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Flash Notes con amor y rabia
by Ricardo Dominguez
Hola todos,
"Public space, in an electronic age, is
space on the run"
- Vito Acconci, 1990
Here are a few flash notes from the other side
of the screen. As the Acconci quote hints at, i/we do indeed
spend mucho time running and running to catch up with all the
code that is due and all the worlds beyond our click-click-click,
our post-contemporary "Wild E. Coyote" condition –
but I, at least, never get very far down the road. That
"Beep-Beep" always seems to just move much faster than
I could ever dream of doing.
Flash Notes con amor y rabia:
- I know that the focus for this pico-moment
is SEX, Desire and Demand and the good times we always imagine
happening on the other side of the fence. So, I will lightly
touch on a few activist style perversities…did you know
that if you are reading this you are probably a "Internet
addict" and should immediately stop reading this online
journal and get this really nice headgear to help you:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4327258.stm
- Female homicides in Ciudad Juárez
still continue. The mothers of the victims are extremely dissatisfied
with the arrests officers have made. In many cases, as in the
Lourdes Portillo video,
women testified that it was police who kidnapped, it was police
who raped, it was police who victimized and harassed the women
of Juárez. Here are some recent online Webdocumentaries:
Click into this beautiful French site:
http://www.lacitedesmortes.net/
Click into video artist Zulma Aguiar's online
documentary:
http://zulmaaguiar.com/Juarez/Juarez_20MB.mov
Re-click this excellent interview:
http://www.thing.net/~cocofusco/radio.html
Many arrests have been made, but due
to lack of evidence or poor police investigations plagued by incompetence
or lack of resources, the fact remains that mistakes have been
made. Accusations have gone uninvestigated.
Various individuals have been arrested in connection
with the murders. However, the Mexican police have been criticized
for making arrests with little or no evidence and failing to detain
alleged perpetrators, and they have been accused of coercing people
to confess to murders, destroying evidence, even kidnapping women.
One of the first arrests made was that of an
Egyptian-born chemist, Abdul Latif Sharif (born in 1947), who
was accused but never convicted of several rapes in the United
States before moving to Ciudad Juárez in 1994 to escape
a deportation hearing in Texas. Since his conviction and imprisonment
for the murder of a young maquiladora worker in 1995, the
police have arrested two groups of men whom, they allege, Sharif
was paying "from behind bars" to rape and murder on
his behalf in an attempt to establish his innocence of the crimes.
Click for more recent analysis by Diana Washington
here:
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2005/05/08/040n1soc.php
However, despite the arrests of Sharif and his
alleged co-conspirator, the killings continued, leading the Mexican
police and the public in general to consider many theories, among
which that the real killer or killers are still on the loose or
that the original killer or killers are in jail and copycats have
since moved to the area. There are also accusations that there
has been a conspiracy of silence and coverup by Mexican politicians
bribed by the killer or killers.
Updates:
http://www.mujeresdejuarez.org/
Other suspects convicted in connection with
the affair include Víctor García Uribe, convicted
in October 2004 for eight of the murders, and Gustavo González
Meza, who was arrested on suspicion in some of the killings but
died in jail under suspicious circumstances on February 8, 2003.
On January 7, 2005, four members of the "Los Toltecas"
gang were convicted of six murders and six members of the "Los
Rebeldes" gang were convicted of another six murders. Jesús
Manuel Guardado and four other "Toltecas" had been arrested
in 1999. One was found not guilty. Five of the twelve convicted
so far have been bus drivers.
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Situation
of the Rights of Women in Ciudad Juárez (2002)
http://www.cidh.org/annualrep/2002eng/chap.vi.juarez.htm
Another important source of international analysis
and support:
http://www.mujeres.amnistia.org.mx/section.php?name=ciudadjuarez
Reactions
On May 30, 2005, PresidentVicente Fox told reporters
that the majority of the Juárez killings had been resolved
and the perpetrators placed behind bars. He went on to criticize
the media for "rehashing" the same 300 or 400 murders,
and said matters needed to be seen in their "proper dimension".
In response, the congressional special commission for the killings
said that the president needed to be better informed about the
situation.
