Category: Yoani Sanchez

Several dissidents and independent journalists traveled from Cuba for the occasion, including Dagoberto Valdes, Manuel Cuesta Morua, Reinaldo Escobar, Rolando Ferrer, Roberto de Jesús Guerra, Yusmila Reyna and Boris Gonzalez. Vargas Llosa dedicated a special part of his speech to the Cuban activists when he said “I can’t tell you how moved I am that you are here and that you have come.”

With a very critical position towards the political system on the island, which has earned editorial censorship in his books, the award-winning novelist said, “Anachronistic communism has two representatives today, Cuba and North Korea.” However, he expressed some hope because although Cuba “will immediately become a capitalist dictatorship, hopefully very soon afterwards, and finally after 57 years, it will become a democracy.”

Just outside the hotel a throng of journalists gathered to capture the broad parade of personalities from the world of culture and politics that were among the guests. Arriving for the party were former presidents from Columbia Andres Pastrana and Alvaro Uribe, Chile’s Sebastian Pinera, Uruguay’s Luis Alberto Lacalle and Spain’s Felipe González and José María Aznar. Also in attendance were the leader of Spain’s Citizens party, Albert Rivera and the parents of Venezuelan political prisoner Leopoldo Lopez.

Vargas Llosa delivered a precise speech and said that after eight decades of life “it is an opportune time to make a stop along the way and look back.” In his case, he said that life has been “a long and unbroken chain of stories” and emphasized his appreciation for having always had at hand literature, through which he has experienced a wide variety of the lives of others.

His eldest son, Alvaro Vargas Llosa, author and journalist, delivered ​​an emotional speech in which he said his father was like a “Rolling Stone of literature” because of the energy the writer maintains despite his age, only comparable with electric projection of Mick Jagger on stage. Blowing out the two candles symbolizing his 80 years and offering a declaration of love to his partner, Isabel Preysler, the honoree ended the evening.

A seminar, “Vargas Llosa: Culture, Ideas and Freedom,” will begin on Tuesday in Madrid, presided over by the writer and organized by the International Foundation for Freedom along with the chair that bears his name. Thinkers and writers will address topics such as populism, the challenges facing Ibero-America and the state of democracy in Latin America.

This morning, for a few hours, people will put aside conversations about high food prices and complaints about the collapse of transportation, aggravated by the security measures that plague the city. On the streets there is a resurgence of jokes starring Pepito, the mischievous child of our folktales, who emerged from his long silence to laugh even about the great visitor’s mother-in-law.

Symbols are a part of Obama. For black and mixed-race Cubans his coming is a reminder of how remote the arrival of the Cuban president seems to some of them. Cuba’s historic generation, white and rancid, has ruled for more than half a century over the destiny of a people whose skin tones span the racial spectrum. In the poorest neighborhoods, the occupant of the White House has many fans, and in those same areas the popularity of the Plaza of the Revolution is taking a nose-dive.

The man who today will descend the airplane stairs with a firm step, trotting as usual, will present a strong contrast to the gerontocracy that dominates Cuba. In a country with a serious demographic problem, where the majority of young people dream of emigrating, this leader born after the events of the Bay of Pigs is read like fresh page in a history book with too many volumes dedicated to the past.

He is also coming, with his family, to a nation where we never knew who Fidel Castro was married to and where, for decades, his children were never officially presented in public. He will visit the cathedral in Havana and for his major speech on Tuesday they have chosen a historic theater, one of the few places on the island where ideology has not been able to remove its purely cultural connotations.

However, with each symbolic chord Obama touches in the popular imagination, he assumes a responsibility. The expectations are overflowing because Cubans want to cling to any hope that makes them believe the future will be better. The dreams of economic relief, the end of food shortages and improvements in the country’s infrastructure, are at their highest point this Sunday but have a short expiration date.

People want Saint Obama to work miracles. They have placed candles on his altar and said a prayer that he will bring them the prosperity promised by others for more than half a century. For many families, the most anticipated marvel is summarized in it being easier to get a plate a food, a desire expressed in the street with every possible rhyme that joins Obama’s name and the popular word for food: jama.

