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The VICE Podcast Show is a weekly discussion which delves inside the minds of some of the most interesting, creative, and bizarre people within the VICE universe. This week, Reihan Salam speaks with Michael Wahid Hanna, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and leading expert on affairs in Egypt and the Middle East. Following the ousting of Morsi, Hanna traces the history and mission of Egypt's key players in an attempt to shed some light on the new wave of violence and bloodshed erupting in the streets of Egypt.
Here is just the audio from this week's discussion:
Previously on the podcast we spoke with Jeremy Refn about Only God Forgives.
More about Egypt:
Watch: Egypt After Morsi
Read: The Egyptian Army Massacred 51 Pro-Morsi Supporters
Is the UK's austerity program really such a terrible thing? Sure, in times of crisis people do tend to smash each other in the head more often, underestimate the value of their own lives, and end up cast adrift in a hellish world of drugs, mental illness, and homelessness. Then again—and sorry to pull rank here, but I'm from fucking Greece, so I know—austerity also helps strip the pointless bullshit from people's lives. No more taxis. No more expensive hangover pizzas. No more white peacocks for your garden. No more diamond slippers... these things don't seem quite so important when you're preoccupied with figuring out where tonight's dinner is going to come from.
Si Barber is a Norfolk-based photographer who, for the past six or so years, has been sensitive enough to the hilarity of life in credit crunched Britain to photograph it honestly. I don't know if that means anything coming from a foreigner, but browsing through his The Big Society project I'm met with images of the Britain I dreamed of as a kid and came to love as an adult—the wonderfully fucked-up loner of Europe.
I spoke to Si about his work.
VICE: Hi, Si. So you've been working on your Big Society project for a while now, right?
I am always working on The Big Society. When I started it in 2007, I could just spend a couple of hundred dollars on diesel, accommodation, and food, and run off to Scotland for the weekend—it would all just be absorbed within my business, which is commission-based photography. Now that times have gotten a bit harder, I try to get as much out of a shoot as possible. I’ll go off and do two or three things at the same time.
Do you ever get involved in a project you absolutely hate?
I don’t hate any of them, but I do find the imagination of some of the people who commission work fairly limited. I also work quite a lot for broadsheet newspapers, and they have a limited view on what constitutes a good picture. They might ask for a bit of side-lighting, for example, which is a little bit old hat.
What I like about your pictures is their simplicity. It seems like you just point your camera at something interesting and take a picture that makes sense.
Is there a particular image that stands out to you?
The Flower Queens
I really like the photo of the Flower Queens. The Barbie memorial, too.
There’s a sort of underlying sadness in both those pictures. The Flower Queens one is particularly interesting because this year's parade was the last parade ever. It takes place in Spalding, Lincolnshire, which is a very rural area and a center for the flower industry—if somebody buys you flowers from a gas station in England, they’re probably from Lincolnshire. Anyway, the parade used to be funded by the local council and the local businesses, but nobody has any money now. They’ve also had a lot of immigration coming in from Eastern Europe, so there’s a sort of tension. Not of the physical violence kind, but a cultural tension, which makes the place quite interesting.
What about the crucified Barbie?
That was up in Cumbria on a road called the A66, which is locally known as quite a dangerous one. There are loads of accidents but the saddest thing is that the councils clear away the memorials once they are set up. Officially, they’re regarded as a form of advertising, which I think is quite sad, really. Then again, they really look cheap. “Sorry you’re dead but this five-dollar trinket is all I can spend on you.” But that's just my opinion, I wouldn’t want to degrade anyone’s memory. In any case, I find them interesting. They stay up there for a few days and then they disappear as if they’d never existed at all.
Road accident memorial, on the A66, Cumbria.
What’s your favorite photo?
I think it's the one of the Claudia Schiffer poster that's been covered up with a painted on hijab. I saw it in Oldham in Manchester, an area with a large Muslim population, and what I like most about it is the bus in the background. To me, this is a very traditional English symbol—I think it creates a certain tension in the picture, which I enjoy.
One thing I have noticed about your pictures is that a lot of them are devoted to army life. What’s that about?
I grew up as a military child. My dad was in the Royal Air Force and the thing that always strikes me about the military is that they have this sort of front where everything is orderly, but behind the scenes it’s a total disaster. For example, the rates of the divorce of people in the military are absolutely huge—it’s over 50 percent.
The body of Private James Grigg is conveyed into Stradbrook Church, Suffolk. The 21-year-old became the 257th member of the British forces to die in Afghanistan when he was killed by an explosion in Musa Qala.
A level of patriotism runs throughout your photos. To me, it seems bittersweet, as if they are saying, "England's great, England’s funny, and England’s fucked up."
You’re absolutely right. When times are tough you tend to see surges of patriotism. Like with Thatcher and the Falklands. My dad was involved in the war—I was 14 when that war kicked off. At the time nobody knew where the Falklands was, people thought it was near Scotland. After Thatcher won it back, it became this huge part of England and Englishness. Which is all completely manufactured, really.
Royal Wedding celebrations.
You mentioned you started working on The Big Society in 2007. What came first, the idea for the project or the photos of Britain in recession shock?
I was walking around Cambridge and I went down a street and there was a big line of people standing outside a Northern Rock branch. They were lining up to get their money out because the bank had gone bankrupt. It was the first bank to go bust in this country in 150 years. It struck me then that there was something afoot, because there wasn’t much in the papers about the crash at the time. I started taking a few photos here and there, and as the credit crunch came on, I started doing more. The difference was then that I didn’t have to go and find subjects, they tended to appear in my way more and more frequently.
Would you say a bad economy contributes to absurd behavior?
Absolutely. The ironic thing is that the best pictures happen in bad economies. I started the project in 2007 and I was going all over the country back then looking for subjects. But what I’m interested in is not the big picture—not the riots and stuff like that—what I care about are the smaller things. I want to photograph the roadside memorial, not the accident. When you look at the picture of the accident you get the shock of seeing somebody injured, whereas with the memorial you get a look at the pathetic nature of life. I don’t mean that life is pathetic, but putting together this memorial with a couple bits of wood can give you an idea of the fragility of life more than anything else.
See more of Si's work here.
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A fawn not unlike the one killed by authorities in Wisconsin because it was in an animal shelter instead of a wildlife reserve. Photo via Flickr user Martin Unrue
Two weeks ago, a 13-person armed raid consisting of nine Wisconsin Department of Natural Resource (DNR) agents and four sheriff’s deputies served a search warrant on an animal shelter in order to seize and exterminate a contraband baby deer named Giggles. The abandoned fawn had been brought by a concerned family to the St. Francis Society shelter in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and stayed for about two weeks (the plan was to take Giggles to a wildlife reserve, a move that would have happened the day after the raid). But housing wildlife is illegal in Wisconsin due to concerns over diseases, and soon enough two anonymous busybodies called in a tip about the deer. The authorities reacted to the threat by immediately mobilizing (they even used aerial photos to track and confirm the existence of Giggles) and came to the shelter looking “like a SWAT team,” according to a shelter employee.
The law itself may seem cruel to Bambi fans, or coldly sensible to those worried about people keeping potentially disease-carrying wild animals as pets, but the issue isn’t the law so much as the bizarre method of enforcement—instead of taking Giggles to a reserve, the DNR sedated her, put her in a “body bag” and took her elsewhere to be killed.
Local news station WISN interviewed Jennifer Niemeyer, a supervisor for the DNR, who dismissed the idea that the cops should have talked to the shelter before they used force, comparing it to warning drug dealers before a raid. “They don't call [drug offenders] and ask them to voluntarily surrender their marijuana or whatever drug that they have before they show up,” she said. No, they don’t. But they might start considering it.
Though SWAT-like tactics are most often used in narcotics cases, aggressive police raids (which don’t always involve SWAT teams) are now used more and more frequently for nonviolent lawbreaking. Examples range from FDA feeling the need to go guns-out while fighting the scourge of raw milk, to SWAT teams ostensibly checking liquor licenses at bars and strip clubs before searching employees and patrons for drugs, to a raid targeting Gibson Guitars after the company bought wood that wasn’t finished properly before being exported from India, to IRS agents training with assault rifles. Law enforcement agencies of all stripes can’t seem to get their heads around the notion that while their jobs might sometimes involve using guns and battering rams just like TV cops, they don’t always need to use force. For instance, they could try knocking politely on a door or making a phone call before they raid an animal shelter and kill a baby deer.
Now on to the rest of this week’s bad cops:
- A Santa Ana, California, police officer fatally shot a combative 22-year-old homeless man on Tuesday afternoon after he refused the officer’s commands to get down on the ground. Hans Kevin Arellano, who had been convicted of one robbery and wanted in connection with another, was allegedly causing some kind of disturbance at a shopping center. When the unnamed officer—who had arrived as backup—demanded he lie on the ground, Hans responded with, “What are you going to do about it, bitch?” according to a witness who filmed the exchange. The female officer then shot him once in the chest, even though she was carrying a Taser she could have used instead. The incident is being investigated.
- Speaking of Tasers and stun guns, it’s mostly good news that two dozen Bergen County, New Jersey, police officers are now authorized to carry stun guns (purchased, naturally, with drug forfeiture money). The weapons are even equipped with cameras that police can’t turn off, ensuring that uses of force are recorded and maximizing accountability. On the other hand, Tasers can kill, and cops in other places have been a little too eager to use them, leading to abuse in some cases.
- A legally blind man filed a lawsuit last week against local police chief Andy Rodriguez and another officer in Shoshoni, Wyoming. L.J. Faith’s lawyer claims his constitutional rights were violated, and Faith says that after they came to investigate complaints over his pet cats, cops tasered and arrested him because he “used strong language” and told them to get lost. The kicker? “Chief Rodriguez also accidentally Tasered himself and his partner during the incident.”
- On Tuesday, the DEA settled with 25-year-old Daniel Chong for $4.1 million more than a year after an April 2012 case where Daniel was placed in a holding cell and completely forgotten about for five days. Daniel, who was never charged with a crime and was supposed to be released after being picked up during a raid at his friend’s house, drank his own urine, hallucinated, and thought he would die during his horrific ordeal.
- Juan Taverna, a sheriff’s deputy in Orange County, California, is accused of making five people sick in September, 2012, after he pulled over a 19-year-old for a traffic violation. Juan let the kid go, but not before Taverna put pepper spray on a pizza sitting in the backseat of his car, which pretty much ruined the pizza party the kid was going to after the spray got them sick. Taverna faces up a year in jail over this bizarre incident, and is being arraigned in court today.
- Two different instances of Texas state troopers intrusively searching women’s body cavities after they were pulled over for minor crimes including speeding and littering were shocking enough, but now civil liberties advocates and others are worrying that they are not unique, and are in fact standard policy (written or unwritten). A long piece in the New York Daily News mentions other women coming forward to report they were treated similarly after seeing the disturbing dashcam videos.
- An Indianapolis policeman named "Community Police Support Officer of the Year" in May might not be such a great guy. Local news station WISH obtained video last week showing officer T. Michael Wilson attacking and arresting a man and his employee who had asked management at the hotel where they were staying to call police to report a robbery in the employee’s room. More off-putting than the incident itself (which happened in September) is the difference between what the footage shows and what Wilson put into his police report from that night, which falsely claims that the arrestees were acting violent. In reality, Wilson threw 60-year-old Brian Hudkins to the ground with little provocation and arrested him and his employee, who claims he tried to film the confrontation and was then threatened with a Taser. The video also shows Wilson throwing Hudkins down in the parking lot after he was handcuffed. Hudkins is now suing the police department for $700,000.
- A cop watcher in Illinois is unsure if he’ll be charged and face up to 15 years in prison under the state’s draconian anti-wiretapping law—one of the strictest in the country, though it’s only occasionally enforced—for recording a police officer without permission. The law was ruled unconstitutional by a state circuit court, but it’s still on the books in Morgan County, where Randy Newingham filmed a cop without consent on Wednesday.
- Police in Starkville, Mississippi, are spending time and resources investigating whoever was behind two parody Twitter accounts pretending to be Starkville aldermen. (The crime allegedly committed here is “illegal impersonation.”) Wait until these cops find out about @__MICHAELJ0RDAN.
- Our Good Cops of the Week are the ones pointed out by journalist Radley Balko in his piece on cops who object to the militarization of their profession. Most of the cops mentioned are retired, and Balko suggests that it might be the older cops who are indeed more skittish about what has happened to law enforcement. One anonymous former officer wrote in an email that some young cops are “acting out, at least to some degree, video game fantasies about being a badass,” and added, “American policing really needs to return to a more traditional role of cops keeping the peace; getting out of police cars, talking to people, and not being prone to overreaction with the use of firearms, Tasers, or pepper spray.” Amen.
Previously: DEA Raids Legal Dispensaries in Washington Again
Lucy Steigerwald is a freelance writer and photographer. Read her blog here and follow her on Twitter: @lucystag
These days, you can call someone a cum bubble that was sharted out of a dead hooker’s crusty asshole and chances are you’ll walk away with a high five. But call someone the N-word, and you’ll be dropped faster than Paula Deen’s hottest potato. Racism really is the last taboo—and that’s a good thing. In fact, earlier this month, Slate examined the waxing and waning power of profanities over time and concluded that cuss words related to religion (“damn,” “hell”) and body functions (“dick,” “shit”) are losing their shock value, while racial slurs are becoming more and more provocative. In other words, as we become more secular, immune to gore, and open to freaky porn, we’re also becoming less OK with bigotry. Again, this is a very good thing.
Yet, extremist lunacy has gotten louder, fouler, and more dangerous. According to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, hate groups have been surging in numbers for the last decade. And a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal study found that race relations in post-Trayvon America are far worse than in 2009, when Obama’s ascendance caused us all to buy into that “hopey-changey” stuff.
As the number of racist hate groups has continued to climb, so have the vile internet underbellies where these bigots let their views run wild. Professor Gazi Islam from the Grenoble Ecole de Management, who has studied online communities extensively, said he would characterize these forums as "low constraint" spaces where “people with like-minded opinions could express sentiments that would otherwise be counter-normative.”
By “counter-normative,” Professor Islam really means, “so fucking offensive, it’s actually funny.” Take Chimpout.com for example. Chimpout’s slogan is, “A black plague is descending upon civilization. That plague is called the nigger.” Its mission is to “provide up to the minute nigger facts and news stories that are either covered up or buried by the mainstream media.” And it accomplishes this goal through posting new stories about black guys who steal 300 gallons of cooking oil, and photo-shopping nooses on Denzel Washington and Ice Cube. There’s even an entire thread called "Movie Posters Niggerized," where scores of classic films are turned into KKK propaganda. Even The Help—which is about a white journalist exposing racism in the 60s—isn’t spared. Its tagline is ironically altered from “change begins with a whisper” to “change begins with a noose.”
Chimpout is so ridiculous, it almost seems like the entire thing was written by people only pretending to be racist in order to ridicule how insane they really sound. But Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, insists that self-deprecation is not a factor. “They’re incapable of looking at themselves in the mirror. They’re deadly serious about evil multi-cultural elites and the literal genocide of the white race,” he said.
Given how outrageous the comments and images are on these sites, I asked Mark if these communities are just as isolated online as they are in the real world. Unfortunately, his answer was… not really. “It’s not so much that you’d see a Klansman integrated in society. But you do see their propaganda making their way into the mainstream,” Mark explained. “For example, the Arizona-based American Border Patrol group floated a conspiracy theory that Mexico has a secret plan to invade and conquer the American Southwest. That idea jumped to the Minutemen Projected, then was presented by Lou Dobbs on CNN as a fact.”
