processedspirits:

Mexico’s leading presidential candidate is handsome, popular and still a mystery.

If any of you are aware of what’s happening in the world, you should know about the protests in Mexico city. In Twitter, the hashtag #yosoy132 has been ‘worldwide trending topic’ for the last 4 days. The news appear in multiple american and european newspapers (washington post, NY times, El país Spain, huffington post…) but not in the mexican newspapers. The elections are getting closer and people are walking down the streets screaming for freedom and information. The main candidate Enrique Peña Nieto is just another product of the main television company and the old ruling InstitutionalRevolutionary Party, known as the PRI, which held Mexico’s presidency without interruption from 1929 to 2000, leaving the country in a state of corruption, economic crisis and violence. 

Important facts about this candidate:
-Anonymous leaked important documents in which the main television company agrees to show Enrique Peña Nieto as the best option for the elections.
With millions of pesos involved of course. 
-Wikileaks also showed important conversations about this candidate between the mexican and american government. 

-In 2006, when this candidate was governor of the mexican state a massacre was held in Atenco, State of Mexico, in which hundreds of people were violently attacked, more than 20 women were raped and two kids were killed. The candidate never clarified what happened.

-A couple years ago, when a teacher took part of a gay march, the state government (PRI) knew about this and later, he got fired. After this, the teacher who had a doctorate in education for the disabled and was director of a center for the development of disabled youth talked to Enrique Peña Nieto who just said “the government hates fags”, after this the teacher was arrested. He spend months in a high security jail where he got raped multiple times in public areas. The reason? They said “you should not mess with the governor Peña Nieto”.
He had to go to the hospital and tried to report what happened, no one listened to him. He is now exiled in the usa where he cannot work.

I don’t want my leader to be corrupt, ignorant, homophobic and a fucking asshole. 
So please sign this cause, or if you live in Mexico, go to the second protest this Wednesday and fight for your right to be informed. 

If you want to help, just sign this petition so the UNITED NATIONS can inspect the transparency of the mexican elections. 

 

always thinking about this!!! does it matter if my memory of an event is a distorted version of the way i actually experienced it? how does that affect my judgment in the present? Like all psychology phenoms, the only thing you can do is be aware of potential biases…!

The 21st of May is a national holiday in Chile commemorating a battle in la Guerra de la Pacífica (Chile vs. Peru) in the 1800s. It’s also the day when the president gives a huge public speech before the congreso, which happens to be here in Valpo. So along with the military parade, etc., there is a march, and everyone who’s pissed off at the gobierno showed up. (I wuz there.)

I’m procrastinating. But this is important. La Violeta!

Is anybody out there? I haven’t put any words out here into cyberspace for what seems like forever, but the world keeps turning! I’m still in Valpo! Still taking classes! Still filled with energy! Still eating a lot of fruit! Still exploring the city! Still taking capoeira! Still filling up pages of my little red notebook with new spanish vocab! Still happy! 

More details?

I switched families at the end of March. For the first month, I lived in Viña del Mar in a high rise in front of the Unimarc (supermercado). It was a block from the beach and the family was nice, but we definitely did not click and it was an uncomfortable environment for me – far too clean and white and quiet. So I told my exchange program and they switched me to a family in Valparaíso, on Cerro Alegre, one of the most beautiful hills in the city. Here there are 3 kids – 9-year old Coty, 15-year old Andrés, and 22-year old Belén, who’s actually the niece. My new host mom is a lot younger and more open, and so sweet and loving – actually shows emotion! The dad works in Santiago during the week but comes home on weekends. I can breathe easier here, I’m no longer afraid to make a little bit of a mess, and the view out of my window makes me droooooool. Plus living in Valpo means spending almost all of my time in Valpo, which – wow, duh – is really what I need to be doing.

The city is not big, but it is a labyrinth. It’s built from the ocean up to the cerros and spreads out following the coastline.  The flat part closer to the ocean is called the plan and there the streets are grid-like and predictable, but walk up into the hills and you enter into a different world of winding cobblestone roads and crumbling staircases and pasajes lined with 10 foot tall murals leading who knows where.  Starting from 2 adjacent streets in the plan that lead into the cerros, you’ll likely end up on completely different sides of the city when you’ve reached the top. As for the stairs, they serve as short-cuts leading to different cerros and pasajes and sometimes just go to houses. And of course, the famous ascensores of Valparaíso – the grand funiculars that, a century ago, were so crucial to public transport in the city, and now have fallen out of use because of the availability of buses and cars. Most are in disrepair, mostly because it’s expensive to maintain them, let alone fix them when they’re broken. 

To get to my house each day, I walk through the city’s centro up a beautiful run-down street with an ascensor (that brings you up to the main part of Cerro Alegre) and lots of colorful murals and clothes hanging up outside windows:

…then I go up a narrow side street that leads to a giant staircase in the side of the cerro, which ends up on Cirilo Armstrong, my street. This is the staircase from close to the top:

Here’s the thing about living on top of a cerro: you have to climb up it. And I love to climb and my legs feel so good and I feel the burn and I’m out of breath and when I get to the top, sweaty and triumphant, I can see the whole city and the port and the sea and there are so many colors and really, every time I get to the top, I get a little burst of joy at how lucky I am to be here and how beautiful everything is. And then I walk up to my door and unlock it and go straight to the kitchen for a glass of fucking water. OOF. 

smashedmind:

Pablo de Rokha

sí, vivo en esta ciudad. hay un lugar más lindo en todo el mundo?