John Rambo

I want to dedicate this post to one of the most memorable characters in the history of movies: Rambo.

Most people may think it is just another banal action movie, but I think it's a movie that denounces important socio-political situations.

Rambo I:

John Rambo is a Vietnam war veteran, who can't forget the war and who lost most of his friends in it. He arrieves to a society that doesn't understand the hell he lived, and that rejects him, fears him. He feels very lonely, so he walks hundreds of kilometers to a small town in Alaska, to meet his only living friend, only to find that he died of cancer.
Shocked by this, he walks with no direction, and is arrested by the Sheriff Will Teasle, who doesn't want him in his town. That's when Rambo starts a war for his freedom...

I'm not breaking any law.

Taglines:

When Trautman (the colonel) meets Teasle (the sheriff), they have little conflict with each other
Trautman: Why are youchasing him? let him escape, he'll be arrested in two months washing cars in Philadelphia, and nobody'll get killed.
Teasle: I have to do my duty, I'll get him.
Trautman: Rambo is an expert in deadly combat, medic, helicopters and guerrilla. He would eat things animals would find disgusting.
Teasle: Are you telling me that 200 of our men against your boy is a no-win situation for us?
Trautman: You bring that many men, just remember one thing.
Teasle: Oh yeah? What?
Trautman: A good supply of body bags.

The great final

Colonel Trautman: It's over Johnny. It's over! Rambo:"Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don't turn it off! It wasn't my war! You asked me I didn't ask you! And I did what I had to do to win, for somebody who wouldn't let us win! Then I come back to the world, and I see all those maggots at the airport, protestin' me, spittin', callin' me a baby killer and all kinds of vile crap! Who are they to protest me?! Huh?! Who are they?! Unless they been me and been there and know what the hell they yellin' about!" Colonel Trautman: It was a bad time for everyone Rambo. It's all in the past now. Rambo: "For you! For me civilian life is nothin'! In the field we had a code of honor. You watch my back I watch yours. Back here there's nothin'!
Movie theme lyrics:

It's a long road When you're on your own...

Rambo II:

Col. Samuel Trautman takes Rambo out of jail for a new asignment: rescue POWs (prisioners of war). However, back in Vietnam he finds out that the operation runned by Gen. Marshall Murdock is a farce, that he doesn't matter the people who gave it all for their country: once he rescues a POW and heads for the recovery zone, he is abandoned to his luck, and is capured by the vietnamese forces of Capt. Vinh.

Where the hell is the helicopter going?

Lt. Col. Podovsky: Your countrry has abandoned you, stupid amerricain

Murdock: Do you honestly think somebody's gonna get up on the floor of the United States Senate, and ask for billions of dollars for a couple of forgotten ghosts?

Co Bao: What means that you're expendable?

Rambo: (talking from the vietnamese radio)"Murdock, I'm coming for YOU!"







Taglines:

“They sent him on a mission and set him up to fail … but they made one mistake … they forgot they were dealing with Rambo”

Murdock: "Colonel are you sure Rambo's still in balance with the war? We can't afford having him involved in this mission and than crack in the pressure of that hell."
Trautman: "Pressure? Let me just say that Rambo is the best combat vet I've ever seen. A pure fighting machine with only a desire - to win a war that someone else lost. And if winning means he has to die - he'll die. No fear, no regrets. And one more thing, what you choose to call hell, he calls home."

Rambo: (talking to Murdock) Mission... accomplished. You know there's more men out there and you know where they are. Find'em. Or I'll find you.

The great final
Trautman: John where are you going?
Rambo: I don't know.
Trautman: You get a second medal of honor for this.
[Rambo looks over at the rescued POWs]
Rambo: You should give it to them. They deserve it more.
Trautman: You don't belong here why don't you come back with me?
Rambo: Back to what? My friends died here, let me die here.
Trautman: The war, the whole conflict may have been wrong but damn it don't hate your country for it.
Rambo: Hate? I'd die for it.
Trautman: Then what is it you want?
Rambo: I want, what they want, and every other guy who came over here and spilled his guts and gave everything he had, wants! For our country to love us as much as we love it! That's what I want!
Trautman: How will you live, John?
Rambo: Day by day.

Rambo III:

Col. Samuel Trautman travels to Thailand, to recruit Rambo for an operation, once more. But Rambo is living a peaceful life, living with Tibet monks and fighting for money. He doesn't want another war.












So, Trautman goes alone to Afganistan to help the good and brave people of the Thaliban to fight the evil Russians, who talk about terrorist while they wipe out a whole country, and whose bombardments kill civilians every day. But he gets captured by the russian forces of Col. Zaysen. When Rambo is informed of the situation, he decides to go to Afganistan to rescue his friend.