The vitriol only continues with Vanguard News Network, one of the internet’s most extreme anti-Semitic communities. VNN’s slogan is “No Jews. Just Right,” and it makes Stormfront—the internet’s first hate site and the most well-known white nationalist group—look like Pinterest. While Stormfront has women-only threads dedicated to whether you should epilate, shave, or wax your hoo-ha, VNN’s founder, the infamous neo-Nazi Alex Linder, is going around telling people to exterminate Jews like cockroaches. Linder is so extreme, he even declared that “if you have any White sentiment, your job is changing your church, not special-pleading for your science-fiction hero among White men.” Then he banned all Christians from joining.
Even though dropping in on sites like VNN, Stormfront, and Chimpout was a stomach-turning endeavor on every click, I never saw commenters try to organize acts of violence offline. Not on any of the public threads, at least. That’s because forum members know that the Constitution only protects their xenophobic and intolerant “opinions” up until the point that they meet the legal definition of a threat—then, the police are allowed to step in. And according to Mark Potok, this happens very rarely. Organizations like United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute have programs in place that aim to increase the capacity of law enforcement to report discriminatory behaviors, but the First Amendment makes censoring these commenters very tricky. Meanwhile, across the pond, France is collecting anti-Semitic account names from Twitter. But who’d want to be like those cheese-eating surrender monkeys anyway?
The Armpit of the Internet is a biweekly column exploring the most odorous and crust-ridden corners of cyber culture.
Previously: Leg Warmer Porn Is Gross
Wanna hear a racist joke? Michelle can tell you many: @MichelleLHOOQ
All photos by Noah Friedman-Rudovsky. Noah Friedman-Rudovsky also contributed reporting to this article.
F or a while, the residents of Manitoba Colony thought demons were raping the town’s women. There was no other explanation. No way of explaining how a woman could wake up with blood and semen stains smeared across her sheets and no memory of the previous night. No way of explaining how another went to sleep clothed, only to wake up naked and covered by dirty fingerprints all over her body. No way to understand how another could dream of a man forcing himself onto her in a field—and then wake up the next morning with grass in her hair.
For Sara Guenter, the mystery was the rope. She would sometimes wake up in her bed with small pieces of it tied tightly to her wrists or ankles, the skin beneath an aching blue. Earlier this year, I visited Sara at her home, simple concrete painted to look like brick, in Manitoba Colony, Bolivia. Mennonites are similar to the Amish in their rejection of modernity and technology, and Manitoba Colony, like all ultraconservative Mennonite communities, is a collective attempt to retreat as far as possible from the nonbelieving world. A slight breeze of soy and sorghum came off the nearby fields as Sara told me how, in addition to the eerie rope, on those mornings after she’d been raped she would also wake to stained sheets, thunderous headaches, and paralyzing lethargy.
Her two daughters, 17 and 18 years old, squatted silently along a wall behind her and shot me fierce blue-eyed stares. The evil had penetrated the household, Sara said. Five years ago, her daughters also began waking up with dirty sheets and complaints of pain “down below.”
The family tried locking the door; some nights, Sara did everything she could to keep herself awake. On a few occasions, a loyal Bolivian worker from the neighboring city of Santa Cruz would stay the night to stand guard. But inevitably, when their one-story home—set back and isolated from the dirt road—was not being watched, the rapes continued. (Manitobans aren’t connected to the power grid, so at night the community is submerged in total darkness.) “It happened so many times, I lost count,” Sara said in her native Low German, the only language she speaks, like most women in the community.
In the beginning, the family had no idea that they weren’t the only ones being attacked, and so they kept it to themselves. Then Sara started telling her sisters. When rumors spread, “no one believed her,” said Peter Fehr, Sara’s neighbor at the time of the incidents. “We thought she was making it up to hide an affair.” The family’s pleas for help to the council of church ministers, the group of men who govern the 2,500-member colony, were fruitless—even as the tales multiplied. Throughout the community, people were waking to the same telltale morning signs: ripped pajamas, blood and semen on the bed, head-thumping stupor. Some women remembered brief moments of terror: for an instant they would wake to a man or men on top of them but couldn’t summon the strength to yell or fight back. Then, fade to black.
Some called it “wild female imagination.” Others said it was a plague from God. “We only knew that something strange was happening in the night,” Abraham Wall Enns, Manitoba Colony’s civic leader at the time, said. “But we didn’t know who was doing it, so how could we stop it?”
No one knew what to do, and so no one did anything at all. After a while, Sara just accepted those nights as a horrific fact of life. On the following mornings, her family would rise despite the head pain, strip the beds, and get on with their days.
Then, one night in June 2009, two men were caught trying to enter a neighbor’s home. The two ratted out a few friends and, falling like a house of cards, a group of nine Manitoba men, ages 19 to 43, eventually confessed that they had been raping Colony families since 2005. To incapacitate their victims and any possible witnesses, the men used a spray created by a veterinarian from a neighboring Mennonite community that he had adapted from a chemical used to anesthetize cows. According to their initial confessions (which they later recanted), the rapists admitted to—sometimes in groups, sometimes alone—hiding outside bedroom windows at night, spraying the substance through the screens to drug entire families, and then crawling inside.
But it wasn’t until their trial, which took place almost two years later, in 2011, that the full scope of their crimes came to light. The transcripts read like a horror movie script: Victims ranged in age from three to 65 (the youngest had a broken hymen, purportedly from finger penetration). The girls and women were married, single, residents, visitors, the mentally infirm. Though it’s never discussed and was not part of the legal case, residents privately told me that men and boys were raped, too.
In August 2011, the veterinarian who’d supplied the anesthetic spray was sentenced to 12 years in prison, and the rapists were each sentenced to 25 years (five years shy of Bolivia’s maximum penalty). Officially, there were 130 victims—at least one person from more than half of all Manitoba Colony households. But not all those raped were included in the legal case, and it’s believed the true number of victims is much, much higher.
In the wake of the crimes, women were not offered therapy or counseling. There was little attempt to dig deeper into the incidents beyond the confessions. And in the years since the men were nabbed, there has never been a colony-wide discussion about the events. Rather, a code of silence descended following the guilty verdict.
“That’s all behind us now,” Civic Leader Wall told me on my recent trip there. “We’d rather forget than have it be at the forefront of our minds.” Aside from interactions with the occasional visiting journalist, no one talks about it anymore.
But over the course of a nine-month investigation, including an 11-day stay in Manitoba, I discovered that the crimes are far from over. In addition to lingering psychological trauma, there’s evidence of widespread and ongoing sexual abuse, including rampant molestation and incest. There’s also evidence that—despite the fact that the initial perpetrators are in jail—the rapes by drugging continue to happen.
The demons, it turns out, are still out there.
Eight Mennonite men are serving sentences in prison for the rapes of more than 130 women in Manitoba Colony. One of the alleged rapists escaped and now resides in Paraguay.
A
t first glance, life for Manitoba’s residents seems an idyllic existence, enviable by new-age off-the-gridders: families live off the land, solar panels light homes, windmills power potable water wells. When one family suffers a death, the rest take turns cooking meals for the grieving. The richer families subsidize schoolhouse maintenance and teachers’ salaries. Mornings begin with homemade bread, marmalade, and milk still warm from the cows outside. At dusk, children play tag in the yard as their parents sway in rockers and watch the sunset.
Not all Mennonites live in sheltered worlds. There are 1.7 million of them in 83 different countries. From community to community, their relationships to the modern world vary considerably. Some eschew modernity entirely; others live in insular worlds but allow cars, TVs, cell phones, and varied dress. Many live among, and are virtually indistinguishable from, the rest of society.
The religion was formed as an offshoot of the Protestant Reformation in 1520s Europe, by a Catholic priest named Menno Simons. Church leaders lashed out against Simons’s encouragement of adult baptism, pacifism, and his belief that only by leading a simple life could one get to heaven. Threatened by the new doctrine, the Protestant and Catholic churches began persecuting his followers throughout Central and Western Europe. Most Mennonites—as Simons’s followers came to be known—refused to fight because of their vow of nonviolence, and so they fled to Russia where they were given settlements to live unbothered by the rest of society.
But by the 1870s, persecution began in Russia, too, so the group next sought refuge in Canada, welcomed by a government in need of pioneer settlers. On arrival, many Mennonites began adopting modern dress, language, and other aspects of contemporary life. A small group, however, continued to believe that they would only be allowed into heaven if they lived in the ways of their forefathers, and they were appalled to see their fellow followers so easily seduced by the new world. This group, known as the “Old Colonists,” abandoned Canada in the 1920s, in part because the government demanded school lessons be taught in English, and hinted at standardizing a country-wide curriculum. (Even today, Old Colony schooling is taught in German, is strictly Bible-based, and ends at 13 for boys and 12 for girls.)
The Old Colonists migrated to Paraguay and Mexico, where there was ample farmland, little technology, and most importantly, promises by the respective national governments to let them live as they wished. But in the 1960s, when Mexico introduced its own educational reform that threatened to limit Mennonite autonomy, another migration began. Old Colonies subsequently sprouted up in more remote parts of the Americas, with a heavy concentration in Bolivia and Belize.
Today, there are about 350,000 Old Colonists worldwide, and Bolivia is home to more than 60,000 of them. Manitoba Colony, which was formed in 1991, looks like a relic of the old world dropped in the middle of the new: a pale-skinned, blue-eyed island of order amid the sea of chaos that is South America’s most impoverished and indigenous country. The colony thrives economically off its members’ supreme work ethic, ample fertile fields, and collective milk factory.
Manitoba has emerged as the ultimate safe haven for Old Colony true believers. Other colonies in Bolivia have loosened their codes, but Manitobans fervently reject cars, and all of their tractors have steel tires, as owning any mechanized vehicle with rubber tires is seen as a cardinal sin because it enables easy contact with the outside world. Men are forbidden from growing facial hair and don denim overalls except in church, where they wear slacks. Girls and women wear identically tied intricate braids, and you’d be hard pressed to find a dress with a length or sleeve that varies more than a few millimeters from the preordained design. For Manitoba residents, these aren’t arbitrary rules: they form the one path to salvation and colonists obey because, they believe, their souls depend on it.
As all Old Colonists desire, Manitoba has been left to its own devices. Except in the case of murder, the Bolivian government does not obligate community leaders to report any crime. Police have virtually no jurisdiction inside the community, nor do state or municipal authorities. The colonists maintain law and order through a de facto government of nine ministers and a ruling bishop, all of whom are elected for life. Beyond being mandated by the Bolivian government to ensure that all residents have a state identity card, Manitoba functions almost as its own sovereign nation.
Abraham Wall Enns (center) with his family. Abraham was the chief civic leader of Manitoba Colony, Bolivia, during the time of the rapes.
I
covered the Manitoba rape trial in 2011 for Time. Haunted ever since my first visits to the Colony, I wanted to know how the victims were faring. I also wondered if the heinous crimes perpetrated on its residents were an anomaly, or if they had exposed deeper cracks in the community. Is it possible that the insular world of the Old Colonies, rather than fostering peaceful coexistence unmoored by the trappings of modern society, is perhaps fomenting its own demise? I was compelled to go back and find out.
I arrived late on a moonlit Friday night in January. I was greeted by the warm smiles of Abraham and Margarita Wall Enns who were standing on the porch of their small home, set back from the road by a manicured and tree-lined driveway. Though notoriously reclusive, Old Colonists are kind to outsiders who don’t seem to threaten their way of life, and that’s how I’d arrived there: I had met Abraham, a freckled, six-foot-tall leader in the community, in 2011, and he said that I should stay with him and his family if I ever came back. Now I was here, hoping to see Old Colony life up close while interviewing residents about the rapes and their aftermath.
Inside the spotless house, Margarita showed me to my bedroom, next to the two other rooms in which her nine children were already sleeping. “We had this installed for security,” she said, grabbing a three-inch-thick steel door at the bottom of the stairs. There had apparently been some robberies (blamed on Bolivians) recently. “Sleep well,” she told me before bolting shut the door that separated me and her family from the rest of the world.
The next morning, I rose before dawn with the rest of the household. On any given day, the two eldest daughters—Liz, 22, and Gertrude, 18—spend the majority of their time washing dishes and clothes, preparing meals, milking the cows, and keeping a spotless home. I did my best not to screw up as I helped with the chores. I was exhausted by lunchtime.
Housework is outside the domain of Abraham and the six Wall boys; it’s possible they’ll go through their entire lives without ever clearing their own plates. They work the fields, but since this was the farming off-season, the older ones assembled tractor equipment their father imports from China, while the youngest pair climbed the barn posts and played with pet parakeets. Abraham allows the boys to kick around a soccer ball and practice Spanish by reading the occasional newspaper delivered weekly from Santa Cruz; however,
any other organized activity, be it competitive sport, dance,
or music, could jeopardize their eternal salvation and is
strictly forbidden.
The Walls told me that luckily no one within their family fell victim to the rapists, but like everyone else in the community they knew all about it. One day, Liz agreed to accompany me on my interviews with rape victims in the community. A curious and quick young woman who learned Spanish from the family’s Bolivian cook, she was happy for an excuse to get out of the house and socialize.
We set out in a horse-drawn buggy along dirt roads. During the ride, Liz told me about her memories during the time of the scandal. As far as she knows, the perpetrators never entered her home. When I asked her if she was ever scared, she said no. “I didn’t believe it,” she told me. “So I only got scared once they confessed. Then it became real.”
When I asked Liz whether she thought the rapes could have been stopped earlier if these women had been taken seriously, she just wrinkled her eyebrows. Hadn’t the Colony given the rapists liberty to attack for four years, in part, because people had blamed the crimes on “wild female imagination”? She didn’t reply, but seemed lost in thought as she steered us along the dirt road.
We pulled into the pebbled courtyard of a large house, and I went inside for an interview while Liz waited outside in the buggy. In a dark living room, I spoke with Helena Martens, a middle-aged mother of 11 children, and her husband. She sat on a couch and they kept the window shades drawn as we talked about what had happened to her nearly five years ago.
Sometime in 2008, Helena told me, she had heard a hissing sound as she settled into bed. She smelled a strange odor too, but after her husband made sure the gas canister in the kitchen wasn’t leaking, they fell asleep. She vividly recalls waking up in the middle of the night to “a man on top of me and others in the room, but I couldn’t raise my arms in defense.” She quickly slipped back into a dead sleep and then the next morning her head throbbed and her sheets were soiled.
The rapists attacked her several more times over the next few years. Helena suffered from various medical complications during this period, including an operation related to her uterus. (Sex and reproductive health is such a taboo for conservative Mennonites that most women are never taught the correct names for intimate body parts, which inhibited certain descriptions of what took place during the attacks and in their aftermath.) One morning she woke in such pain that “I thought I was going to die,” she said.
Helena, like the other rape victims in Manitoba, was never offered the chance to speak with a professional therapist, even though she said she would if given the opportunity. “Why would they need counseling if they weren’t even awake when it happened?” Manitoba Colony Bishop Johan Neurdorf, the community’s highest authority, had told a visitor back in 2009 after the perpetrators were caught.
Other victims I interviewed—those who awoke during the rapes, as well as those with no memory of the night—said that they would also have liked to speak with a therapist about their experiences but that doing so would be nearly impossible because there are no Low German-speaking sexual-trauma recovery experts in Bolivia.
