![]() I speak for them, but I speak to you-the rich, the powerful, the politicians, the comandantes, the generals. But you silenced them and blinded them so that they could not tell you, could not show you. I speak for the people who tried to tell the truth, who tried to tell the story, who tried to show you what you have been doing and what you have done. I speak for the mass of others ground down by an economic system that cares more for profit than for people. ![]() I speak for the people enslaved, forced to labor on the narcos’ ranches, forced to fight. I speak for the dead children, shot in crossfires, murdered alongside their parents, ripped from their mothers’ wombs. I speak for the orphans, twenty thousand of them, for the children who have lost both or one parent, whose lives will never be the same. I speak for the tortured, burned, and flayed by the narcos, beaten and raped by the soldiers, electrocuted and half-drowned by the police. For the poor, the powerless, the disenfranchised for the victims of this so-called “war on drugs,” for the eighty thousand murdered by the narcos, by the police, by the military, by the government, by the purchasers of drugs and the sellers of guns, by the investors in gleaming towers who have parlayed their “new money” into hotels, resorts, shopping malls, and suburban developments. I raise my voice and wave my arms and shout for the ones you do not see, perhaps cannot see, for the invisible. Or as Billy Daniels sang it in Golden Boy: While the city sleeps, And the streets are clear, There's a life that's happening here.įOR THE VOICELESS by El Niño Salvaje I speak for the ones who cannot speak, for the voiceless. And from now on the silence is broken only by the occasional forlorn hoot of a bogged-down drunk or the gutted-cat squeal of a too sharply swerved axle coming around a turn. And as the windows on the 'Late Show' title silhouette light up one by one, the real ones all around go dark. Now guys and girls make love, or kill each other or sometimes both. The blue hours when guys' nerves get tauter and women's fears get greater. This is the deep of the night, the dregs, the sediment at the bottom of the coffee cup. It's an around-the-clock town, but this is the stretch from now until the garbage-grinding trucks come along and tear the dawn to shreds, it gets as quiet as it's ever going to get. Then this too dies down, and a deep still sets in. There's a sudden splurge, a slew of taxis arriving at the hotel entrance one by one as regularly as though they were on a conveyor belt, emptying out and then going away again. ![]() Now the buses knock off and the subway expresses turn into locals and the locals space themselves far apart and as Johnny Carson's face hits millions of screens all at one and the same time, the incoming tide reaches its crest and pounds against the shore. Now the incoming tide rolls in the hours abruptly switch back to single digits again, and it's a little like the time you put your watch back on entering a different time zone. Or as the coffee-grinder radio, always on the beam, put it at about this point: 'New York, New York, it's a helluva town, The Bronx is up, the Battery's down, And the people ride around in a hole in the ground. Now everybody will want to get back where they came from - and that's home somewhere. Everybody has got where they wanted to go - and that was out somewhere. The last acts of the three-act plays are now on, and the after-theater eating places are beginning to fill up with early comers Danny's and Lindy's - yes, and Horn & Hardart too. The outgoing tide has simmered down, and there's a lull-like the calm in the eye of a hurricane - before the reverse tide starts to set in. Now the evening's at its noon, its meridian.
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