Col. Zaysen: I'll find this man (Rambo) and I'll kill him.
Col. Trautman: Don't worry, he'll find you.
Col. Zaysen: He alone will fight my whole army and kill me? Who do you think this man is, God?
Col. Trautman: God would have mercy, he won’t.

Gee, I love my explosive arrows. Hey, ruskie, don't forget your hand grenades...























"They want us to surrender, I have no choise... but to fight. "












Aaaaaaaaahhhhhh.....

Cabooomm!

Juan Antonio's proposal

Relevant Actors:

This happened a night of April (I think), in a pub/disco at Vitacura, near Luciano's. There we were, JA, Luciano and me waiting for Jackie and "Girl":

I hate chilean girls. Their men selection method is anti-Darwinist. Don't you think Twister?

AAAhh, I need a drink! I'll get somthing from the bar.

(unknown guy, looking at JA's empty chair)

Excuse me mister, may I use this chair?

I'm sorry, but that's the chair of my friend JA. If you take it, he may get angry with you.

(seeing the stranger) Who are you??!! Why are you taking my chair??!! It is my chair!! (taking his coat off... in order to leave it on the chair) Dou you have a problem??!!




I'm s.. s.. ssorry, I didn't want to b.. b.. bother you, aahh I have to go now (walking away very quickly).



Then, Jacky and Girl arrived.



Hi! (every body: hi).






(watching at the until then unknown friend of Jackie)
Hi.. aahh ... mmhh.. I.. I.. I have to go now, for a moment, to say hi to some friends over there. I'll be back in a moment (thinking "yeah, sure").





(completely drunk, talking to Girl)
Who are you??!! What's your name??!! How old are you??!! What are you doing here in Chile??!!




(said something I don't remember, in a very bad spanish)

Gee, you should really improve your spanish, specially your "spanish R" pronunciation. Now, try it again, with this tong: grrrrrr.




(trying hard, but unsuccesfull) ggggghhh.




(even more drunk, talking to Jackie)
Would you marry me?







YEEEESSSSS!!!!





WHATTT???!!!
Ok, ok, I think I can give you the ring that keeps my car keys together...

I can't believe what I just did!

Ok, if we are going to get married, we should start to get to know each other. What's your favorite color?

We don't have to marry now, you can be my back up: if none of us has married when we're 33, then we'll get married. Well, you'll be my second back up: a back up for my back up. And my favorite color is purple.

What?! WHY do you like PURPLE?

I don't know! What's your favorite color?

NOT PURPLE!!

The End

Victor Bout

He is the world's largest arms dealer. Here is his story.

Victor Bout was born January 13 of 1967 in Tajikistan. He attended the Soviet Military Institute for Foreign Languages in Moscow and then went to a Russian military college, earning a degree in economics. He speaks six languages fluently. He served in a military aviation regiment until 1991. Two of those years he spent
in Mozambique, at the end of that country's civil war. Retired as a lieutenant
being 25, when the Soviet empire collapsed, bought three Antonovs russian military cargo planes for US$120,000. Nobody knows were he got the money.

Now he lives as a free millionaire man in Moscow (the Russian goverment is
skeptical of the charges against him), has been linked to at least 60 planes, his companies have 300 employees and operate in four continents. In 2003 he gave an interview to Peter Landesman, published by the New York Times Magazine:

''I woke up after Sept. 11 and found I was second only to Osama.'' The truth, he said, was much bigger than his personal story. ''My clients, the governments,'' he began. Then, ''I keep my mouth shut.''
Later he said, ''If I told you everything I'd get the red hole right here.'' He pointed to the middle of his forehead." ...

...C.I.A. and MI6 agents on the ground in Africa first picked up Bout's scent in the early 1990's, when his fleet of planes began crisscrossing the continent. In the early days, they transported gladiolas; later, frozen chickens and then diamonds, mining equipment, Kalashnikov assault rifles, bullets, helicopter gunships and even, Bout says, U.N. peacekeepers, French
soldiers and African heads of state. The names of the men Bout came to count as his personal friends and customers included Massoud, Mobutu, Savimbi, Taylor, Bemba. It was not until the summer of 2000 that the N.S.C. realized it had stumbled on not only the most prolific arms trafficking operation in Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan but probably the best connected (and protected) private-weapons transport and brokering network in the world.

¿How does an arms dealing empire start? This is what happened in 1993:

Business really started to boom when he began filling his
planes with South African gladiolas. ''Vic bought a day-old flower for $2 and sold it in Dubai for $100,'' Chichakli said. ''Twenty tons per flight. It's better than printing money." ...