To protest the lack of progress in the case,
a huge free concert organized by famous Latin artists such as
Alejandro Sanz, Alex Ubago, Manu Chao, Lila Downs and others took
place on September 18, 2005 in Mexico City's central Zócalo
square.
http://www.cooperativa.cl/p4_noticias/site/artic/20050514/pags/20050514111058.html
Some recent books on the femicides:
Antonio Mendoza, Killers on the Loose: Unsolved
Cases of Serial Murder (Virgin Books, 2002), ISBN 0753506815
— A study of unsolved serial killings around the world,
including Ciudad Juárez.
Simon Whitechapel, Crossing to Kill: The
True Story of the Serial-Killer Playground (Virgin Books,
2002), ISBN 0753506866 — Updated edition of the first detailed
study of the Juárez murders.
- On the lighter side of SEX and code here
are some dirty clicks to keep you company as you run to catch
up with all that needs to be done in the world.
The first Art and Politics of Netporn Conference
took place at the start of October, 2005. Lots of very sticky
links.
http://www.networkcultures.org/netporn/
4.0 One of my students (lotu5) found this on
http://indyblogs.protest.net:
"While SuicideGirls.com purports to be hip and women-friendly,
apparently not everyone thinks so. So apparently someone decided
to culture jam the whole idea of a Suicide Girl by signing up
for as a model for them and populating their personal profile
with information from a Palestinian female suicide bomber. It
provides an interesting critique of the perspective of potential
viewers of SuicideGirls.com, as well as to the people running
SuicideGirls.com. One field in the profile is "CURRENT THOUGHTS
ON SG: I hate it", summing up this person's opinion of the
site."
At the time of this posting, the jammed profile
was still available on the SuicideGirls.com website.
http://suicidegirls.com/members/RealSuicideGirl/
In case it has been deleted by the time you
read this, here is what they wrote:
A bit about me written by Mika Minio-Paluello:
Hanadi Jaradat, a 29-year-old lawyer from Jenin,
blew herself up in the Haifa Maxim restaurant in early October,
killing 21, including four children. Her younger brother Fedi
was executed by an Israeli undercover unit in front of her,despite
her trying to protect him. On June 12th, three days before Fadi's
wedding, the family was in the courtyard of the house. Salah Jaradat,
Fadi's cousin and a member of Islamic Jihad, came to visit his
pregnant wife, Ismath, and their two-year-old son, who were living
with the family.
MEMBER SINCE: October 2005
AGE: 30 (Sep 22, 1975)
LOCATION: Palestine
HOMETOWN: Jenin
SIGN: I've seen it.
OCCUPATION: Law, until that proved insufficient.
STATS: Don't commodify people.
BODY MODS: A few.
FAVORITE BANDS: Chrissy Hynde.
FAVORITE FILMS: Battle of Algiers.
FAVORITE BOOKS: The Qur'an, The Bible,
Give Me Liberty: The
Uncompromising Statesmanship of Patrick
Henry
FAVORITE TV SHOWS: Xena the Warrior Princess.
VICES: Deadly revenge.
CURRENT CRUSH: Mordechai Vanunu.
INTO: Fighting oppression.
MOST HUMBLING MOMENT: You have to ask?
5 ITEMS I CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT: I only wanted
two: My brother and justice.
MAKES ME HAPPY: Family. The Act of Sacrifice.
MAKES ME SAD: Israeli colonial aggression.
Your imperialist government. Your lying media. Your passivity.
The need for sacrifice.
GETS ME HOT: You have a very crude culture,
the way you talk of such things.
I LOST MY VIRGINITY: Not.
FAVORITE SEXUAL POSITION: My mother –
who I actually talk about these things with – tells me she
really enjoys something I can hardly wait to try – oh, no,
I guess I'll have to…
FANTASY: For you to understand.
CURRENT THOUGHTS ON SG: I hate it
WEBSITE: http://www.aztlan.net/women_martyrs.htm
- Before I click out and leave you to your
demands and desires (in that best-of-all-possible worlds we
catch a glimpse of before waking), a few self-promotional links:
Electronic Disturbance Theater and swarmtheminutemen.com
have been doing a series of actions online and on the ground these
past few months against the Minutemen vigilantes that have been
running around north of the border.
Click for updates:
http://www.swarmtheminutemen.com
And for the direct action information:
http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/swarm/swarm.php
And finally, you might enjoy drifting in this
direction:
http://www.insite05.org/auxillary/tjcalling2.htm
where you will find yours truly drifting around
enjoying
the border sun.
Over and out,
rdom
P.S. Just one more link for you click addicts:
http://deletetheborder.org/
"Señorita extraviada" ("Missing Young Woman")
(2001)
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