All of the women I spoke with were unaware that the greater Mennonite world, particularly progressive groups in Canada and the US, had offered to send Low German counselors to Manitoba. Of course, this meant that they also had no clue that it was the men in the colony who had rejected these offers. After centuries of tension with their less-traditional brethren, Old Colonist leadership regularly block any attempts at direct contact with their members initiated by these groups. They saw the offer for psychological support from afar as yet another thinly veiled attempt to encourage the abandonment of their old ways.
The leadership’s refusal likely had other underlying reasons, too, such as not wanting these women’s emotional trauma to stir things up or draw too much attention to the community. I had already been told that a woman’s role in an Old Colony was to obey and submit to her husband’s command. A local minister explained to me that girls are schooled a year less than boys because females have no need to learn math or bookkeeping, which is taught during the extra boys-only term. Women can neither be ministers nor vote to elect them. They also can’t legally represent themselves, as the rape case made painfully apparent. Even the plaintiffs in the trial were five men—a selected group of victims’ husbands or fathers—rather than the women themselves.
But while it was tempting to accept the black-and-white gender roles in Manitoba, my visit also revealed shades of gray. I saw men and women share decision-making in their homes. At extended family gatherings on Sundays, the women-only kitchens felt full with big personalities and loud laughter, while men sat solemnly outside discussing the drought. And I spent long afternoons with confident and engaged young women such as Liz and her friends, who, like their peers anywhere, see each other when they can to vent about the annoying things their parents do and get updates on who broke who’s heart last week.
When it came to the rapes, these times of strong female bonding—and the safe space provided by such a segregated daily routine—offered comfort. Victims told me they leaned on their sisters or cousins, especially as they tried to adjust back to regular life in the wake of the trial.
Those under the age of 18 named in the lawsuit were brought in for psychological assessment as mandated by Bolivian law, and court documents note that every one of these young girls showed signs of posttraumatic stress and was recommended for long-term counseling—but not one has received any form of therapy since their evaluations. Unlike adult women who found at least some solace with their sisters or cousins, many young girls may not have even had a chance to speak with anyone about their experiences after their government-mandated assessments.
In Helena’s living room, she told me how her daughter was also raped, but the two have never spoken about it, and the girl, now 18, doesn’t even know that her mom is also a rape survivor. In Old Colonies, rapes bring shame upon the victim; survivors are stained, and throughout the community other parents of the youngest victims told me that it was all better left unspoken.
“She was too young” to talk about it, the father of another victim, who was 11 when she was raped, told me. He and his wife never explained to the girl why she woke with pain one morning, bleeding so much she had to be taken to the hospital. She was whisked through subsequent medical visits with nurses who didn’t speak her language and was never once told that she had been raped. “It was better she just not know,” her father said.
All the victims I interviewed said the rapes crossed their minds almost daily. In addition to confiding in friends, they have coped by falling back on faith. Helena, for example—though her clutched arms and pained swaying seemed to belie it—told me she’d found peace and insisted, “I have forgiven the men who raped me.”
She wasn’t alone. I heard the same thing from victims, parents, sisters, brothers. Some even said that if the convicted rapists would only admit their crimes—as they did initially—and ask penance from God, the colony would request that the judge dismiss their sentences.
I was perplexed. How could there be unanimous acceptance of such flagrant and premeditated crimes?
It wasn’t until I spoke with Minister Juan Fehr, dressed as all ministers in the community do, entirely in black with high black boots, that I understood. “God chooses His people with tests of fire,” he told me. “In order to go to heaven you must forgive those who have wronged you.” The minister said that he trusts that most of the victims came to forgiveness on their own. But if one woman didn’t want to forgive, he said, she would have been visited by Bishop Neurdorf, Manitoba’s highest authority, and “he would have simply explained to her that if she didn’t forgive, then God wouldn’t forgive her.”
One of the youngest victims to speak with prosecutors was as young as 11 during the time of the rapes. Most of the victims have had almost no psychological counseling, and according to experts, are probably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
M
anitoba’s leaders encourage residents to forgive incest, too. It’s a lesson that Agnes Klassen learned in a painful way. On a muggy Tuesday, the mother of two met me outside her two-room house off a highway in eastern Bolivia, approximately 40 miles from her former home in Manitoba Colony that she left in 2009. She wore her hair in a ponytail and was sweating in jeans and a T-shirt.
I wasn’t there to talk with her about the rapes, but once inside her house, the subject inevitably came up. “One morning I woke up with headaches and there was dirt in our bed,” she said, referring to when she lived in Manitoba, as if remembering an item she had left off a shopping list. She had never thought much about that morning since and wasn’t included in the lawsuit because she saw no reason to come forward after the perpetrators were nabbed.
Instead, I had come to talk to Agnes about other painful parts of her past—namely incest—the origins of which aren’t even clear. “They kind of mesh together,” she said of her earliest childhood memories, which include being fondled by several of her eight older brothers. “I don’t know when [the incest] started.”
One of 15 children, growing up in the Old Colony of Riva Palacios (her family moved to neighboring Manitoba Colony when she was eight), Agnes said the abuse would happen in the barn, in the fields, or in the siblings’ shared bedroom. She didn’t realize it was inappropriate behavior until the age of ten, when she was given a stern beating after her father found her brother fondling her. “My mother could never find the words to tell me that I was being wronged or that it was not my fault,” she recalled.
After that, the molestation continued but Agnes was too scared to go to anyone for help. When she was 13 and one of her brothers tried to rape her, Agnes warily notified her mom. She wasn’t beaten this time, and for a while her mom did her best to keep the two apart. But the brother eventually found her alone and raped her.
The sibling assaults became increasingly commonplace, but there was nowhere for Agnes to turn. Old Colonies have no police force. Ministers deal with wrongdoing directly but because youth are not technically members of the church until they are baptized (often in their early 20s), bad behavior is handled inside the home.
Seeking help outside the colony would have never entered Agnes’s mind: from her first day on earth, she, like all Old Colony children, was taught that the outside world holds evil. And even if someone managed to reach out, there is virtually no way for a child or woman to contact or communicate with the surrounding non–Low German world.
“I just learned to live with it,” Agnes said haltingly. She apologized for her stops and starts, for her tears. It was the first time she had ever fully told her story. She said the incest stopped when boys began courting Agnes, and she filed it away in her mind as a thing of the past.
But when she got married, moved into her own house in Manitoba, and gave birth to two daughters, family members began molesting her children during visits. “It was starting to happen to them, too,” she told me, her eyes following the movements of her two young platinum-blond girls darting past the windows as they played outside. One day, her eldest daughter, not yet four at the time, told Agnes that the girls’ grandpa had asked her to put her hands down his pants. Agnes said that her father never molested her or her sisters, but that he allegedly routinely abused his grandchildren until Agnes fled Manitoba with her daughters (and still allegedly abuses her nieces, who remain in the Colony). Another day, she caught her nephew fondling her youngest daughter. “It happens all the time,” she said. “It’s not just my family.”
Indeed, for a long time now there has been a muffled yet heated discussion in the international Mennonite community about whether Old Colonies have a rampant incest problem. Some defend the Old Colonists, insisting that sexual abuse happens everywhere and that its occurrence in places like Manitoba only proves that any society, no matter how upright, is susceptible to social ills.
But others, like Erna Friessen, a Canadian-Mennonite woman who introduced me to Agnes, insist, “The scope of sexual violence within Old Colonies is really huge.” Erna and her husband helped found Casa Mariposa (Butterfly House), a shelter for abused Old Colony women and girls. Located near the town of Pailon in the heart of Bolivian Old Colony territory, they have a continuous influx of Low German-speaking missionaries ready to help, but the number of women who have made it there are few. Aside from the challenges of making women aware of this space and convincing them that it’s in their best interest to seek help, Erna told me that “coming to Casa Mariposa often means leaving their families and the only world they’ve ever known.”
While Erna admits that exact figures are impossible to calculate due to the insular nature of these communities, she is adamant that rates of sexual abuse are higher in the Old Colonies than in the US, for example, where one in four women will be sexually abused before the age of 18. Erna’s whole life has been among these groups—she was born on a Mennonite Colony in Paraguay, raised in Canada, and has spent the past eight years in Bolivia. Of all the Old Colony women she has met over the years, she says, “more have been victims of abuse than not.” She considers the Colonies “a breeding ground for sexual abuse,” in part because most Old Colony women grow up believing they must accept it. “The first step is always to get them to recognize that they have been wronged. It happened to them, it happened to their mom and their grandmother, so they’ve always been told [to] just deal with it.”
Others who work on the issue of abuse in the Old Colonies are hesitant to pinpoint incidence rates, but say that the way abuse is experienced within an Old Colony makes it a more acute problem than in other places in the world. “These girls or women have no way out,” said Eve Isaak, a mental health clinician and addictions and bereavement counselor who caters to Old Colony Mennonite communities in Canada, US, Bolivia, and Mexico. “In any other society, by elementary school a child knows that if they are being abused they can, at least in theory, go to the police or a teacher or some other authority. But who can these girls go to?”
Though it wasn’t by design, Old Colony churches have become the de facto state. “Old Colonists’ migration can be understood not just as a movement away from society’s ills, but also toward countries that allow the Colonists to live as they choose,” said Helmut Isaak, Eve’s husband who is a pastor and Anabaptist history and theology professor at CEMTA, a seminary in Asuncion, Paraguay. He explains that before Old Colonists migrate to a new country, they send delegations to negotiate terms with the governments to allow them virtual autonomy, particularly in the area of religious law enforcement.
In fact, the serial rapes stand as one of the only times that a Bolivian Old Colony has sought outside intervention regarding an internal matter. Manitoba residents told me that they handed the gang over to the cops in 2009 because victims’ husbands and fathers were so enraged, it’s likely the accused would have been lynched. (One man who was believed to be involved and caught on a neighboring colony, was lynched and later died from his wounds.)
The Old Colony leaders I spoke with denied that their communities have an ongoing sexual abuse problem and insisted that incidents are dealt with internally when they arise. “[Incest] almost never happens here,” Minister Jacob Fehr told me one evening as we chatted on his porch at dusk. He said that in his 19 years as a minister, Manitoba had only one case of incestuous rape (father to daughter). Another minister denied that even this episode had happened.
“They forgive a ton of gross stuff that happens in families all the time,” said Abraham Peters, father of the youngest convicted rapist, Abraham Peters Dyck, who is currently in Palmasola Prison, just outside Santa Cruz. “Brothers with sisters, fathers with daughters.” He told me that he believes his son and the entire gang were framed to cover up widespread incest in Manitoba Colony. Abraham senior still lives in Manitoba; he considered leaving in the period immediately following his son’s arrest because of hostility from the rest of the community. But uprooting his family of 12 proved too difficult, so he stayed put and says that over the years and despite his perspective on his son’s incarceration, he has been accepted back into the fold of Colony life.
Agnes thinks the two crimes are flipsides of the same coin. “The rapes, the abuse, it’s all intertwined,” she said. “What made the rapes different is that they didn’t come from within the family and that’s why the Ministers took the actions they did.”
Of course, leaders do attempt to correct bad behavior. Take the case of Agnes’s father: at some point, his fondling of his granddaughters was called out by church leaders. As procedure dictates, he went before the ministers and bishop, who asked him to confess. He did, and was “excommunicated,” or temporarily expelled from the church for a week, after which he was offered a chance to return based on a promise that he would never do it again.
“Of course it continued after that,” Agnes said of her father. “He just learned to hide it better.” She told me she doesn’t have faith “in anyone who after one week says they have turned their life around,” before adding, “I have no faith in a system that permits that.”
Younger perpetrators have it even easier; according to Agnes, the brother who raped her admitted his sins when he was baptized and was immediately expunged in the eyes of God. He now lives in the neighboring Old Colony, Riva Palacios, with young daughters of his own.
Once an abuser has been excommunicated and readmitted, church leadership assumes the matter has been put to rest. If an abuser flagrantly continues his behavior and refuses to repent, he is once again excommunicated and this time permanently shunned. Leaders instruct the rest of the colony to isolate the family; the general store will refuse to sell to anyone in the household, kids will be banned from school. Eventually the family has no choice but to leave. This, of course, also means that the victims leave with their abusers.
Yet it wasn’t sexual abuse that finally prompted Agnes and her family to abandon Manitoba, which they did in 2009. Instead, her husband had bought a motorcycle, after which he was excommunicated and the family shunned. When the couple’s toddler drowned to death in a cow trough, the community leaders wouldn’t even let her husband attend his own son’s funeral. That’s when they left Manitoba for good. In the end, driving a motorcycle was apparently a larger affront to the Colony’s leadership than anything Agnes, her daughters, or the rest of the women in the community had suffered.
Keeping a colony like Manitoba together is getting harder and harder in modern times. Agnes and her family aren’t the only ones who’ve fled. In fact, the nearby city of Santa Cruz is populated by Mennonite families who have become fed up with the Old Colony way of life—and the situation may be reaching a crisis point.
Johan Weiber, leaning on his pickup truck, is the de facto leader of a dissident group of Mennonites in Manitoba.
"W
e no longer want to be a part of this,” a young father named Johan Weiber told me one day when I visited him at his home in Manitoba. Johan and his family were one of 13 others still living in the colony but who had officially left the Old Colony’s church. For months, they’d been saying they wanted to leave—they even owned vehicles—but Manitoba Colony leaders refused to compensate them for the land they wanted to abandon. Now, instead, they’d decided to build their own dissident church inside Manitoba.
“We are [leaving the Old Colony church and starting our own] because we have read the truth,” Johan said. By “truth,” he meant the Bible. “They tell us not to read the Bible because if we do, we realize things like, in no place does it say a women’s hair has to be braided like that,” he told me, leaning on his white pickup truck as his ponytailed daughter played in the yard.
Curious about the specifics of religious instruction at Manitoba, one Sunday I attended a service at one of the colony’s three nondescript brick churches. I soon realized that the solemn 90-minute ceremony is not a priority. Heads of households might go two or three times a month, but many go even less frequently.
For children, the core school curriculum is based on selected Bible readings, but aside from a silent 20-second prayer before and after meals, there is no specified time or requirement for prayer or Bible studies in the adult Old Colony world.
“Many [people have] lost their biblical literacy,” said Helmut Isaak, the Mennonite historian. He explained that over time, as Mennonites stopped having to constantly defend their faith against persecutors, other more practical concerns took precedent. “In order to survive, they needed to spend their time working.”
This has created a crucial power disparity: the small cadre of church leaders have became the sole interpreters of the Bible on Old Colonies, and because the Bible is seen as the law, leaders use this control over the scripture to instill order and obedience.
Ministers deny this charge: “We encourage all our members to know what is written in the holy book,” Minister Jacob Fehr told me one evening. But residents admit in quiet that Bible-study classes are discouraged and Bibles are written in High German, a language that most adults barely remember after their limited schooling, while Low German versions are sometimes banned. On some Old Colonies, members face excommunication for delving too deeply into the scripture.
This is why Johan Weiber was such a threatening presence—he terrified the leadership and community at large. He also reminded them of the troubled past of the Old Colonies. “This is exactly what happened in Mexico and that’s why we came [to Bolivia],” said Peter Knelsen, a 60-year-old Manitoba resident who arrived from Mexico as a teenager with his parents. It wasn’t just the Mexican government that was threatening Old Colonies with reform, but also an evangelical movement from within that sought to “change our way of life,” said Peter, who explained that in his colony in Mexico dissenters tried to build their own church, too.
