By NELSON RIVERA
The contribution of Ronna Risquez
From so much reading news that points to them, we have built an agreement: we think we know what El Tren de Aragua is. We repeat: a band of violent criminals, linked to high commands of the regime, which has spread its operations throughout several countries on the continent. Maybe we remember some case. Or we wonder if his recurring role in the news encourages prejudice against Venezuelan migrants.
Ronna Rísquez has published what could be the most revealing document on the state of things in Venezuela, produced by journalism: The Aragua Train. The gang that revolutionized crime in Latin America. Among his virtues, this is: he concentrates on the facts. It is not intended to interpret —in the terms in which a sociologist, a social psychologist or a criminologist would do it—, nor to offer conclusions about the possible consequences of what is narrated. His is a methodical and articulated report, produced with exceptional courage, a three-year investigation, which tells of the gang, its leaders and the operation in that citadel that is the Aragua Penitentiary Center, commonly called the Tocorón prison.
It narrates the genealogy, realities and myths that surround the brand —because the Tren de Aragua is a brand—; the expansion through the Venezuelan territory and, later, to other countries; the portfolio of its criminal practices; describes the multiple arsenal they have; he manages to glimpse the keys to his businesses (one that he was unaware of is the extortion associated with professional baseball signings); shows some of its tentacles and modes of operation; their movements, files and organizes information about the lives of their leaders. He narrates a singular case, the kidnapping of the journalist Anatoly Kurmanaev, an x-ray of the back room where the powerful criminal agrees with the regime official, also powerful. A question to think about, among innumerable: the similarities and affinities that are projected between the boss of the regime and the boss of the criminal gang.
But I want to go to the first part of the book, the one that narrates — crossed by love stories and sexual fantasies — of what I insist on calling the Tocoron Citadel. The headlines repeat that the prison is under the control of the pranes. However, this statement limps. Because, in reality, what happens is that the place has become a fortification, where the Venezuelan State has been subdued and placed at the service of the criminals who live there. Specifically, from the dome of the bands.
You have to think about whether the intuition that tells me that Tocorón is an imitation, on its scale, of fierce political authoritarianism, is valid or not. One must wonder if this hierarchical, stratified model of irremediable obedience, where mistakes are paid for with summary executions; if that world of armed men (essentially and extensively paramilitary), of dog loyalties, codes and jargon; if that world of endless extortion chains (which operates as a tax regime); of scales, merits and a permanent state of exception (where life is experienced on the spur of the moment, about to end at any moment), it resembles to some extent, somewhere, certain chapters of reality outside the walls of Tocorón.
You have to wonder if that prison is not, in reality, a theme park or an excessive tavern, with a zoo, a disco, a swimming pool, a cockpit, a tailgate, sports fields, a stable, ATMs, women who come and go, as if they had been hired as part of a vacation package (theme park related to the proliferation of imitations and fantasies that the regime encourages).
And you have to wonder, beyond the ways of acting, of the bosses of El Tren de Aragua, of their innovative extortion methods, of the power they have shown to impose their alliances; if beyond the biography of El Niño Guerrero; from the metamorphosis of the gang leader to the status of pran; if beyond the forensic record that is still to be done, one must ask, if the take is — as they used to say of delinquents — outside the law, or if it constitutes a form of center, paradigm of the real law, the wet dream of Miraflores; and it is necessary to wonder if between Tocorón and the Las Mercedes urbanization —for example—, there are shared aspirations and mental routines; Yes, Tocorón—a militarized fortress, an enclave from which death orders and the satisfaction of wishes are issued by telephone—if that Tocorón is not, after all, the final fantasy, the earthly paradise of the Bolivarian revolution.
Dispatch from the Turkey-Syria border
In the reports published up to February 26, the number of deaths from the series of earthquakes originating in the fault line of Eastern Anatolia —Kahramanmaras province, Turkey— exceeds fifty thousand: more than 44 thousand on the Turkish side, more than 6 thousand on the Syrian side.
When the earth unleashed its fury, at 4:17 a.m. on February 6, between 13 and 14 million people lived in the region. The lack of precision is due to the presence, on both sides of the border, of hundreds of thousands of displaced Syrians who have been concentrating in the northern region of their country or have crossed into the province of Gaziantep, fleeing the criminal regime. of Bashar al-Assad. Precise: they are fleeing from Bashar al-Assad and the military support that Putin has maintained for 12 years.
As soon as the first reports about the devastation circulated —on February 6th— the European emergency programs began a complex economic, logistical, political, and moral operation: momentarily detach themselves from the operational chain in favor of Ukraine, to provide assistance to the area, with the agreement or mediation of Erdogan. Of the obstinate Erdogan and violator of Human Rights, head of a corrupt regime, architect of an impeccable centralism, which has blown up in the face of the demands that have arisen due to the earthquakes: from Ankara, the capital, in the midst of the emergency, they had to start wondering how to get the aid to the south of their own territory. Ask yourself why, in substance, Erdogan’s only consistent public policy towards the region consists in persecuting the Kurds, the Kurdish self-defense groups and the Kurdish People’s Party. These words from the Canadian academic, Ariel Salzmann, sum it up: “Erdogan is more concerned with repressing the Kurds than with the humanitarian rescue.”