Thousands of parents across the country are putting on the shoulders of the visitor the responsibility of convincing their children not to leave on the rafts of despair. They believe that he will be able to stop this incessant flow that is bleeding the country, if only he manages to persuade them that a new Cuba is just around the corner. For the nine migrants who just died trying to cross the Straits of Florida, it is a chance that comes too late.

The marvel others are expecting from Obama is connectivity, as if in Air Force One the United States president will have brought the fiber optic cable that will lift the Island from the precarious state of its internet access. The man who has used social networks intensively in his political career is seen as someone who can do a great deal to sneak Cubans into cyberspace.

In the prisons, thousands are waiting for the president of the United States to achieve an amnesty. Opponents of the current government project major openings in political spaces and room for expression. In the hospitals, patients await the arrival of resources to upgrade deteriorating emergency rooms, and in the Cuban countryside expectation of access to machinery and seeds bears the face of Uncle Sam.

Obama arrives in Havana on the first day of Holy Week. Awaiting him is the glory of his popularity and the cross of excessive hopes.

The limits within which we can move are made clear very early: Respectable or whore? Good wife or questionable spinster? Dedicated mother or bad mother? Submissive or quarrelsome? Made up or slovenly? Good cook or useless in the kitchen? Every attempt to free ourselves from these narrow frames implies double the effort for a man and a proportional quantity of external insults.

The violence starts from the time we’re small, when we prepare to be “beautiful and delicate,” forcing our tastes, affinities and vocations. They impose on us to be condescending and sweet, demure and silent; subordinate to masculine initiative and patiently bearing all. The ways girls are raised, in their families and in the education system still prevailing in our country, lock us into narrow, 19^th century gender roles.

We are measured on more demanding scales and asked for the highest levels of patience. If a woman is the victim of lewd abuse in the street, most people’s immediate reflection is that she is wearing “very provocative clothing” or wiggling her hips too much. The aggressor is considered someone who “is acting like a man” while the woman is the brunt of the worst adjectives.

Women television presenters must be luxuriant and attractive, while her masculine colleagues can be gray-haired, double-chinned and pot-bellied, and no one bothers him about it. In government something else happens. The “male chauvinist” power we have lived under for nearly 60 years likes to be photographed with pretty faces and hold honeyed ceremonies on International Women’s Day. They give us flowers and call us “compañeras,” while the rest of the year they put the brakes on women’s demands and the independence of any initiative for gender equality.

What has happened to Cuban feminism is what happens to a professional woman who ends up locked in the house with a jealous and dim-witted husband. They take her best years, keep her from experiencing life and taking to the streets to demand her rights and now demand that she remain calm, gentle, supportive of those who mix testosterone and power, which is another form of violence masked by supposed praise and compliments.

The appropriation of our bodies by force is a heinous crime, as is taking our freedom, imposing on us a model of what we should be, and prolonging these discriminatory patterns, this false market of values, where ovaries are worth less than testicles.

Pavón captures in a series of black and white photographs that were exhibited at the Cervantes Institute of New York, a part of the nostalgia of those who carry their roots on their shoulders so that a new generation can bear fruits. Parents who left behind their world of references, the house where they were born and even their wedding rings, with the obsession of giving their children a future. They are like us, but they have lived more, and the title of “Cubans” sounds sweetly and painfully in their ears.

Their names are Josefa, Paco, Pedro, Yosvany, Miguel… and they have experienced daily contact with other cultures, the pleasure in the little things they managed to carry with them: a yellowed photograph of Grandma and a memory of the dog barking from the farm path. They are also burdened with the depression of exile, the conviction that they don’t belong entirely to the land they left behind nor to the one that received them. They are beings who carry with them their own homeland.

The author of The Cuban-Americans took as a reference Robert Frank’s famous series of photographs, The Americans. The work of the American artist was heavily criticized in its time for not embodying “the image of progress and greatness they wanted to project in the fifties,” recalls Pavón. Like Frank, he also wanted to escape “the stereotypes, the commonplace.”

This “no man’s land,” where the exiles have found themselves because of politics, intolerance and immigration restrictions, resembles in many details the island we have woven within the bubble of our intimacy. An identity hard to catch in the tourist snapshots or sepia postcards that so content the foreign eye. More than a photographic work, Pavón has had to undertake a true immersion in that abyss of Cuban identity.

From this plunge, he has returned without beautiful ruins, old cars, or easy smiles. Instead of that, the artist claims to have “found another Cuba outside Cuba,” a nation that long ago ceased to be contained on an island.