For more than 40 years, Bolivian Old Colonists had escaped such an internal rift. But with Johan Weiber’s attempt to build his own church—he also wanted land in Manitoba on which to farm and build his own independent school—Peter and others spoke of an impending “apocalypse.” Tensions nearly exploded in June, after my visit, when Johan’s group actually broke ground on their church. Soon after construction commenced, over 100 Manitoba men descended on the site and took it apart, piece-by-piece. “I think it’s going to be really hard to maintain the colony intact,” Peter told me.
If this rift continues to widen and the crisis comes to a head, Manitobans already know what to do. Centuries ago, the original Mennonites in Europe, faced with persecution, had a choice: fight or flight. Given their vow of pacifism, they fled—and they have been doing so ever since.
Manitoba leaders say they hope it doesn’t come to that. In part, this is probably because Bolivia is one of the last countries left that will let them live on their own terms. So for now, Minister Jacob Fehr says he prays. “We just want [Weiber’s group] to leave the colony,” he said. “We just want to be left alone.”
Heinrich Knelsen Kalssen, one of the rapists, is led out of the courtroom by police in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.
O
n my last day in Manitoba, I got a shock.
“You know that it’s still happening, right?” a woman said to me, as we drank ice water alongside her home. There were no men around. I hoped something was lost in translation, but my Low German translator assured me it wasn’t. “The rapes with the spray—they are still going on,” she said.
I peppered her with questions: Had it happened to her? Did she know who was doing it? Did everyone know it was going on?
No, she said, they hadn’t returned to her house, but to a cousin’s—recently. She said she had a good guess about who was doing it but wouldn’t give me any names. And she believed that, yes, most people in Manitoba Colony knew that the imprisonment of the original rapists hadn’t put an end to the serial crimes.
As if in a strange time warp, after dozens of interviews with people telling me everything was fine now, I didn’t know if this was gossip, rumor, lies, or—worse—the truth. I spent the rest of the day frantically trying to get confirmation. I revisited many families who I had previously interviewed, and the majority admitted, a bit sheepishly, that yes, they had heard the rumors and that, yes, they assumed they were probably true.
“It’s definitely not as frequent,” said one young man later that day whose wife had been raped during the first series of incidents before 2009. “[The rapists] are being much more careful than before, but it still goes on.” He told me he had his suspicions about the perpetrators’ identities as well, but didn’t want to give any more details.
On a subsequent reporting trip by Noah Friedman-Rudovsky, the photographer for this article, five people went on record—including three Manitobans as well as a local prosecutor and a journalist—and confirmed that they had heard the rapes are continuing.
Those I spoke with said they have no way to stop the alleged attacks. There is still no police force in the area, and there never will be any proactive element or investigatory force that can look into accusations of crimes. Anyone is free in the colonies to report somebody else to the Ministers, but crimes are addressed on the honor system: if a perpetrator is not ready to admit his sins, the question is whether the victim or accuser will be believed… and women in Manitoba already know how that goes.
The only defense, residents told me, is to install better locks or bars on the windows, or big steel doors like the one I slept behind each night during my trip. “We can’t put in streetlights or video cameras,” the husband of a victim of the rapes told me—two technologies not allowed. For it to stop, they believe they must, as before, catch someone in the act. “So we will just have to wait,” he said.
That last day, before leaving Manitoba, I returned to visit Sara, the woman who woke up with rope around her wrists nearly five years ago. She said she’d also heard the rumors of ongoing rapes, and breathed a heavy sigh. She and her family had moved to a new house after the gang of nine was captured in 2009. The old house held too many demon-filled memories. She said she felt badly if others were now living her past horrors, but she didn’t know what could be done. After all, her time on earth, like that of all her fellow Mennonites, was meant for suffering. Before I left, she offered what she considered words of solace: “Maybe this is God’s plan.”
Editor's Note: Abuse and rape victims’ names have been changed at their request.
For a closer look at the ongoing scandal in Manitoba Colony, check out our documentary, The Ghost Rapes of Bolivia, airing this month on VICE.com.
More from VICE:
Just before the city of Detroit filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection on July 18, Whole Foods opened a relatively low-priced version of their store in Midtown Detroit, the area around Wayne State University. Midtown is Detroit’s neighborhood with fixies and really small dogs, so it’s only natural that, like Williamsburg, Silver Lake, San Francisco's Mission district, and their ilk, despite Midtown’s relative affluence, the poor are just a few blocks away. Having a Whole Foods there is a “game changer,” according to Mayor Dave Bing, and “Detroit’s 112th grocery store,” according to those who regularly buy food there.
But excuse me. You’re one full paragraph into a story with “Detroit” in the headline, and there hasn’t been any rubble porn. Here you go:
To their credit, Whole Foods hired about 100 Detroiters to open the store. They go out of their way to get a lot of their products from within Detroit, and they really want you to notice:
There are also a lot of messages about how they’re “proud to be here,” which sort of comes off as overcompensating in an “Ooh a gay wedding! Fun!” kind of way. This is apparently one of three experimental, low-income Whole Foods specially designed for distressed locations where media coverage is assured. The other two are going to be in New Orleans and Chicago’s South Side. I’m guessing these are going to form their “Proud to be Here” trifecta.
If it weren’t for all the “Proud to Be Here,” signs, you would never know you were in Detroit, what with a nationally recognizable retail outpost and fully renovated parking lot. It forms a fully branded corporate oasis in the middle of a city where the walls have street art where most cities would have advertisements.
A slightly higher-end grocery store is only the start of a whole yuppie renaissance for the Motor City, but what that future really holds is anyone's guess. I hung around the parking lot and asked some of the patrons what they want next for the city (besides another Whole Foods).
Colin, resident of Midtown
“Light rail. I don’t make very much money, and it’s hard to keep my car going. The People Mover really only takes you to places that you can easily walk to anyway. Plus it’s very expensive on minimum wage to continuously fix your shitty car, because you can’t afford a nicer car, because you work for minimum wage...”
Andre, resident of Midtown
“The Pistons in Detroit. I love Auburn Hills, but they’re the Detroit Pistons. We have the Lions here. We have the Tigers here. It would be a great move to also have the Pistons actually in Detroit. It would also bring jobs to the city. That would be a huge benefit.”
Cynthia, resident of Lafayette Park
“Security. Because I actually haven't been feeling that as much lately. Well… I just got mugged. At gunpoint. It was the first time I've actually encountered that, so now I can kinda see a different side of things. I'm trying to erase that. I never wanted to be that skeptical person but, now it's kind of eerie, and I'm, like, scared.”
Roger, resident of Midtown
“Jobs. And more police on the streets.”
Alissa, resident of Midtown
“Garbage cans. This area is nice because of the Whole Foods. The rest of the time people just throw their shit everywhere.”
Zach, resident of Midtown
“To see everyone in government fired. There’s a lot of shitty management going on. I’d like to see a restructuring of the whole thing, based on the same principles, but new people. In this article could you title me ‘local malcontent'?’”
George, Resident of Midtown
“Development at Tiger Stadium [which was mostly demolished in 2008].”
While this guy, George, was answering my question, a huge guy who never stopped looking at his feet came up and asked both of us if we wanted anything to eat or drink. I thought he was working security at Whole Foods for a second. Then he said he just got out of the hospital, and he wanted us to let him use his Starbucks account to get us some food at the Starbucks that was right behind me at the time. Both of us said we had just eaten. I realized after he walked away that it was a convoluted way of asking if we’d trade some cash for a Starbucks card. Sometimes I’m too thick for subtle panhandling.
Site of old Tiger Stadium, 2011. Photo by Flickr User wyliepoon
“They’ve been trying to figure out what to do with that leftover corner of Tiger Stadium forever,” George continued. “I’d like to see some land developers come in and develop more than just downtown. There’s so much empty space now that could be used for something better.”
I know George’s sentiment doesn’t sound very original if you’ve been following the whole Detroit story from afar, but when you spend time wandering around this huge, half empty city, most of it feels like a perfectly good, unused shed in someone’s backyard. It’ll be really good for something, someday. It’s probably got a lot of spiders in it though.
The US Capitol as photographed by Flickr user Robert Hensley.
The 113th United States Congress got together at the beginning of this year to start the difficult task of governing the Most Powerful Nation of All Time. The Senate and the House of Representatives were tasked with writing new laws that would help solve the myriad problems facing the USA and negotiating compromises between the two parties, both of which controlled a chamber of Congress and therefore couldn’t do anything without the other. It was a difficult task, but of course the people elected these men and women for their superior wisdom, and they were therefore the lawmakers best suited to move the country forward.
Ha ha, no, just kidding. The 113th Congress is, by almost any objective standard, the worst Congress of all time. So far, it’s even more unpopular and inefficient than the 112th Congress, which was the least liked and least productive of all time until the 113th came along. When it comes to all the big stuff that really matters (immigration reform, getting the House and Senate together on a budget bill), lawmakers haven’t done shit all year.
Now, like a stoned college student going on vacation after failing his finals, Congress is leaving a mess behind while it takes off for its August recess. (Lawmakers need a vacation after their exhausting three-day workweeks.) When it comes back, it will have to do something quickly to stop the federal government from shutting down and defaulting on its debts. It’ll probably try to pass a temporary measure known as a continuing resolution to keep everything running, but even that might be difficult thanks to the deep divides not just between Democrats and Republicans, but between far-right Tea Partiers, who won’t vote for anything but a repeal of Obamacare, and the rest of the GOP. We’ve reached the point where getting these guys to agree that the government should exist at all is a tall order.
While our esteemed legislators have failed to enact any major legislation so far this year, it’s not fair to say that they’ve done nothing. Both chambers have been voting on bills and even passing them—it's just that the state of gridlock means that pratically nothing of substance has gotten accomplished in the seven months the current Congress has been in office. For a closer look, here's a summary of the 22 bills that have turned into law this year:
One Law Let the Government Function for a Little While Longer
HR 325, a.k.a. the No Budget, No Pay Act was passed in February and temporarily raised the debt ceiling until May. It also suspended the salaries of members of Congress until they worked out a budget for 2014. The idea was to force legislators to come to an agreement over what the government should pay for, but of course that hasn’t happened yet and we’re now facing exactly the same problem we were when HR 325 went into effect.
One Law Was a Routine Spending Bill
HR 933 allocated funds to the Department of Defense, the Department of Agriculture, and some other agencies. There were also some provisions in there that were extremely beneficial to infamous agribusiness giant Monsanto. The good news is that all those pro-Monsanto bits will expire, along with the rest of HR 933, in September, at which point Congress will have to get its act together enough to pass more spending bills. Which is bad news.
Two Laws Were Devoted to Renaming Stuff
Thanks to HR 2289 and HR 2383, respectively, a section of the tax code is now called the Kay Bailey Hutchison Spousal IRA and a bridge in St. Louis is named after baseball star Stan Musial. Woooo.
Without the hard work of Congress, this bridge would be called something totally different. Screenshot via
Two Laws Awarded Medals to People or Things
Congress took time off from naming things to give Congressional Gold Medals to the First Special Service Force (a group of American and Canadian volunteers) for their service during World War II and to the little girls who were murdered in a 1963 anti-Civil Rights bombing of a church. Good stuff, no doubt, but laws that renamed things or awarded medals made up a whopping 18 percent of all the laws passed so far by the 113th.
One Law Was Renewed the Violence Against Women Act
It took more than a year, but Congress finally renewed the Violence Against Women Act. It was pretty much a no-brainer, but even passing a reauthorization of an existing piece of legislation was a fucking adventure—House Republicans had a problem with how non-Native Americans would get treated on reservations, or something.
One Law Concerned the Response of the Federal Government to Health Crises
Thanks to HR 307, the Secretary of Health and Human Services will have to “submit the National Health Security Strategy to the relevant congressional committees in 2014.” Also, the strategy’s “preparedness goals” have been revised. Fuck yes.
Two Laws Involved Hydropower in Utah
HR 251 and HR 254 “give Utahns more of a say over the resources and entities affecting our state,” according to Orrin Hatch, who sponsored the bills in the Senate. Apparently some stuff that was operated by the federal government will now be run by the South Utah Valley Electric Service District.
Orrin Hatch helped pass some legislation involving hydropower in Utah that I honestly don't really 100 percent understand. Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore
Two Laws Were Responses to Superstorm Sandy
Congress overcame the normal state of total gridlock to increase National Flood Insurance funds and allow agencies to spend more on disaster assistance, which is sort of the minimum response from a government a few months after a devastating storm hits the country’s most densely populated area.
One Law Was a Rewording of a Previously Struck Down Law
Last year, the Supreme Court took a look at the Stolen Valor Act of 2005, which made it illegal to lie about having a military medal. This was fantastically unconstitutional—lying is covered by the First Amendment in most situations—and it got struck down. So Congress went back to its drawing board and reworded the law, making it illegal to profit from lying about military medals. As we all know, this was a pressing problem in the US.
The Remaining Nine Laws Were Even Less Important than Those Above:
- HR 588 allows the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund to acknowledge donor contributions, which will make fundraising easier.
- HR 1151 is devoted to telling the Secretary of State to please try and let Taiwan attend the next International Civil Aviation Organization Assembly as an observer.
- HR 1071 modifies the specs for gold and silver coins made to commemorate the Baseball Hall of Fame.
- S 716 is a minor tweak to rules about financial disclosure for members of Congress.
- HR 1246 specifies what happens in case the Washington DC CFO dies or resigns (the deputy CFO takes over).
- HR 475 adds seasonal flu vaccines to the list of taxable vaccines.
- S 622 reauthorizes the FDA to collect fees related to reviewing and approving drugs for animals.
- HR 1765 allows the FAA to move some money around so they can keep paying workers, including air traffic controllers.
- S 982 (a.k.a. the Freedom to Fish Act) stops the Army Corps of Engineers from blocking fishing access on part of the Cumberland River in Tennessee and Kentucky.
It’s true that for a faction of the GOP, not getting stuff done is the whole point, and some House Republicans will probably spend their August recess bragging about how they saved America from destruction at the hands of immigration reform. But even the wackiest wackjob in Congress wants something—that’s one of the reasons they all ran for office in the first place. Some of their wants conflict with the agendas of other lawmakers, so they have to negotiate with each other and come to a mutually unsatisfying agreement. That’s how the American political system works. That’s the only way it can work. Except it’s not working at all right now, except when it comes to commemorative coins and fishing in Kentucky.
More about Congress:
Forget Gun Control, Let’s Ban the Senate
Several miles outside central Sofia, in an industrial park in the Izgrev District, the Museum of Socialist Art occupies a blocky modern low-rise that could pass for a progressive high school in any American suburb, garnished on one side by a garden where much of the local sculptural residue of bygone Communist regimes—the Stalinist reign of Georgi Dimitrov from 1946 to 1949; the less stifling, more prosperous era of Todor Zhivkov, first party secretary from 1954 to 1989—has migrated from more imperious altitudes in the hub of the Bulgarian capital.
Marooned in this far-off scruff of greenery, the old order’s monuments to its ideals and protagonists retain the patina of immutable, hortatory literal-mindedness characteristic of the Soviet period’s official art and literature. Now, though, they appear less frighteningly exalting of a pushy idea than like fragments of a nightmare drained of nocturnal menace, planted in glassy sunlight like an assortment of lawn elves mixed in with massive fantasy figures who, so we’re told, once upon a time were real and walked the Earth.