However, I have not yet reached the crux: among the victims of earthquakes, there are categories. At the top of the pyramid are Erdogan’s partners and allies: the same ones who control Turkey’s political, economic and military power; and, among them, the members of the Turkmen Front, a racist paramilitary organization specialized in attacking foreigners. It is followed in the pyramid by a broader group, made up of the related, social and political clientele of the previous category. Below are the beneficiaries of international aid, private initiatives and the Red Crescent, which is the name that the Red Cross had to adopt so that its operations would be tolerated by the Islamist intransigence.
The fourth category is that of the hopeless: they are those who have received no or almost no help, more than two million displaced persons who are dwindling day by day, excluded from the functioning of the world, among other reasons because nations and institutions with the capacity to to provide any form of humanitarian assistance, they refuse to accept Putin’s and al-Assad’s demand that the aid must pass through the control of the regime, that is, of the Syrian power structure on which sanctions, files and substantiated complaints of corruption, violation of Human Rights and war crimes. Delivering humanitarian aid to al-Assad is nothing less than placing it in the hands of one of the biggest scoundrels on the planet, an ally of Putin.
At this time, hundreds of thousands of Syrians, Kurds, Shiites and Turks survive in conditions of extreme poverty, without food or medicine, around bonfires fueled by the remains of wood extracted from the rubble of houses and buildings that collapsed in the earthquakes. neither blankets nor expectations in relation to what his destiny could be in the near future. They only have to pray, that something happens, that something arises from somewhere, a miracle that saves their lives.
Yuri Andrujovich: war and intimacy
He came to Spain to present Small encyclopedia of intimate places. Personal brief on geopoetics and cosmopolitics (translated by Oksana Gollyak and Frederic Guerrero-Solé, Editorial El Acantilado, Spain, 2023), and the inevitable happened: they questioned him about the war. Yuri Andrukhovich has remained in his country—he lives in Ivano-Frankivsk, during the catastrophic year of the invasion, and will remain so. He has joined a group of writers, Trampwhich operates from an air raid shelter, where they give conferences and have gatherings: the basement collapses due to the number of people who attend.
Andrujovich has been interviewed by dozens of journalists. His answers do not disappoint: “Our country is at a crossroads and has always suffered a lot from the confrontations and the forces that were around us. We are at a point where everyone has clashed.” “Russia stopped being on the left during the Stalin era. The Stalinist regime was conservative right, but under a communist ideology. Now we have this form of Russian racism, as Timothy Snyder stressed, which is the Russian form of Nazism.” “You have to answer the question why Dostoyevsky was Goebbels’ favorite author.” “In Ukraine, we will not have the right to call ourselves Central European until we apologize to the Czechs for our collaboration.” “The peoples of the East share crucial experiences. Being part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is an imprint that has not yet disappeared. World War II and The Holocaust, either. These phenomena modified both the culture and the way of life of this geographic space. Add to that the communist experience.” “Berlin, which continues to be an important platform for artistic projects, continues to maintain an ambiguous attitude: they talk about dialogue, negotiations, peace agreements. They continue to look at today’s reality with yesterday’s eyes. German pacifism drives me crazy, its effort to put the victim and the executioner on the same plane. I guess Putin’s brutality will eventually cure them of that.”
The Small anthology of intimate places brings together 39 texts, organized alphabetically —Aaurau, Antwerp, Bayreuth, Berlin, Bucharest, and so on—, commemorating the places where Andrujovich has lived or visited, between 1983 and 2017: Ukrainian cities, European capitals, and three from our continent, Detroit, Guadalajara and New York. They do not follow a common logic. Andrujovic addresses the reader with a certain familiarity (“What I like most about this world are the cities that can be observed from the heights”); there is no discipline or enforcement of a specific record. He talks about his sensations (“The absence effect is experienced when you are not in a certain place and, suddenly, you feel an enormous desire to be there”); when he stops in kyiv or Lviv, for example, history or cultural profile impose their stamp on the text; in others, such as the cartoon —about fifty lines— that he dedicates to Frankfurt on the Oder, he changes his balance: the anecdote occupies the foreground, while the city barely appears in the background, discreet and almost invisible. The titled “Chernivtsi, 1983 and later”, unequivocally recalls the pulse and approach, the way of drawing and closing the ideas, of the essays gathered in the last territory. In this, Andrujovich talks about culture (“Chernivtsi is one of those places where utopia does not bother, but excites”), by Paul Celan, and orders seven very short essays —matter, ruins, the cemetery, the green , the stones, Chernivtsi, the light— that bring us back to the multifaceted personality of his writing: that display where essay and fiction do not repel each other, but feed back for the reader’s enjoyment.