”What did you do when the poor suffered, when tenderness and life burned out of them?”
These lines are from the Guatemalan poet Otto René Castillo. (...)
Before his death, Castillo had just returned from exile in Europe in 1966 to become a propagandist for the Guatemalan Rebel Armed Forces. Soon after, he dropped the pen and picked up a rifle to fight. After he was captured by government forces, he was tortured and burnt alive in 1967.
Before the Scales, Tomorrow
And when the enthusiastic
story of our time
is told,
who are yet to be born
but announce themselves
with more generous face,
we will come out ahead
--those who have suffered most from it.
And that
being ahead of your time
means much suffering from it.
But it's beautiful to love the world
with eyes
that have not yet
been born.
And splendid
to know yourself victorious
when all around you
it's all still so cold,
so dark.
Castillo joined the Workers' Party of Guatemala at seventeen. In 1954, an army junta trained and financed by the U.S. government overthrew the democratically-elected Jacobo Arbenz after he had instituted agrarian reforms, which would have loosened the stranglehold of the United Fruit Company over Guatemala. The U.S. government mounted a full-on assault on Arbenz’s government, from economic sanctions to aerial bombings to radio propaganda. Like many of us from Latin America and elsewhere, Guatemalans are here because the U.S. was there. Like a friend once told me, “Puerto Ricans didn’t come to the United States. The United States came to Puerto Rico.”
by Luis Feliz Leon, Low Frequencies | Read more:
Image: Ryan M. Kelly/The Daily Progress/AP via[ed. And the feds came to Minneapolis a few days ago, too (link w/video). Are we Great Again yet?
Looks like we’ve reached a boiling point when it comes to ICE. Today in Minneapolis, a militarized federal task force raided the beloved Lake Street taqueria, Las Cuatro Milpas—and the community was not having it. Agents from ICE, the DEA, FBI, ATF, IRS, and HHS rolled up looking like they were ready for war. And Minneapolis PD was helping them. Why are local cops backing ICE raids?’