Like the indoor exhibit of socialist realist posters celebrating factory openings and heroically met agricultural quotas, the sculpture garden features depictions of many nameless humans incarnating ideological rectitude and civic virtue—The Award Winning Builder, Head of a Worker, Machine Operator, Women from the Farm, Participants in the Uprising, etc.—grouped near, or around, charismatic, historically legible individuals. The relatively liberal Zhivkov is somewhat mingily represented, as is the first Communist prime minister, Vassil Kolarov, whereas the hard-liner Dimitrov is amply depicted in granite, bronze, and marble likenesses, of various sizes. There are busts and statues of Hristo Karpachev, Poet of the Revolution; Dr. Mara Maleeva-Zhivkova, Zhivkov’s wife (“she loved the people”); and Tsvaytko Radoynov, a colonel in the NKVD who worked in the Bulgarian communist underground during the Second War, was captured and executed by firing squad, and posthumously promoted to general.
No Bulgarian, however, appears anywhere as often—in museum or garden—as Stalin. Busts and full figures of the Red Tsar far outnumber the many of Lenin, who, despite an unusually ugly, gigantic rendering in stone (many of these statues, and almost all the posters, are actually gorgeous, contrary to reputation) looming over a whole quadrant of garden in a stance resembling a lunging grizzly bear, unavoidably evokes John the Baptist vis-a-vis his ubiquitous successor.
It occurs to me that I have never seen a sculpture of Adolf Hitler dating from the Third Reich. The only plastic representations I can think of at all, off-hand, are the Hitler dolls and marionettes in Syberberg’s film Hitler: A Film from Germany, and Maurizio Cattelan’s “Praying Hitler,” which were made decades after the Primate of Linz ate the gun in his bunker. Portraits of Hitler were everywhere in the Reich, of course, from classroom walls to postage stamps. Once, he was even pictured as a Teutonic knight in armor, mounted on a horse. Perhaps it was forbidden to make a three-dimensional effigy of Hitler, as it must be to fashion one less than 30 feet tall of Kim Jong-il in North Korea. On top of everything else, Hitler was neurotically superstitious, and probably feared the voodoo power of the replica. Effigies can be pricked with pins, cursed, sexually assaulted, ripped to pieces, incinerated, or decapitated in the privacy of a citizen’s home, where until recently the fact that there is no privacy in a citizen’s home eluded collective awareness, which in turn inhibited privacy invaders from acting too directly or drastically on the objects of their surveillance for fear of giving the game away. In Stalin’s case, an endless profusion of sculpted Stalins planted from Moscow to Vladivostock served the cosmetic function of smoothing out his smallpox craters and filling out his withered arm.
Aside from an old woman inside the museum who resembles a wary crow pecking the ground cover in a graveyard, her embittered, devout expression leading me to suppose that she is, in every sense, an old Communist, everybody I meet here (the man in the sentry box at the front of the drive, the woman collecting the entrance fee, the lady who runs the video exhibits and the souvenir concession) signals, in one way or other, that they perceive this museum’s horde “ironically.” The Communist period, for them, survives here as an increasingly weightless novelty of recollection, yet one worth preserving, as it is, after all, history.
It’s the intelligent thing, to have museums like this. I’m convinced almost any revolution, uprising, or military victory that begins by toppling the absurd statues and glorifying kitsch commemorating the once-adored is likely to end with the worship of someone or something even worse, or devolve into chaos and savagery—as in Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge, Iraq after Saddam Hussein, Afghanistan after the Taliban demolished the Baniyan Buddhas, and China when the emperor burned all existing books and built the Great Wall, the most overreaching monument to human stupidity ever erected. Tomorrow’s monsters always insist on changing everything that reminds people of the day before. The French have it right; there is still a Stalingrad metro station in Paris, and myriad other place names belonging to people who landed on the wrong side of history, and to events that embarrassed the state, like the plaque in front of Brasserie Lipp where Medhi Ben Barka was kidnapped.
*
I leave Sophia on Deathtrip National Airlines and land an hour later in Bucharest, where I draw cash from an airport ATM and, distracted by someone I decide is a dangerous maniac talking to invisible people in a belligerent voice, forget my card in the machine and get into a taxi.
Within seconds, I glean that the driver is a dubious piece of work, asking “casual” questions he’d ask gullible, anxious, miserably horny tourists with lots of money: am I here on vacation? Business? What am I going to do in Bucharest? He reveals that the city is full of easily available, clean, and respectable whores. I’m not going to shut this asshole up by telling him I like men, first of all because it’s none of his business, and second because he’d just offer me his brother or, god forbid, himself. He’s about 35, clearly eats too much, and has a greasy film all over his skin that seems also to coat his grubby clothing. He delivers me to the wrong hotel, despite having entered the address in his GPS and consulting some crony on his cell phone, and insists it’s the right hotel that just has a different name over the entrance. This after inquiring whether I would be interested in an erotic massage and being told that I don’t need a pimp. He becomes enraged at my use of the word “pimp,” though that is unmistakably what he is. “It’s legal in Romania,” he grumbles. “Not a pimp.” OK, a ponce, a procurer, a pander, a whore-monger, a man who lives off the earnings of women: take your pick. I know he’s deliberately driven to the wrong address, but fail to deduce that he does so to avoid the right hotel’s security camera, as he plans to rip me off for a startling amount of Romanian New Leus, seeing that I have them confused with Bulgarian Levs and am so impatient to get away from him that I fail to consult the currency converter on my phone. He has the negative aura of a human oil slick. I pay him quickly and roll my luggage into the lobby of what I know is not my hotel. Luckily, the staff is nice; they fetch another cab.
When the second driver pulls up to the correct hotel, miles away, and shows me the fare on his meter, I realize the oil slick took me for a truly audacious ride, and, while paying the new fare, discover an empty flap in my wallet where the bank card is normally tucked. A disaster scenario briefly unfolds in my head. I only know three people in Bucharest well enough to have their current phone numbers, and seriously doubt that any of them has the price of however many hotel nights I will need to fix this sudden pennilessness. But I’ve trained myself over the years to process panic-inducing situations like this as welcome material for a novel, in case I ever write another one, so walk into the peculiarly situated but very nice Hotel Vila Arte, and quite calmly explain to the woman at the desk that I have, at the moment, only cash, and only enough cash to cover a single night. After a flash of visible skepticism, she tells me not to worry and to relax in a little parlor off the lobby while they make up my room. It would be very funny indeed to end up a clochard in the gutters of Bucharest after the life I’ve had, but I’m not going to think about that. I didn’t bring American Express, which I’m told will crawl over broken glass at the summit of K-2 to replace a lost or stolen card, or take any other credit cards on this trip: it becomes too tempting to buy things I couldn’t afford when I was younger and certainly don’t need now, when the end always seems unavoidably in plain sight.
I’ve had some dealings with my regular bank over the phone from Havana, and know that its “toll-free from outside the US and Canada” line is not a working number, and never has been. I call instead the number you’re charged for, am put on hold for 12 minutes, then learn that the bank will send a replacement card by regular air mail but not express overnight delivery. This will take five or six days. Not good enough. By the clock it’s too early to call the branch office, where I’m pretty sure I can talk someone I know into sending a new card by next day UPS. I find that I have a Chase debit card in my wallet, for my other checking account, which has, I think, $25 in it. I could call someone in New York and have them deposit money in the Chase account. But I don’t have checks for that account, or the number written anywhere, so call the allegedly toll-free number on that card, hoping to easily get the account number. I am told by a man on the other end of the line whom I picture as tall, nondescript, 27 years of age, with medium-length, straw-colored hair, wearing a muted check blazer, a pale blue shirt, and teal corderoy trousers, that I will need to answer a few security questions.
I realize that I picture every male voice I hear when I call places like a bank as issuing from exactly the same blandly affable person, wearing exactly the same imaginary clothing. And that I somehow assume this person was a fan of the Jerry Seinfeld show and follows baseball without fanaticism, rents instead of owns, drives a Prius, dates a woman finishing a Master’s in marketing for the 21st century at an inferior college, and has occasional problems sustaining an erection with her, or comes prematurely. Once a month or so, he hooks up with a pre-op transsexual prostitute in the skanky part of whatever city he lives in. I realize too that I have not used my Chase account in over a year and have undoubtedly forgotten how I answered any security questions, and say so.
“Oh, no, these aren’t answers you’ve given us,” he tells me. “They’re questions based on publicly accessible information about you that we have at the bank.”
“Oh.”
“All right, first question. I’m going to read you five addresses, and want you to tell me if you’ve ever been associated with any of these addresses. 15 Buckingham Road. 94 Chestnut Avenue. 109 St. Mark’s Place. 43 Thalia Massie Drive. Finally, 12 Winterville Road. Have you ever been associated with any of these?”
“Not that I know of. Why exactly is this a security question? St. Mark’s Place is close to where I live in New York, but—well, wait. I just remembered. I lived in a little apartment on St. Mark’s Place for three months in 1978.”
“That’s correct!”
“What do you mean, ‘that’s correct’—why the fuck do you know where I lived for three months, 35 years ago? I didn’t even have an account at Chase Bank in 1978. I didn’t have any bank account in 1978. It wasn’t even called the Chase Bank in 1978; it was the Chemical Bank, Chase Bank was Chase Manhattan. They merged. Which, come to think of it, I only opened an account at Chemical Bank in 1980, when I was living somewhere else.”
“Well, that’s the information I have here.”
“But why do you have it? Where did the bank get the information, who did they get it from? Is David Rockefeller listening to this call, by any chance?”
“Forgive me, sir, but that’s a little like asking why is the sky blue, at my end of this. I have no idea why the bank has this information… public records of some kind or other—”
“No, but wait, I’m not anybody—I don’t have a trillion dollars on deposit at Chase Bank, I’m not a drug kingpin, or a spy, I’m just some little person with a checking account at your bank. Why do you have all this kind of detailed, private information about me? You know something, I’ve been writing a memoir for three years, and really, you should write it for me, you know more about me than I do.”
The man in the checked blazer giggled. This reminded me that people who work on Maggie’s Farm, so to speak, do not own the farm, and find its inner workings just as mysterious and probably as obnoxious as I do.
“Are you ready for the next question?”
To crop this to a forgivable length, the next question cited five corporations, all with acronymic names, and asked if I had ever had dealings with any of them. It seemed safe to say that I hadn’t, since I’d never heard of them, and never worked for a corporation, for that matter, though I supposed that somehow, anyone who ever works at all actually works for some corporation, somewhere, that owns or controls the non-corporations they may have worked for at one time or another—and further supposed that I was having dealings that very minute with some surveillance company owned by, say, WXY Corp, or SBRQ Corporation, or one of the others Mr. Pleasant Ordinary was reeling off the names of.
I’ve forgotten what the final question was about, only that it was equally invasive, structured around a harvest of data mining, and the kind of query that should be illegal, and isn’t, like the obnoxious “recommendations” from Amazon.com based on our previous purchases; the very special selection of movies urged on us by Netflix after we’ve used the site precisely once to watch one episode of Breaking Bad; and the digital profiling that occurs automatically whenever we order a pizza, buy a roll of film, check in at the airport, or do anything else that obliges us to identify ourselves. This story does not have a happy ending, simply because it doesn’t have any ending, but just continues, as if we each had a personal Stasi officer assigned to monitor our existence. However, the episode itself ended painlessly enough, with someone in New York putting cash in the Chase account, no doubt becoming himself an object of the surveillance connected to me, quite aside but not apart from the already existing surveillance connected to him.
*
"He ain’t no Sheik, that’s no great physique, and Lord knows he ain’t got the smarts…"
- Chicago, the musical
We’ve all heard about it, read about it, and some have even seen it. I refer, of course, to former congressman Anthony Weiner’s penis, an object of limited curiosity for those of us amply acquainted with male genitalia, and of even less interest to those familiar with Anthony Weiner’s overall physical envelope and personality, yet for a considerable time an organ of rapt, though possibly feigned, fascination to a woman named Sydney Leathers—which seems not only improbable, but an almost unforgiveable lapse in taste on the part of Ms. Leathers, who has launched herself in specialty cinema, and will soon essay a sin queen in a whalebone corset for one of the higher end adult entertainment ventures.
Judging from the white-cotton-veiled intimation of Weiner’s virile member featured several months ago in the New York Post, the artifact in question is what Norman Mailer, describing his own equipment, once characterized as “an average Jewish prick.” For the record, I am wholly in favor of anyone wishing to promote his or her genitals of whatever dimensions on Facebook or Instagram being able to do so, and don’t find mildly quirky sexual impulses like Weiner’s, or really any sexual quirks that don’t involve involuntary pain, or murder, or cruelty to animals, at all abnormal or reprehensible. But given what Weiner has claimed to be his career ambitions, putting his cock online after getting caught doing it once already indicates not only lamentably poor judgment but sufficient idiocy to exclude him from the kind of public employment that involves decisions about other people’s money, the placement and timing of urban construction projects and street repairs, zoning enforcement, noise abatement, police deployment, and a host of other responsibilities far too boring for most of us to even contemplate, but necessary in a grossly overpopulated world full of incompatible life forms. Unfortunately, the realm that would otherwise seem the most appropriate venue for Weiner’s self-realization, namely Vivid Entertainment, is one where his physical endowments would not be greatly in demand, and his inevitable next mea culpa will probably not create copious opportunities as a television talking head, since anything he has to say is bound to be interrupted by questions about his penis. In Croatia, I caught a half-hour TV interview with Dominique Strauss-Kahn in which an earnest discussion of world economic policy lurched suddenly into a barrage of questions about pimping. This sort of thing is vastly entertaining the first time, and box office poison forever after.
Weiner seems doomed to a season on Celebrity Apprentice, followed by his complete disappearance from public life, and some bucolic aftermath as an accountant in a small town in western New York. Or, perhaps, he could carve a new future growing hydroponic vegetables for sale at farmer’s markets, if he can resist raising cucumbers and zucchini squash. Weiner may be an asshole instead of a creep, but sometimes even an asshole flaunts his inability to control himself once too often.
Previously by Gary Indiana - A Few Days in Bulgaria
On Sunday, the grassroots organization Restore the Fourth rallied activists across the country for the second time this year to protest the National Security Agency’s dragnet-style surveillance programs and their violations of the Fourth Amendment. The protest was named 1984 Day, both a play on the date 8/4 and after George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel about oppression and surveillance.
Their first protest, which took place on the Fourth of July, was sparked after former NSA computer analyst Edward Snowden leaked top-secret NSA documents about the agency’s surveillance programs. Since then, polls have shown that few people believe there are adequate limits on NSA surveillance, Snowden has been granted asylum in Russia for one year, we’ve learned of the program XKeyscore, and it was revealed that members of Congress are getting much of their information about the aforementioned programs from the Guardian.
In San Francisco, protesters targeted Representative Nancy Pelosi for voting against the Amash Amendment, and heard from a variety of speakers, including Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. In New York, activists marched from Bryant Park to Columbus Circle, stopping to protest at the AT&T building on 53rd and 11th, as well as the NYPD precinct on 54th and 8th. I asked a few protesters about their signs, many of which included quotes from 1984.
VICE: Do you feel like we’re living in Orwell’s narrative in some ways?
Ms. Leivowitz: I don’t think we’re actually quite there yet, but we’re really close. And if we don’t stop the turn we’re going to be there. We’re extremely close in a number of ways.
How do we "stop the turn"?