People see as “normal” that the phones are tapped and that in the homes of opponents hidden microphones capture even the smallest sigh. It has become common practice for ETECSA to cut off dissidents’ phone service during certain national events or visits from foreign leaders, and to block the reception of messages whose contents upset them. This Orwellian situation has gone on for so long, that few take note any more of the illegality involved and the violation of citizens’ rights it entails.

The feeling of constant supervision has come to affect the way we speak, filling it with whispers, gestures and metaphors, to avoid saying those words that could get us into trouble. To the extent that few mention the names of Fidel or Raul Castro, substituting a gesture over the face as if touching a beard, or making slanted eyes, or placing two fingers on one’s shoulder to allude to “them,” “the power,” “the government,” “the Party.”

The limits of the state to obtain private information are currently at the center of an international debate, sparked by the United States government demand that the technology company Apple unblock the telephone used by a terrorist, who participated in a shooting in California where 14 people died. The discussions have risen in tone between those who brandish the needs of the security agency, and those who see it as a danger to violate the rights to protected data.

These kinds of questions are very far from Cuban society, where the need to reconquer the privacy lost over more than half a century of the interference of power in every sphere of daily life is never publicly raised. Even keeping a private diary, closing the door of a bedroom, or speaking softly, are frowned upon by a system that tried to replace individuality with massification, and to eradicate intimacy in the promiscuity of shelters or barracks.

Apple fears that by creating software to unlock its phones, it cannot avoid the government or hackers from collecting the private information of millions of innocents. It knows that any power is insatiable with regards to the information it wants to have about others, hence the law should curb and rein in those excesses of interference that characterize all governments.

The dispute over privacy and security will continue for a long time, because it is the eternal tension between the limits of social space versus personal space. The clash between the interests of any nation and that fragile but essential part that makes us individuals.

Sanchez. You hired a lawyer in a collective law firm take on the defense. How did that lawyer perform?

Santos. In July 2014, when my son was still being held in Villa Marista, they explained to me that he had the right to a lawyer. As Raibel was a resident in the United States we had to pay 6,000 CUC. We could have had any kind of attorney, but I hired a “Revolutionary attorney,” like the government told me to.

Sanchez. Did you believe during the trial in the independence of the court regarding any political or exemplary bias and that the Government wanted to bring to the case?

Santos. During the two long years we waited for the hearing, I always had confidence in what Cuban officials sent me. I was confident that justice would be done. I went to the hearing with much hope, because I saw it as clear and transparent. The lawyers exercised their full rights. It made an impression on me to see how those young people used their office, with professionalism and fairness. Especially since they used the facts and evidence and asked that they be applied according to the Penal Code.

Sanchez. If the defense attorney made ​​every effort to reduce the sentence and even achieve an acquittal, why do you think that Raibel received a 15 year sentence?

Santos. The judges’ power of discretion was unfair. The prosecutor asked for eight to 15 years for my son and the judges ruled the maximum sentence. Without facts or evidence.

Sanchez. What was your child’s defense?

Santos. The lawyer raised two issues. One, that it was ​​impossible because an unarmed person cannot take arms into a military unit, because of all the protection of these places and how difficult it is to even get past the post barracks entrance. So to do something like that was impossible, they should absolve him.

Number two: lack of evidence. The prosecutor made his argument basically on what the defendants said, starting from the ideas they had of provoking an uprising, a civic-military uprising. So, the defense lawyer agreed that they had “ideas,” “attempted rebellion,” but nothing else and asked the judges for a sentence of between two and four years.

Sanchez. What is the crime for which Raibel and the other three defendants were tried?

Santos. They accused him of terrorism and categorized, judged and sentenced him as he it were a terrorist, even though the defense attorney clarified during the trial that it wasn’t about terrorism, or even terrorist ideas. My son and others weren’t caught with even a knife.

Sanchez. What is Raibel’s situation with regard to his imprisonment right now? What prison is he in and under what conditions?

Santos. Raibel is in the Combinado del Este prison in Havana, and is well. He is in a cell with 35 men and has not had any problems so far with anyone. He has not committed any indisciplines and there have been no complaints about him. He is quiet, in good health, including putting on weight, because when he left Villa Marista he had lost 28 pounds. We can see him every other month.

