Author: Montefrio

The Shining Path

South America and what goes on down here is more important to you gringos than you think. We provide “coming attractions” to a degree that few of you realize or understand.

How many of you recognize the name of the guerilla group known as “Shining Path” (Sendero Luminoso)? How many know anything about its leader, the demented philosophy professor Abimael Guzmán (aka “Presidente Gonazlo”)? How many of the people you know can even find Perú on a map, never mind have even a vague idea of its history?

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El Sur También Existe

By Montefrío

That “the South Exists as Well” is something too many from the North too often forget, or so believe the probably-more-than 400 million inhabitants of South America, the fourth largest continent.

The poem “El Sur También Existe,” by the late Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti (1920-2009), popularized by the song of the same name performed worldwide since 1985 by Catalan singer Joan Manuel Serrat, has become something of a “Continental Anthem” down here. Anyone interested in a reading an acceptable translation of the poem can see one here: https://tambienexiste.wordpress.com/el-sur-tambien-existe/. Bendetti, a Castro supporter and lifelong leftie of bourgeois and Italian origin, has never been a favorite of mine, but he’s revered down here. My near-contemporary Serrat (b. 1943), also a leftie, has never been a favorite either, but like Benedetti, he’s still the bee’s knees in this neck of the large woods.

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