Marches like this, getting in touch with our people in Congress, protesting to the president. He’s gone over and above going after whistleblowers and is certainly on board with the spying. We need to make our voices heard in as many ways as possible.
Do you think there is any level of spying necessary for National Security?
When there is something that happens where authorities have a reason to believe that someone is up to something, they can get a warrant and spy on them. But this is being done without a warrant and without any reason to suspect that each and every American is doing wrong. And for petty things where they don’t even check into, they just see something that triggers an alert and go after people for no sense of a reason.
VICE: What are your thoughts on the NSA surveillance program recently leaked?
Vincent: If it's national security, it’s national security, but don’t do a big dragnet on everybody. It’s as if they’re treating people guilty until proven innocent, as opposed to looking for the individual people who are actually suspicious.
Is surveillance that could potentially target terrorists OK?
Yes, but “terrorist” must be strictly defined. Not just anybody can be called a terrorist and then immediately surveyed.
How do you feel about the government’s response to whistleblowers?
I believe the truth should be free. They say that the truth sets you free… not in this case.
VICE: What was your view of Obama before this came about?
Cynthia: I supported him in his first go around and was bitterly disappointed with him before the first year of his term was over. You know, you look at him, and he’s a lawyer, so he understands the constitution. He was saying all the right things, but when he got into office he did all of the wrong things. I feel like it’s my duty to speak out even louder because I spoke out against Bush. He’s doing things to the next extreme.
What about the notion of privacy in the modern age?
You know, they say roaches are more popular than Congress right now, but literally no one wants to do anything. There should be thousands of people out here. You know, it’s funny, I just had this argument with Brad Friedman, and he’s a journalist. He blames the mainstream media. I blame America, because in this day and age when everything is at your fingertips, what is alternative media? You guys do a great job, RT does a great job, there are so many other places to get your news, if you’re going to be a dunderhead and watch coverage of the royal baby for four hours, shame on you.
Isn’t that what the people want?
I think when people can’t afford their hamburger on a Friday night, that’s when you’re going to see people get involved. But for me, I’m a taxpayer, my taxes are going to drones, to these wars, I don’t understand how people don’t feel like its their duty to get out here and speak.
What do you think about Edward Snowden?
I think he’s a hero, and I think Bradley Manning’s a hero. Sometimes your conscience gets the better of you, and we need more men like that. Like this guy really needed this headache? To stay in this airport for how many months? Now he’s got a temporary stay with Russia. I don’t care why he did it; the American people need to know this stuff.
My husband and I didn’t agree on the Manning thing. My husband's a marine. I went down the first day they started the trial to the rally, and he had said to me, “I can’t support you.” And I said, "Whatever, I don't care, I don't need your support." Then he spent a night researching what Bradley Manning leaked. I was on the bus, and he texted me and said, “You’re right”.
VICE: What would you personally like to see happen?
Scott McGill: Absolute first step: it would be ideal if there could be legislation in place to make sure there is actual oversight with adversarial court hearings that actually means there’s somebody arguing on behalf of privacy rather than just security. That would be a good first step. It doesn’t matter so long as it’s transparent, there’s accountability and decisions aren’t made in a vacuum, away from where any of us can actually understand why a decision was made or that a decision was made.
Are you willing to trade civil liberties for national security?
I’m personally not, but I’m more open to the conversation. I’m personally not because I believe that the odds of a terrorist attack being the end of me versus a car accident. It's just a numbers game at that point, and I personally don’t think it’s worth trading the liberties for the security. Ben Franklin's quote [“Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one”] rings true to me. But a lot of people have different opinions on it, so we need to get to the point where we can have that conversation in public rather than right now where it's all in secret.
The forefathers purposefully wrote the Constitution where time wouldn’t be a factor in its validity. Do you think there are parts of the Constitution that might just simply be outdated?
I don’t think the Constitution necessarily means that there can’t be these kinds of programs, but the Constitution guarantees that there will be actual specific warrants. And right now we don’t have that so it's very difficult. We're so far away from the Constitution simply because, in no other court could you offer a warrant for 10 million people. That doesn’t exist. There’s no warrant for 10 million people except in FISA courts.
VICE: How did you end up here?
Zachary Jospeh: I just showed up today walking through Central Park, seeing the signs about NSA, spying, and so on and so forth. I’m aware of what’s going on with Snowden leaking the documents, with information about the government spying on everybody.
Do you feel like it violates your constitutional rights?
Yes, technically it does, but it’s not anything new.
Do you think there is anything Americans can do? Do you think protests like this are useful?
Yeah, it’s definitely useful. The more people that pay more attention to it the better.
VICE: How was the turnout today compared to last time?
Ben Doernberg: I think there were more people last time, about 800. This time I’d say we had about 400. Still, you know, I think it’s been an extra month since all this has come out, and we didn’t have quite as much time to plan this time around. So honestly I’m still really encouraged, you know, if you had tried to get a rally together three months ago, of people against Fourth Amendment violations you might have had eight people. So, I think this is a sign people are still upset and things are still headed in the right direction.
Can you talk about XKeyScore?
XKeyscore is a new program that collects all internet activity and just stores it for a set amount of time. We don’t know if that’s three days, or a week, or a month, but the NSA is building this massive storage facility in Bluffingdale, Utah. If they can store all of your internet activity, all of your searches for a week, two years from now they might be able to store it for a month or a year. And I just don’t see anyway that that’s constitutional. They’re collecting your information without a warrant, without probable cause to prove you did anything wrong. So, it's unconstitutional and illegal. Members of Congress and other people have been very clear saying, “Look, no one is reading your emails, no ones got the content, its just metadata." Well, now it looks like that’s not true either.
I read today that Congress has been denied access to basic information about these programs and is unable to conduct any oversight.
It just goes to show that even though there’s a dispute over the validity about this type of surveillance, and that there are three independent branches of the federal government. Nothing is changing. It’s like well, the judiciary court is a secret court where there’s no representative of civil liberties, most of Congress doesn't even know about it, and clearly the executive branch... You know Obama came in as this candidate of transparency. Now, we clearly can’t trust him to defend our civil liberties.
Why the 1984 reference?
This was August 4 (8/4), so we called it 1984 Day because we wanted to bring attention to the fact that everyone is talking about, how are these programs working right now? But that’s missing the big picture, which is we’ve built the infrastructure for a surveillance state—and this sounds like a conspiracy-theorist-type thing to say—but if the NSA flipped a few buttons tomorrow they could just write down every single phone call, every single email, so the infrastructure is being built for Big Brother. We can’t rely on politicians who have lied to us, the NSA—which has also lied to us—to responsibly use that power. No government agency in history when given that kind of power has used it for the good of the people. Then you have a former Stasi colonel saying he would have loved to have these kinds of systems when he was working for the Stasi.
What’s next for Restore the Fourth?
Starting on August 5, which is when the Congressional recess begins, we’re going to be meeting with every member of Congress, every senator, and district-by-district, vote-by-vote turning things around. And I think we’re really close, and I think we’re going to do it. We’ll be setting up official meetings, going to town halls, there will be civil disobedience actions. We’re going to make sure that if members of Congress thought they weren’t going to have to answer for these votes, they will. And they’re going to have to answer in a big way.
Previously - Restore the Fourth Wants the NSA to Stop Lying and Spying
Franco Loja, head breeder for the Green House Seed Company, inspects a specimen of the marijuana strain called Limon Verde in the Cauca region of Colombia. All photos by Jackson Fager.
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ne afternoon this May, Arjan Roskam lounged on the deck of a 24-foot sport-fishing boat. He was speeding through a deep bay off the Caribbean coast of northwestern Colombia, keeping an eye on a line he’d cast a few minutes before. Arjan is 48 years old, well over six feet tall, and clean-shaven. He has the rough-hewn mien of a Dutchman, and possesses a piercing baritone that cuts through chatter like an oboe. He looks and sounds like a leader, one of those rare souls who was able to fulfill his destiny without compromising. He is the most recognizable and controversial figure in the business of marijuana, the self-styled and self-described “King of Cannabis.”
I was traveling with Arjan through the mountains and jungles of Colombia, along with a crew of international pot growers he calls the “Strain Hunters.” We were searching for three exceptional but elusive varieties of marijuana that have remained genetically pure for decades. They have lyrical, almost mythic names that roll off the tongue: Limon Verde, Colombian Gold, and Punta Roja. The day before our jungle excursion, we’d found specimens of the latter two strains in a nearby marijuana grove maintained by paramilitary groups and local farmers. Arjan was elated. He had acquired the first two of the 200 or so landraces—strains of marijuana that have naturally developed in far-flung regions around the world—and he was hell-bent on getting them all.
Arjan and his breeders will grow thousands of plants from these landrace seeds, pick the strongest ones, and breed new commercial strains based on their exotic genetics. This is the first step in a long, intricate process that makes it possible for a local deliveryman to show up at your house with a backpack bouquet filled with varieties like Alaskan Ice, Bubba Kush, and White Widow. If you’ve ever been cornered by a bleary-eyed pot nerd at a party, you know that the reason we’re not all still smoking Thai stick and twiggy, seed-filled weed is because of the thousands of commercial breeders around the world mixing, cross-breeding, experimenting, and developing new flavors, effects, and qualities—all from what is essentially a common mountainside plant.
From the water, the snowcapped foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range loomed in the distance. It extends right up to the country’s Caribbean coast, and just over 26 miles inland. Two peaks (one named after Colombia’s colonial liberator Simón Bolívar) stand at about 19,000 feet. The topography is freakish and stunning. The temperate highland air and year-round equatorial sunshine of these mountains makes for one of the most fertile regions in the world to grow and harvest cannabis. During the 1960s and 70s, thousands of tons were exported from the very same 100-meter-deep bays we were cruising through. Smuggling boats followed a northern route via the Caribbean, onward toward the United States. It was a weed rush colloquially called the “Bonanza Marimbera,” and it transformed hundreds of peasant farmers into wealthy drug lords. The foundation of Santa Marta, the vibrant coastal city where we were staying, was literally built of drug money.
A recent edition of El Tiempo, Colombia’s daily newspaper, had boasted “la marihuana vive una nueva bonanza”—heady times for growing and shipping weed from Colombia’s northern coast were back, as the demand for marijuana continues to grow exponentially. These days, however, Colombian growers aren’t producing much Colombian Gold. Instead, like the rest of the industry, they’ve shifted toward hybrids developed by breeders and growers in California, British Colombia, and Amsterdam—breeders like Arjan.
If cartels and other criminal organizations were the millionaires of last century’s drug booms, then pot breeders—horticultural nerds holed up in grow houses and labs across the world—may very well be the future billionaires of this one. Like Monsanto, or other agribusiness giants, massive companies could end up controlling the plant at its most basic level, which is why Arjan is so important to this business: he controls Amsterdam’s Green House Seed Company, one of the largest seed companies on the planet, which styles itself as “the most successful cannabis business in the world.”
Green House claims to have won 38 Cannabis Cups, nearly twice as many as any other company. In the wake of legalization in US states like Colorado, and with the prospect of legalization in countries like Uruguay, Arjan is betting on a future where the demand for weed will evolve and mature, and he’s doing everything he can to ensure that he’ll be the one on top when the dominoes of criminalization tumble around the world. And he should be. The man is arguably is the best-positioned, legitimate drug dealer out there; he isn’t just selling drugs—he’s helping to build the culture of the industry.
As we fished and downed cans of beer on the boat in Santa Marta, sparking massive joints stuffed with hash and pungent bud, Arjan kept an eye on the ocean. Eventually one of his lines was pulled taut, and he grabbed the pole from its holster and commanded the seat at the stern to reel in his catch. Before long, a six-foot iridescent fish writhed on the white deck of the boat. We ate it for lunch. It was delicious.
Colombia’s Caribbean coast was a major area for marijuana smuggling in the 70s and early 80s.
A ccurately estimating the size of the global marijuana market (both legal and illegal) may be flat-out impossible—they range from 10 to 140 billion dollars per year. Arjan claims he owns 25 percent of the seed market, a smaller subset of the entire industry, but arguably its most crucial. And while this figure is extremely difficult to verify, industry sources I spoke with on background said that Arjan’s math isn’t too far off. Considering there are currently hundreds of seed companies worldwide, this is a fairly significant slice of the pie. And while Arjan also owns weed-selling coffee shops, a clothing line, and even a booze company that makes cannabis-flavored alcohol, his primary business is to create new varieties of marijuana to sell on the international market. This is a lucrative, and somewhat exclusive segment of the market. To unlock new flavor profiles and new body effects through the combination of cannabinoids and terpenoids (the lesser-known chemical in weed), an expert level of knowledge is essential. Breeding new lines is not genetic engineering per se, it’s just husbandry. But, like the modern wine industry, growing pot has become a valuable science that requires an artisan’s skill, knowledge, and sensibility.
Franco Loja is Arjan’s gaunt, hyperactive head breeder and business partner. He’s 39 years old and previously served as a paratrooper in the Italian military. As he explained to me this spring, “The beauty of cannabis is in its variety. It’s not just one plant—it’s thousands of plants. Breeding plants is creating something new. You could compare the job to that of a Michelin-star chef creating new recipes. The ingredients are almost infinite to combine.”
Franco and Arjan’s business model relies on finding these rare plants, which, as I witnessed firsthand in the mountains, is easier said than done. Weed is still very much illegal in Colombia, and guerrilla factions, paramilitary groups, and other gun-toting bands of frightening humans usually control the areas where it is best grown. Arjan’s name recognition and economic clout open doors, but he still has to travel through these remote, militarized zones. This requires arduous journeys in trucks or on foot, journeys that Green House’s competitors are, frankly, too timid or too cash-strapped to embark upon.
At a seaside restaurant inside Tayrona National Park near the city of Santa Marta, Arjan told me about one of his life’s most pivotal moments, which underlines his unwavering belief in the plant. “When I was 17,” he told me, “I went to Thailand. In the north of Thailand, I was hiking and I met a very old man who at that time was curing heroin patients with marijuana. I stayed there for a week, and at that time, I thought the guy was really crazy. But the more I stayed, the more I learned from him, and the moment I went away, he gave me some seeds and told me to remember one thing: in the future, those seeds could overthrow governments.”
Magic beans from a mysterious stranger. It’s a Jack and the Beanstalk story. Who exactly plays the giant in Arjan’s life is unclear. It could be the beast of illegality, or lobbying pressure wielded by the industries that control other, regulated vices like tobacco, alcohol, and petroleum. Or it could be the insurmountable fact that, despite his leadership in the community of pot growers and business people, he’s never quite fit in.
Arjan Roskam dubbed himself the “King of Cannabis” and scours the world for rare marijuana.
A
rjan wasn’t always a magnate. He started growing in basements and apartments in and around Amsterdam nearly 30 years ago. “We were just pot growers enjoying our smoke,” Arjan reminisced. “After a few years, we figured out that we weren’t the only ones. There are 2 billion people who enjoy that smoke, and we were very lucky to jump on this wagon in the 80s. That wagon became a train, and the train became an airplane. That airplane is flying really fast now.”
“And really high,” added Franco.
“Yes,” Arjan said. “Really high.”
Arjan first found success in Holland, a country that decided decades before California that it was better to regulate the near-universal desire to get stoned than attempt to ban it. He started breeding new strains of weed under the Green House name in 1985, opening his first shop seven years later. He wasn’t the first to the game, but over the course of his career he leveraged his early adoption in the legal weed market into a form of self-appointed chairmanship. He often serves as the spokesperson for Amsterdam’s guild of coffee shops, and has polished the image of his company into an internationally recognized operation. “It’s very successful,” he said. “To give you an idea, just last year we sold over 400,000 packs of seeds. That makes us the number-one seed-seller in the world.”