Sanchez. What was the relationship between the four defendants? Were they friends or acquaintances? How did they contact each other before reaching Cuba?

Santos. In the trial it was shown that they knew each other, but I don’t know anything more than that. My son has never talked to me about that.

Sanchez. After arriving in Miami at 21, he started studying at college and had a future ahead of him in the United States. Did he think of returning to Cuba with their idea of instigating a popular uprising?

Santos. First of all, he is Cuban, not a foreigner and he left the country because of dissatisfaction with the system. He is also a young man who had dreams of seeing his country free. He loves to read a lot and perhaps he felt the need to do something for his country. Many young people in exile feel they have turned their back on their country. I also want to make clear that my son had no criminal record either in Cuba or the United States.

Sanchez. It is speculated that the conviction of your son could be government revenge against his father, Manual Pacheco Toledo, rector of the Univresity of Holguin and an official in the Cuban embassy in Mexico, who fled to the United States. Do you agree?

Santos. If so, it would be a doubly unjust conviction, because my son was not raised by his father, he left the family when the boy was nine. We divorced in 1993 and I raised my children alone. I came to America precisely because I no longer had any family in Cuba, all my relatives were here.

I try not to judge anyone without evidence and would like to continue to trust that this is not a grudge match.

Sanchez. Do you have any hope that your son won’t have to serve such a long sentence, that there will be some amnesty or a prisoner exchange with the United States government, which will get him out in the short term? Perhaps now with Barack Obama’s visit to the island?

Santos. In Cuba after the triumph of the Revolution, there has never been an amnesty and there are many men in prison. For me, as a Cuban it would be an enormous satisfaction if this happened. The intentions of both governments to establish peace fills me with expectations. If Obama is going to talk about human rights in Cuba and touches on the issues of the prisoners, I would like him to address the case of these four detainees: two of them are U.S. residents and the other two are Cuban-Americans.

Sanchez. What steps have been taken to appeal the decision of the judges and the sentence imposed on Raibel?

Santos. Where I first made known my opinion on the hearing and the judgment it was in a letter to Raul Castro that I delivered to the Council of State in Havana. I have always taken into account the Cuban government.

Right now I’m appealing the case, which is valid for all the defendants, and I hope that the misuse of power by the arbiters, which are the judges, will be corrected, because it has been an unjust and excessive sentence. I am persevering because Raibel has a future ahead of him, a wife who is expecting a baby. Why take from him the right to see his child born, if he hasn’t done anything?

Sanchez. If the appeal does not reduce the sentence, will you appeal to an international body?

Santos. I will continue until the last step. If a mother does not defend her son, who is going to defend him? If Raibel is guilty of misconduct he needs to be corrected, but if they have been unfair to him, I have every duty and obligation to take the case to every possible body.

One day I lost sight of both of them. We grew up, reached adulthood, and the game of childhood ended. I know Cusio stayed with his adoptive parents until their final days, in a Cuba where material poverty results in so many old people being abandoned. Of Libna, not a trace. I don’t know if she is still living on the island or if she decided to leave, with her persecuted beliefs, for some other place.

As time goes on I think about them more. I appreciate the lesson of humility that developed before my eyes, without expecting anything from me, not a vindication, not even a hug.

When the presidential plane touches down on the island, the discourse of the barricade, so commonly called on by the Cuban government for over half a century, will suffer an irreversible blow. It will not be the same as seeing Raul Castro and Barack Obama shaking hands in Panama to see them to meet on the territory that until recently was full of official billboards against “the empire” with mocking caricatures of Uncle Sam.

The Communist Party press will have to jump through hoops to explain to us the official welcome of the commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the “enemy country.” The most recalcitrant Party militants will feel betrayed and it will be clear to all that, behind the supposed ideology, there is only a determination to cling to power through the typical strategies of political chameleons.

In the streets, people will experience the enthusiasm of the unexpected event. For black and mixed-race Cubans, the message is clear and direct in a country where a white gerontocracy controls power. Those who have a T-shirt or sign with Obama’s face will flaunt it on those days, taking advantage of official persuasiveness. Fidel Castro will die a little more in his guarded Havana refuge.

