young men involved in drug trafficking at between 20,000 and 100,000. It’s just like the movie City of God – only much more violent.
Favelas, the slums of Rio De Janeiro Read More »