And it looks as though Green House’s profile will continue to rise. As growing pot evolves from a clandestine pursuit into something any garden hobbyist can consider, a seed company’s image is more important than ever. This is what marketing hacks refer to as “brand equity,” and Arjan and Franco are busy building the equity of Green House Seed Company by bolstering its profile through the company’s online operations.
The Green House has produced a handful of hour-long documentaries shot during strain-hunting trips they’ve taken to Malawi, Morocco, and India, among other far-flung locales, in search of the ultimate high. The videos, ambitious in their cinematic aspirations, have garnered several million views on YouTube. In them, Arjan comes off as the sociologically enlightened Arnold Schwarzenegger of weed, lending an ear to the sometimes-painful stories of peasant pot growers as he crisscrosses the globe in a tank top and cargo shorts. According to David Bienenstock, a former senior editor for High Times, Arjan has “adopted a modern marketing sensibility,” something that’s woefully missing in much of the nascent industry. The Dutchman has an American understanding of market forces, which makes it somewhat ironic that the American industry has shut him out, even as it has exploded over the past decade as states across the country have embraced legalization on various levels. Importing seeds remains illegal in the States.
“The game between illegal and legal in our industry forces us to stay sharp,” Franco told me. To combat this tension, Green House has heavily invested in research and development, “to keep flexible, to adapt to new laws, new regulations, new market demands, new repression, and new openings. We can’t afford to choose our own market strategy.”
Arjan knows how to grab what’s directly in front of him, a skill that has landed him a negative reputation with his competition. Some refer to him as a pretender, a businessman in the garb of a breeder; however, like any other industry, having vocal detractors could be interpreted as a sign of success.
Breeders do not think of themselves as drug dealers, but as hyperskilled farmers, more akin to cheesemongers or vintners. There’s an unwritten understanding that your product ought to speak for itself, that the plant is above any one person. In 1999, Green House, alongside two other companies, was stripped of its Cannabis Cup in the Hash category following accusations of vote rigging. It’s a reputational wound that festers and further diminishes Arjan’s cred among the hermetic Amsterdam pot scene. But Arjan shrugs off such setbacks without fear. Even during moments when marijuana was highly illegal in most parts of the planet, he stamped his face directly on his product, knowing that weed would eventually blossom into a quasi-mainstream consumer product. It was a bold move, and one that’s indicative of a personality that continues to rub certain segments of the marijuana industry the wrong way.
Gato stretches out the floral, sweet hash he made from by dumping a bucket of THC crystals into a meat grinder.
T
hree days before my sit-down interview with Arjan and Franco, I was following Arjan through Colombia’s southwest Cauca region to scope out a massive grow operation headed up by a 35-year-old Colombian man named Alejandro Londono, better known as Gato, or “the Cat.”
Gato isn’t as svelte as his nickname suggests, but his moniker is an apt descriptor of his spry business acumen. Raised in Miami, he cut his teeth growing in Mexico and Venezuela before founding and operating large-scale industrial operations in a handful of Central and South American nations. He is currently on the payroll of Uruguay’s government as an Official Legalization Advisor. It’s obvious that Gato looks up to Arjan and acts as his protégé, paying close attention when he speaks.
Our visit was less of a strain hunt, and more so a way for Gato to show off how well he’s done for himself since taking over the family business, a breeding and seed-sale operation he named Marimbero (a reference to the faded glory days of Colombian weed supremacy). The plantation is massive, with plants growing outdoors covered by acres of clear plastic sheeting draped over a lattice of bamboo poles that extend down the slope of a mountain. A quick calculation clued me in to the stakes: Gato and his head grower, a former assassin he met in prison, have 8,000 plants that yield 4,000 pounds of weed every harvest. Because of Colombia’s year-round stable weather, the operation produces three harvests a year, which roughly equates to six tons of weed.
Over the past few years, Gato’s father and two of his brothers were gunned down by rivals. “My two brothers got killed in the last three years by some fuckers in Medellín who think they are the kings of pot,” he said. “They think they control the business because they’re bandits, but they control the market through violence, not quality.”
Quality is Gato’s chief mission. He tries to grow excellent pot because he loves it. It’s as simple as that. “Your hobby becomes your business automatically,” he said. “You don’t look for it. It’s like when you’re a good singer, and you become famous—you don’t ask for that shit. Some good singers hate fame, but that shit arrives. With grass, it’s the same. My daughter’s mom, she told me one day I had to choose between marijuana and her. I divorced her that day. How can you fucking complain about pot when you live like a rich hooker? You have everything you want. Everything in your fridge came from this pot.”
Later Gato took me on a tour of his storehouses, his drying and curing facilities, and the small indoor factory where he makes hash and other processed goods. At one point he shoved a bucketful of dried THC crystals into an industrial meat grinder, producing a flow of gooey, floral hash that looked like melted chocolate. He gushed about his particular strand of weed, named for one of his daughters. The blend is a deep, couch-locking hybrid called Nicole’s Kush, and while it hasn’t risen to the same popularity as some of Arjan’s varieties just yet (and can’t be found in the States), it is some truly primo shit. If things go right for Gato, his daughter’s namesake could be his breakout hybrid that will solidify his dominance in the industry.
Pay dirt. Arjan shows off the Punta Roja seeds he and his strain-hunting crew found near Santa Marta, Colombia.
A
rjan’s breakout hybrid was White Widow, named for the abundance of trichomes that give the plant a white tint. The blend is a legendary variety available around the world and has even been name-checked in episodes of Weeds. It gives the user an intense energetic euphoria and offers a spicy smoke with a sweet, buttery finish. It won the Cannabis Cup in 1995, which is part of the reason why the question of precisely who developed this particular strain is a major point of contention among the Amsterdam grower community. So much so that it has resulted in a fundamental rift that still divides opinion regarding Arjan’s motivations as a businessman and a human being.
The story behind the creation of White Widow is convoluted. Arjan claims a grower he worked with in the 80s named Ingemar was the progenitor of the strain, which Green House perfected over the next decade. But Arjan’s former business partner, an Australian named Scott Blakey, claims he invented it at Green House, and when he left the company in 1998 he took the first stabilized generation of plants with him to form a new company. These days, Scott is better known as “ShantiBaba,” and his company is called Mr. Nice Seed. ShantiBaba is merciless in his accusations against Arjan. According to Scott, Arjan doesn’t deserve credit for the discovery, or the numerous accolades that have been bestowed on White Widow.
Part of the reason the White Widow debate has persisted all these years is because the weed market is largely deregulated. Patents and intellectual property aren’t yet applicable to the pot industry, so neither side has been able to take their grievances to court. It’s purely a battle of reputation and a clash of inflated personalities. Arjan rarely speaks about the accusations, but when he does, his language is vitriolic. In 2011, he composed an approximately 4,309-word post on International Cannagraphic’s online forum, lobbing ad hominem attacks on ShantiBaba that labeled him a huckster while simultaneously shoving sales figures in his face. “Green House represents up to 50 percent of the market in Holland, Spain, England, Italy, and in many more countries,” he wrote. “In most shops it works like this: for every GH pack sold, one pack is sold from all other companies together. Just call any grow shop in Spain, or ask large distributors like Basil Bush or Plantasur, and you will have an idea of the volume of seeds we sell compared to Shantiblabla.”
T
he afternoon we found the Punta Roja landrace strain was exceptionally beautiful. We found our prize after hiking up into a modest grow operation in a valley a few hours outside of Santa Marta. The logistics of the trip were somewhat overwhelming, as we were shuttled from hotels to fields to conferences with local leaders, eventually arranging a meeting with our contacts on the side of a road. But once we were actually surrounded by what we had been seeking, both Arjan and Franco became amplified versions of themselves.
We surveyed a hundred or so plants that Arjan and Franco had identified as pure sativa based on their thin leaves and narrow bud structures. Franco explained the importance of internodal distance between the branches of the plant, how seeds must mature in their casings before they are plucked, how Punta Roja—or Red Dot—was given its name. When we came across a particularly superb phenotype, he was elated. Each of us couldn’t help but to plunge our hands into the raw, sticky buds that smelled of pine and sawgrass, overwhelmed by the thrill of discovering seeds that could be taken back to Amsterdam.
“This is original material that I can breed, that I can store in my library, that I can use to create new genetics, that are gonna win Cannabis Cups,” Franco said. “These are going to make people rich, put people in jail, change destinies and lives. And this is why I wake up with a smile every fucking day of my life.” His tawny face creased as he looked skyward and howled, “We got seeds, man!”
Arjan ran down the hill to rifle through the plant. He grabbed handfuls of tiny seeds, plucked any living plant material from them, and secured them into small plastic bags. He spoke wildly about the potential of the industry, prophesizing of a time in the near future when governments will limit the THC content of commercial marijuana. In that version of the future, flavor is more important than effect, and controlling rare, as-of-yet unincorporated genetic material gives the grower a huge leg up on the competition.
The discovery of these seeds marks the beginning of Arjan’s real work. Once back in the lab, Franco and Arjan will plant the seeds, pick the best specimens, and replant their seeds. They’ll repeat this process many times over until they have it just right. Ultimately, they will grow upward of 10,000 plants from these seeds. They’ll attempt to stabilize different lines to optimize factors such as flowering time, mold and fungus resistance, and resin. Five years down the line, unique qualities inherent in the source strain could form the basis of an entirely new creation.
Or not. But even if these specific source strains don’t pan out on a consumer level, Green House will still catalogue the mother plants and keep the line alive, while analyzing the cannabinoid and terpenoid properties. It’s possible that a pharmaceutical giant on the hunt for specific strands could knock on their door—in 2003, Bayer paid $40 million for the right to distribute Sativex, a marijuana-derived medicine designed to alleviate spasticity, overactive bladder, and other symptoms.
Arjan and his associates know very well that theirs is a risky business with no immediate reward. But betting on a world where marijuana is legally closer to wine than heroin has the potential of the most handsome of rewards, which include the priceless adventures that people like Arjan and Franco must embark on to collect their ultimate bounty.
“We all know that in ten to 20 years everything will be legal,” Arjan said. “We’re just keeping all our options open and finding all the keys for the future. One of the keys is all the different landraces.”
This metric of success was proven during our time in Colombia; Arjan and his team found all three of the strains he had gone there to find. Though festooned with the regalia of his own personal mythos—his uncle, Peter, was a big-time potato farmer in Holland, another sign of his horticultural destiny—and the stigma of millions of dollars he’s made from a successful gray-market business, Arjan fancies himself a humble man.
“I still want to be alone with my plants in my room, smoke, that’s it… That’s my main thing, enjoying watching my plants grow,” Arjan said. “I’m a farmer.” Then he took a hit and reconsidered. “I’m a farmer with big ambitions.”
For beautiful bud footage from the mountains of Colombia, watch Kings of Cannabis below:
More on weed:
The War on Weed: Still Expensive, Racist, and Failed
A while back I was looking for a series of things to vandalize and post online for laughs. I started with photos from magazines and wrestling cards, and they were OK, but I wanted something a bit more unique. Then I discovered a few Chick tracts stored away in my drawer. For those of you who don’t know, a Chick tract is a tiny religious comic made by Jack Chick designed to scare you into becoming Christian. Jack has been cranking these things out since the early 70s, and you can find them in bus terminals and public bathrooms across the country.
The design of these tracts is pretty uniform, and perfect for fucking with. The first one I used was titled Who Killed the Dinosaurs? I posted it on my Tumblr and it got a pretty good response, so I kept going. I just used a little white acrylic paint pen, and sometimes markers, and Voilá! I’d have a new and improved tract.
For a good two months I was posting a few every day. People were asking me what I was going to do with all of them, and I had no idea. My buddy Greg has a clothing store called Mishka in LA (and NYC) and was opening a small gallery in the back. He asked me if I’d be up for doing an art show, and I told him I didn’t really have time to do anything new since I was in the middle of working on my book, Prison Pit V, but I did have about 80 of these Jack Chick tracts that I had ruined. Surprisingly, he thought it was a cool idea for a show, so that’s how the world’s fucking stupidest art show was born. Oh, and there’s also going to be a book collecting all the tracts coming out soon from Monster Worship.
More from Johnny:
Fake protesters marching in Los Angeles.
Crowds on Demand, as the name suggests, is a company that will organize a crowd for you, on demand.
The two main scenarios that require this service are: 1) You're an aspiring celebrity who wants to make it seem like people give a shit about you, so you hire some fake fans; or 2) you believe in a cause and want to make it seem like people give a shit about it, so you hire some fake protesters.
Unfortunately, I couldn't go along to see one of the company's fake fan events (as they're super secret,) so I went along to a fake protest they organized in Los Angeles, instead. While there, I sat down for a chat with Crowds on Demand's founder and CEO, Adam Swart.
Fake protesters raising tourists' awareness on Hollywood Boulevard.
VICE: What's this event that's happening now?
Adam Swart: It's an event we're doing in coordination with a charity. We're trying to raise awareness about mental health issues. They want to raise a lot more awareness about mental health, which is an often overlooked issue when it comes to, uh, to policy.
OK. Are they paying you for this?
They get a discount. We give charities discounts.
How many people are protesting here?
About 20.
Are any of these guys real protesters or are they all provided by you?
They're all provided by me.
Can I ask how much they're getting paid for this?
They get $15 an hour.
If I wanted to do something like this and have 20 people protesting on my behalf, how much would that cost me?
Normally it would cost you a couple thousand dollars, but in this case we're doing it for less than that.
Your company also provides fake fans for things, right?
Yes, we surround people with an entourage. Security guards, paparazzi, fans—all the trappings of celebrity. It's like the whole experience of being famous. You'll be walking down the Vegas Strip or the Hollywood Walk of Fame and everyone will think you're an A-lister.
And who uses that service?
A lot of tourists will use it. People in the entertainment industry use it, people who are up-and-coming and want to increase hype for their name.
How much does that cost?
It all depends, it starts at the low thousands, though.
What would "the low thousands" provide me with?
A couple of photographers, five or six fans, and two security guards. A small entourage, but you don't need a large entourage to get attention.
A fake protester making an Amanda Bynes reference. When I asked one of the protesters if they knew what they were protesting for, he told me, "It's a day to ban guns, I think."
Anyway, back to this protest. What do the signs say?
"Purge Day USA." It's all about purging the mental health problems, like, think optimistically. It's a call for optimistic thinking and to sort of... purge your bad thoughts.
But with these signs that just say "purge day, August 21st"—what exactly is that giving to people who just drive past? I wouldn't know what that sign meant if I saw it. I would think it was something to do with the movie The Purge.
The goal, like with any sort of demonstration on the street, is to keep people's attention. So when they get home, maybe they tell their friends about it or they look it up on their computer. Just sort of spread the word about it.
Do you think it diminishes the impact of real protest when it's possible to hire protesters?
I think when the cause is good, and you're demonstrating over meaningful issues... What's important is the awareness, not the means.
Say a cause you don't agree with wanted to hire protesters. For instance, some kind of company who wanted to cause huge and terrible environmental damage offered you $50,000 to gather protesters to support their cause, would you do it?
I don't want to speculate hypothetically. I would look into each individual request and see whether it's worth being involved in... We have organized protests on behalf of private businesses before. But I don't want to speak in hypotheticals.