“President” brand beer will run out in the cafés, where loud calls to “give me two more Obamas” will be heard, and there is no doubt that the civil registries that week will record several newborns with names like Obamita de la Caridad Perez or Yurislandi Obama. Pepito, the little boy who stars in our popular humor, will release a couple of jokes for the occasion, and tchotchkes sellers will offer items with the lawyer’s profile and the five letters of his name.

One thing is clear, however, beyond the trinkets of enthusiasm, the leader of the United States cannot change Cuba and it is better if he doesn’t try, because this national mess is our responsibility. His trip, however, will have a lasting effect and he should take advantage of the opportunity to send a loud and clear message in front of the microphones.

His words should be directed to those young people who right now are assembling a raft, fueled by their despair they carry within. He needs to let them know that the material and moral misery that surrounds them is not the responsibility of the White House. The best way in which Obama can transcend Cuba’s history is by making it clear that the perpetrators of the drama we are living are here, in the Plaza of the Revolution in Havana.

Under these conditions, the government of Colombia and the FARC guerrillas have engaged in peace talks for more than three years. A conflict in which thousands of human lives have been lost, people have been displaces, and continuing military clashes between both sides hinder the process of coming to an understanding and make any kind of agreement unthinkable.

The Catholic and Orthodox hierarchies have done the same thing. The hug between Francis and Kiril closes a stage that began in the year 1054 when the Pope of Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated each other. A schism that shaped a part of the world that we know today, and created a separation in everything from rights to questions of theology and doctrine. A chasm that seemed insurmountable until this Friday.

In the case of both the Colombian peace negotiations and a meeting between two religious leaders, the seriousness of the confrontation has demanded a good deal of sensitivity to get to the point of dialogue. Around the discussion table and in the improvised meeting room at the airport, those involved were conscious that in any mediation no one can emerge unscathed, without ceding even an inch.

The principals have to show willingness to agree, in part because of the exhaustion associated with any confrontation. But especially because they understand the damage their dispute is doing to the common people, desecrating the existence of the people and of the faithful. The pope and the patriarch have shaken hands because they know that in all those centuries of denying each other, the principal victim of their enmity has been the Christian flock.

In several photos of the February 12^th historical meeting we also see Cuba’s general-president. The man who during his eight years in office has not demonstrated the greatness of narrowing the distance that separates him from his political opponents, who do not have blood on their hands nor arms stowed under their beds, but rather ideas that differ from those of the Communist Party and a sincere concern for their country, along with the imperative to promote peaceful change.

Refusing to talk while lending our national soil so that others can come to agreement, Raul Castro confirms his small stature as a statesman and reveals his fear of awarding legitimacy to the opposition. Despite his reluctance, we Cubans will end up understanding each other and we will not need to wait one thousand years to give each other three loud kisses on the cheek.

In the homeland of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” failing to take advantage of Raul Castro’s official visit to demand a democratic opening would be a huge disappointment. The reasoning from a French government source, declaring that the question of human rights “is always present,” is unconvincing. This is the time to push the octogenarian caudillo for a commitment to a democratic opening on the Island in the near term.

France loses nothing if it takes a stronger stance on the lack of freedom under which 11 million Cubans live. Unlike Rouhani, Raul Castro will not purchase more than 100 modern Airbuses, not will he offer a contract for the extraction of thousands of barrels of oil. The Plaza of the Revolution is only going to offer losses and disrepute.

It will fall to the French executive to silence the complaints of the creditors of the Paris Club – which last December forgave 8.5 billion dollars in Cuban debt –when they never see one cent of the remaining 2.6 billion that Havana committed to pay over a span of 18 years. Which it is highly unlikely to do, because the Cuban system is an expert in wasting other people’s money and in swindling those who help them.

The same thing will happen with the 360 million euros of the bilateral accord reached this Monday to finance development projects. Money that Cuban officialdom will use at its convenience, but not to empower citizens to prosper nor to develop an autonomous business network. Over time, these resources end up feeding corruption, the illegal market, and the pockets of the olive-green clad rulers.

Raul Castro will promise Hollande tonight that his piece of cake is safe. As he has said to so many, undoubtedly, he will confirm to “friends of Cuba, the Revolution will always remember you.” The “friendship” in this case is inextricably linked to complicity in and silent acceptance of the authoritarianism imposed on the Cuban citizenry.