...By 1997, Bout's operations had expanded to an abandoned airfield in Pietersburg, South Africa. He built a refrigeration facility in South Africa to freeze and store chickens, which cost a little over $1 a kilo in South Africa and sold for $10 in Nigeria. ...

... Starting in 1995, Bout expanded his air-freight operations to Ostend, Belgium, and later to Odessa, Ukraine. Eleven years earlier, Ostend had been a transit point for weapons in the Iran-contra operation, leaving behind a comfortable precedent and logistical mechanisms for arms traffickers. So did Belgium's lax arms-trafficking laws. From Sharjah and South Africa, and now from Ukraine and Ostend, Bout did indeed tap
into what Africa and the Middle East needed. But it wasn't gladiolas and frozen chickens.
Most people think that controlling arms shipments is merely a matter of international diplomacy. That may have been true during the cold war, when traffickers were often subcontractors of the superpowers, feeding the proxy conflicts Washington and Moscow wanted fought. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the exclusive club of arms brokers metastasized. Some brokers still work at the behest of governments and intelligence agencies. But most are now entrepreneurial freelancers who sell weapons without regard for ideology, allegiance or
consequence. They have only one goal in mind: profit. ...

... On the evening of my third day with Bout, the phone in my hotel room rang. A voice said, ''I understand we have things to talk about.'' At first I was taken aback, even amused, by the melodrama. But the voice was coldly sobering. ''Tomorrow, 1700 hours,'' the caller said. ''Go to the McDonald's on Pushkin Square. Buy two cups of coffee and sit at a table. I'll find you.'' Then
he hung up.
At 5 p.m. I went to the McDonald's. It was vast, multitiered and crowded with Russian teenagers. Techno-pop was playing loudly. It was the perfect place for a private conversation.
I put two coffees on a random table and waited. At 5:02, I looked left and right into the crowd, then turned back. A man in his early 40's was in the seat across from me. ''Thank you for the coffee,'' he said.
The man didn't identify himself, but his knowledge of arms trafficking and its various players was expert. He told me that Bout was merely the public face of something much larger and that I was just getting through the surface and that
to go further was very dangerous.
He alluded to two assassinations that had taken place 10 days before. Both victims were executives of a huge air-defense contractor involved in export of antiaircraft weapons and other systems.
He said to imagine the structure of arms trafficking in Russia like a mushroom.
Bout was among those in the mushroom's cap, which we can see. The stalk is made up of the men who are really running things in Russia and making decisions. Looking from above, he said, you never see the stalk. Earlier, in Kiev, Grigory Omelchenko, the former chief of Ukrainian counterintelligence, had said that traffickers like Bout are either protected or killed. ''There's total state control.''
Said E.J. Hogendoorn, the former U.N. arms investigator: ''There was the sense
that there were bigger and murkier forces involved in this. Bout's being protected by highly influential people.''I began to understand why Bout was both eager to
talk and reluctant. Cornered by multiple governments, selling off his assets and hounded by the press, he wanted to complain that he had merely become the fall guy for a criminalized -- and quasi-legal -- political structure much larger and more significant than Victor Bout. But if he revealed too much, he said, he would be perilous.

The interview is much larger, and so are the stories about him. It is also known that every single armed conflict on the surface of the earth has one person in common: Victor Bout. You can find the complete interview at:

http://italy.peacelink.org/

disarmo/articles/art_2385.html

That's the way local girls are...

The day before yesteday I really wanted to visit a place I've heard it's great: El Cachafaz Tango Bar. It's a place were you can watch a tango show, eat, and of course, dance tango. So I asked the girls I'm actually dating if one of them would like to go to this place, but not one of them was available that night, so I decided to ask it a local girl I know, an old friend of mine.

I called her, and proposed to teach her tango dancing on Tuesday night (the show started at 22:00 pm), she accepted with excitement, so I made reservations at El Cachafaz. On that day I had a test at 18:00 pm, so I spent the hole afternoon at the university dressed formal in a black suit, and carried my shoes and perfume in my bag, so I could go directly from the campus to pick her out. I even got borrowed the car of my good friend Juan Antonio, the Great Observer.

I arrived at JA's department at 20:00 pm, and I called the girl, to tell her that I was just going to pick her out, but she kindly told me: "I'm sorry, but I feel a little tired tonigh, so I won't be able to go out with you".

¿Can you believe it? She could have called me to tell me before, so I could at least ask someone else out, but It was too late then. So I ended up drinking wine, watching the local news in "mute" and talking about nothing (the video is a little heavy):


View this clip on Vimeo

Aloha!

Welcome to my blog. I've already wasted lots of time at the creation of this, and I don't have much more left. Anyway, I've always hated introductions. So anyway, visit my blog again in a close future, when I had posted something else.