More on stickin' it to the man:
New Laws Would Make Environmental Protest “Terrorism”
All I'm Saying Is, Give Violence a Chance
The Brother of a Turkish Protester Murdered by the Police Speaks Out
Born and raised on Vancouver Island, Kynan Tait never seems to be stuck in his backyard. Jammed on the back of his parents Harley at a young age, he was roadbound as soon as he could walk. I suppose that helps with his adventures, such as his motorcycle trips through America and Mexico alongside Emerica's Wide Ride—a feat that makes the most hardened skate nerd jealous. When he's off his bike, he takes casual photographs of moments unspoiled by intrusive cameras or surplus photo gear, instead opting to let moments play out and work from there. Whether it's working in the northern BC oil patch and shooting a few quiet landscapes, or on the side of the American highway with a few beers, Kynan's photographs (and life, for that matter) are enviable to anyone seeking that elusive freedom. His work doesn't require captions to fix the context—simple photographs shot as naturally as possible. Based on our most recent chat, it seems like India by motorbike is next on the agenda. A better place is hard to find.
More photo galleries from VICE Canada:
Guillaume Simoneau Photographed the End of His War-Torn Relationship
Over the past couple of weeks almost 2,000 inmates, including “hundreds of terrorists,” have escaped from prisons in Iraq, Libya, and Pakistan. The series of ultra-violent, highly organized attacks has the US scared, al Qaeda celebrating in Iraq, and a whole load of embassy staff with a week off.
The party started with a bang. On the evening of July 21, suicide car bombs near Baghdad Central Prison (formerly known as Abu Ghraib) detonated, blasting open the gates. Military-grade mortar and rocket attacks followed and suicide-vested militiamen streamed into the prison. The assault was highly coordinated—while the apparent jihadists started freeing their brothers from Iraq’s nastiest correctional facility, others set up positions on the road outside, shooting police and security forces as they arrived on the scene.
At least 500 prisoners escaped, most of them “convicted senior members of al Qaeda” who’d been looking at death sentences, according to the Iraqi government. At least 25 cops and prison guards were killed, along with ten prisoners and six militants. At almost exactly the same time north of Baghdad, a botched escape using similar tactics killed 16 prison guards.
Fast-forward six days to al-Kwafiya prison near Benghazi, Libya. On the afternoon of July 27, while protests raged nearby, some 1,200 prisoners, most of them held on “serious” charges, and some of them supporters of Gaddafi, the country’s former dictator, escaped. Details are vague, but it seems a riot in the prison, combined with an assault from outside, allowed the prison gates to be smashed open. There’s no confirmed link between al Qaeda and the breakout, but that hasn’t stopped Interpol from hinting at one. Only a handful of prisoners have been recaptured.
Two days later in Dera Ismail Khan, central Pakistan, Taliban fighters launched another violent prison raid, attacking the city’s main jail with assault weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars. Like the Baghdad attack, the Dera breakout was sudden, ruthless, and professionally executed.
Video taken by the Taliban as they broke into Bannu city jail in 2012.
The walls of the prison fell quickly, and fighters ran inside. One used a megaphone to call for specific prisoners by name, and after a gunfight that led into the early hours of the following day, 248 prisoners had been freed. None were high-level Taliban leaders, but at least 30 were “hardened” Taliban foot soldiers. The breakout was near identical to another last year, in which 400 prisoners were freed in the nearby city of Bannu.
To get the view of someone with experience on the ground, I got in touch with James “Sky” Skylar Gerrond, a former US Air Force officer who worked in Camp Bucca, a jail in southern Iraq, from 2006 to 2007. He’d described a violent breakout as his “worst nightmare” so I asked him why. “I'm afraid that it will have a horrific effect on the levels of violence in Iraq,” he said. “July was, officially, the deadliest month in the country since 2008. I'm afraid that we are at the base of an upward trend in Iraq and that as soon as the leadership base that was in Abu Ghraib gets reestablished, there will be a new wave of sectarian violence and score settling.”
Gerrond dealt with “several” breakout attempts during his time at Bucca, meaning there was “definitely a constant threat of a violent escape.” While “some of them were so simplistic that they were almost laughable," he said, "several were amazingly well thought out and meticulously coordinated.” Luckily for him, “brute force” attempts were rare, and tunnels were the preferred option.
So it’s been an excellent couple of weeks for Islamist militants. About 30 of those who escaped from Abu Ghraib were commanders with the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” a particularly nasty Sunni group responsible for a spate of recent attacks across the country, and that has ambitions across the border in Syria. The Taliban who escaped in Pakistan look likely to regroup—after the Bannu mass breakout last year, attacks on government buildings, minorities, and police increased significantly.
It wouldn’t be the first time a jailbreak has bumped terrorist activity. In 2006, 23 suspected al Qaeda members tunnelled out of a prison in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a. Among them were founding members of the terrorist group “al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” which has since become one of the most dangerous al Qaeda franchises—its projects include the 2009 “underwear bombing” attempt, and the fundamentalist zine Inspire. The recent escapes are much, much bigger than Yemen's in 2006.
The threat is being taken seriously. The escapes seem to be at least part of the reason behind the closure of US and British embassies and consulates across the Middle East and North Africa this weekend, and the continued closure of some of them for the rest of this week. While the US government’s stated reason for the security measures is an intercepted message between terrorist leaders plotting an attack, the apparent mass of recently released terrorist fighters has played a part. Today, the US State Department urged “citizens currently living in Yemen to depart immediately," citing an "extremely high" threat level.
The big question, though, is whether the prison breaks in Pakistan, Iraq, and perhaps Libya were planned together—as veteran terrorist-watcher Daniel Drezner writes: “I'm not a big fan of conspiracy theories… but I'm fully aware of 'the Rule of Three.'" Interpol would love to know—it wants help "to determine whether any of these recent events are coordinated or linked.” The global crime-busting organization also points out that August will see the anniversaries of terrorist attacks in India, Russia, and Indonesia, and of attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. It could be a bloody month.
Ayman al-Zawahiri.
According to al Qaeda’s burbling nut-job “leader” Ayman al-Zawahiri, in an audio recording released last weekend (though recorded in June), the next, somewhat implausible, target is Guantanamo Bay: "We pledge to God that we will spare no effort to free all our prisoners,” the recording said, going on to list a number of Gitmo inmates.
The longer-term outlook is much more serious, especially in Iraq and perhaps even the unending nightmare of the Syrian civil war. Iraqi civilian deaths have spiked heavily in 2013, amid fears of a new civil war there, and the injection of new blood into the most violent factions is unlikely to end well. The situation in Syria seems to be exacerbating the Iraqi “destabilization,” and it’s highly likely that the flow of fighters, weapons, and ideology will increase in both directions. If it turns out the Pakistan and Libya breakouts were related to Iraq, al Qaeda may be much more connected and organized than anyone realized.
Follow Alex on Twitter: @alexchitty
More on al Qaeda:
I Ate Ice Cream with a Member of the Most Feared Jihadist Group in Syria
Jody Pendarvis is a kooky southern gentleman who has built a ramshackle UFO welcome centre in his backyard in rural Bowman, South Carolina. If aliens happen to land around Bowman, they'll be greeted by Jody, who claims he'll be able to talk to them, and his homemade alien spacecraft full of clutter. We recently flew down to Bowman to meet Jody and see the welcome centre for ourselves.
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Even before I got locked up, I enjoyed reading and watching prison-centric shit, 'cause like many people I’m fascinated by the subculture of the incarcerated. I’m not quite sure why so many people either sympathize with the so-called bad guys or simply get off on watching other humans suffer, but they definitely do. Now that I’ve done some time, I realize that prison-centric entertainment usually ratchets up the absurd and outlandish aspects to the point where I can’t even relate, 'cause my experiences were so drastically different than what’s on the tube. Luckily, there’s Netflix's new show, Orange Is the New Black, based on the experiences of a woman who did a little time, so not only do we get the ridiculous entertainment that we all crave, we also get some very realistic characters going through tribulations that I can relate to as an ex-con. Shame on me for stereotyping the sexes, but the fact that this show was created by a woman and is based on the experiences of a woman means we get a lot more feelings than we usually do with prison stories. This is a good thing, though, 'cause dudes go through the same emotions in jail. I’ve seen it many times, but you won’t see it too often on the screen in the same way Orange Is the New Black captures it.
It's a damn good show, and I know this because I’ve been told so by many people. It’s even getting more love than Arrested Development, at least in my very, very small circle of friends. That has actually been making me a touch paranoid, because I don't know if everyone I see on a day-to-day basis knows my status as an ex-con. One of my bosses said the other day, “Have you seen this new show, Orange Is the New Black? It’s really good... I think you’d like it.” I was like, Oh shit, he must know, but who cares? He actually enjoys the show, which is good, 'cause the show succeeds admirably in depicting at least a few fairly normal people who got locked up over some bullshit.
The show is based on Piper Kerman’s 2011 memoir, which was about how she got caught up laundering money while she was hooking up with a lesbian heroin queenpin, then got put in the clink-clink for it a decade later. There are a bunch of similarities between her story and mine, actually: we both were living upper-middle-class lives and attending elite colleges before we decided that money, drugs, and the freedom they afforded us was a way to escape our mundanity. I think her activities were more hands-off and lasted for a shorter time than mine did, and while I was caught in the act, she unfortunately got snitched on nearly a decade later. She also did her time and then actually finished parole like a good girl, whereas I have allowed myself to get sucked back into the abyss again and again for damn near a decade.
Point is, she was a bit of an anomaly when she was inside, just like me, which gives us a little different perspective on things. The life of the character based on her reminds me of my situation in some ways. I tried to remain anonymous for the most part, but once an inmate found out I was educated or went to college, they’d usually call me “College Boy” or some such shit.
It’s very tricky to condense years of jail and prison experiences down into an hour-long episode or even a 13-hour season, but Orange Is the New Black did a phenomenal job of keeping shit relevant and realistic. I’ll give you an example: there is a game that more street people love to play on more suburban folks like myself, and a scene in OITNB captured this fantastically in a scene when a couple in Poussay and the fat black chick run up on Piper and basically say, “Yo! Run yo’ shoes!” and then when Piper steps up stone-faced like, “WHAT?!? You better back off!” the street chicks crack up like, “Hahaha! Did you see her face?” People love playing this fake-aggressive game in prison, but it doesn’t always end so friendly. It can be dangerous to play too much in jail. I’ve seen some real dumb fights over dumb shit… The show doesn’t really capture the dumb fights, and I feel like women’s prisons might have a lot of dumb, hot-headed, catty fights, but maybe I’m just being a sexist asshole…
What I dig most is the character development and the fact that everyone seems real enough to identify with. For the most part, they’re humans first and prisoners second. You can see this through the backstories we get with a handful of them. The Tricia character played by Madeline Brewer nails a certain breed often found in jail—the lost soul who is clearly a good person but got dealt a bad hand, couldn’t deal with life, and turned to drugs and all that bad stuff. This is a very common story. The whole part with the guard Mendez abusing her I don’t know about though. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of COs are scumbags, and a bunch have been convicted of abusing inmates... But cartoonishly evil COs aren’t all that common.
Pennsyltucky, the Christian fundamentalist played by Taryn Manning, is fuckin’ awesome, but at the same time basically a cartoon character, just like Mendez. At times I find her performance brilliant, but then a second later it’s over-the-top clown stuff. I will say she does represent a very real contingent in prison. The religious freaks are there, they’re crazy as hell, and there are a lot of them. One thing I noticed is that while both Mendez and Pennsyltucky pull some fucked-up shit, they also make us laugh, and at times we almost feel bad for them. Like maybe no one in this system is really at fault, and everyone might be a victim of an unfortunate reality.
I wish I wrote for this series, or something like it. I actually contacted Piper Kerman when I was filming the documentary about my life a year ago—my idea was to interview her for the movie to show another person similar to me in this war-on-drugs world. She happens to live near my neighborhood in Brooklyn and was happy to meet me and discuss how to write a book and be a successful writer but (understandably) didn’t want to be part of our movie. I was excited to meet her and figure out the best way to follow in her footsteps, but then I got locked up on some bullshit for a few months and forgot about it. I couldn’t be happier now that the show based on her life is a success—she’s an example of someone who got thrown in prison for no damn reason and got back on her feet postincarceration. Most importantly, her story is providing the world with a respectful interpretation of what happens behind bars for a lot of us. Hopefully, it will change a lot of people’s perception of what prison in the USA is really all about, and I applaud the shit out of her.
Bert Burykill is the pseudonym of our prison correspondent, who has spent time in a number of prisons in New York State. He tweets here.
Previously: Some Advice for a Sex Offender on His Way to Prison
At the end of June, while a bunch of people were losing their minds listening to music and stomping around Chicago, I too was surrounded by good vibes and thousands of revelers glued to a sound system somewhere. Only, that somewhere happened to be the Silk Road Festival in the soaring Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan's Bamyan province, far from the drug-induced spirituality of Union Park. Thousands of Afghans, having arrived throughout the day in a stream of aging pickups and Iranian motorbikes, had filled a meadow surrounded on all sides by soaring golden mountains. Their peaks formed a convenient natural amphitheater for the day’s performances.
The festival had opened the previous night with an exclusive gala evening attended by politicians and the crème de la crème of local society. One by one they gave their addresses to an unexcited crowd in a vast conference room. Soon, however, their talks gave way to what the audience had all been waiting for: live performances from a host of local and national musicians. The melodies of their damburas—a two-stringed instrument popular in Hazara folk music—loosened up the crowd, which was gradually coerced into a frenzy that culminated in explosive cheers as Adbul Hameed Sakhizada took to the stage.
Abdul is a national superstar and winner of the phenomenally popular TV show, The Voice of Afghanistan. His performance was so energetic that even some of the heavily armed guards patrolling the auditorium couldn't fight the urge to move, the one seated to my left smashing his Kalashnikov with worrying enthusiasm against the tiled floor.
Now in its fifth year, the three-day festival was started by the Bamyan Tourist Development Board with support from the Aga Khan Foundation. The aim of the festival is to celebrate and showcase the rich culture of the region following centuries of repression. As recently as 2001, some 6,000 Hazara were massacred by the Taliban after the occupiers had already outlawed much of their expressive music and dance.
And during the festival—as some 10,000 Afghans from across the region danced on the plains surrounding the sleepy town of Bamyan—the dark, repressive days of Taliban occupation couldn't seem further away.
The energy continued well into the evening, when the crowds began to dissipate back into the hills, leaving a select few to witness an intimate acoustic performance held in a legendary ruin on top of a steep hill. Named Gholghola, or the "City of Screams," after its inhabitants were massacred by Genghis Khan, the high-domed rooms that remain in the ruined city provided excellent acoustics for the hauntingly melancholic music.
Before culminating with the grand closing ceremony, the final day provided more demonstrations of the local culture, including bizarre interpretive dance and a game of tug of war. But by far the most memorable was Buzkashi—a game played on horseback in a field without boundaries, with the headless carcass of a goat in lieu of a ball. In our match, two teams of 20 had to drop the lifeless animal into a hole dug into the field. In retrospect, it was slightly less bougie than polo.
After the match, the crowd congregated in front of a large stage for the grand finale, which mostly involved dancing to more dambura jams until a power cut plunged the crowd into darkness. But before long, the ancient diesel generators kicked back in, and with them the boom of some Persian-inspired techno to finish the festival off for good.
Follow Maximilian on Twitter: @MTIClarke
More stories from Afghanistan:
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