It is just another maneuver to gain time. Hollande will leave office and a new administration will have to deal with those who have spent nearly six decades in power in Cuba, and the story will start again at the beginning: commitments, pats on the shoulder, ceremonial photos and a dinner where the wine flows freely, but where the indecent presence of democracy is well hidden.

The date honors the guild established in 1975, during the finishing of the first stretch of the central line. At the celebration Fidel Castro operated a Soviet locomotive, a moment that is still a source of amusement among elderly train engineers. “Everything was ready and he didn’t even get the credit of making that mass move,” says an old conductor in his eighties. The event, more about politics than railroads, was enough to let the imposed anniversary go.

The 19^th of November should be the date for those who carry the iron serpent circulating in our blood. The day the first rail link in Cuba was completed, between Havana and Bejucal, in 1837, should get all the credit to earn itself a celebration that goes beyond the fanfare of the politicians and the headlines of the official press. In those nearly 17 miles (27.3 kilometers) of the initial line, a lineage began that refuses to die.

Now, when I stand in front of the lines at La Coubre terminal in Havana and observe the disaster that is rail transport in Cuba today, I ask myself if the era of the “sons of the railroad” will come to an end. Old cars, unsafe, accidents, delays, long lines to buy a ticket, luggage thefts, the stench of the toilets… and an iron fence that isolates the platform and those going aboard from those who are saying goodbye.

The Cuban railroad died. There is not much to celebrate on this day.

That appointment in Havana in 2008, brokered by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, had only one objective: to sweet talk the irreverent Penn so that he would repeat the “virtues” of a system under which eleven million Cubans live. And so, the conversation was entirely a dance of conquest, with no outbursts, no guns on the table. The star of Mystic River must not suspect a thing, must not be afraid.

It is probable that the meeting proceeded amid knowing glances, paused words, in the style of “I never liked the idea of giving interviews,” offered by the younger of the Castro brothers. The makeshift reporter had to feel he was accessing the hidden soul of a hardened guerrilla, when in reality he was falling in the web of an adept totalitarian. The trap worked perfectly.

Penn not only left assuring us that “in fact ‘Raulism’ is on the rise along with a recent economic, industrial and agricultural boom,” and also passed on from his interview – without questioning it – the ‘fact’ that reports about the violation of human rights in Cuba published in the media in the United States “are very exaggerated and hypocritical.” A journalist would not have lost the opportunity to slip in a hard hitting question and try to get at the truth.

However, Sean Penn didn’t even flinch. His reason for being there was not to question the words of General – as an ‘inconvenient’ reporter might have done – but to use Cuba as the point of the sword in his personal battle against the United States government. We were nothing more than numbers before his eyes, figures that should explain why the Cuban “model” was superior to that emanating from the White House.

As a crumb, Penn later admitted that if he “were a Cuban citizen” and had to do an interview like that one, he could “be imprisoned.” But he said it as one recites the Lord’s Prayer before stealing from a neighbor; he clamors for transparency and then puts on a hood; brays for freedom and shakes hands with a dictator. He says it in a way that is not convincing.

Years later, Penn would repeat the same modus operandi. He would interview, in the back of beyond in Sinaloa, a fugitive from Mexican justice, a blood-stained drug lord, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, El Chapo. The caviar-progressive with his private planes would fall again, surrendering at the feet of power, becoming the ventriloquist for a story told by another famous culprit who wanted to clean up his image.

This time, the scene also developed like a mating dance, where the one who was in control the whole time managed his naïve prey who believed he was dictating the pace of the encounter. El Chapo also sweet talked the winner of two Oscars, as Raul Castro had done years earlier in Havana.

The actor-journalist gave himself up to the interviewee, joking with him, offering his hand. In their conversation, it is the other who sets the pace and dictates the topics. The idea is presented of the bloodthirsty criminal as a product of a corrupt society, someone who has been shaped by external causes and turned to violence as an act of rebellion.

However, far beyond the adversities and the context, there was a moment when both Raul Castro and El Chapo Guzman could have questioned the harm they were doing, the unhappiness and pain they left in their wake. The greatest failure of the condescending reporter was not to delve into why there was no repentance in either man, only the frigid stubbornness of the caudillos.

Again, Penn missed the opportunity to be a journalist and became, instead, a sad spokesman for drug lords and generals.