by JOHN ROSS

MEXICO CITY (June 19th) - Plan Colombia, the $5,000,000,000 drug war boondoggle cooked up in 1999 by Bill Clinton and then-Colombian president Andres Pastrana and subsequently transmographied into a War on Terror adjunct by George Bush and Alvaro Uribe brought U.S. troops, fleets of helicopter gun ships, spray planes spewing poisons, and a vast array of human rights abuses to that troubled Latin American country. It also made Colombia the third largest recipient of Washington's foreign aid and the number one repository of U.S. military aid in the western hemisphere.

BY JOHN ROSS

MEXICO CITY (Jan) - Following last October's discovery of an enormous (four meters by three) monolith during excavation on a lot wedged between the Templo Mayor or Great Temple, the refurbished citadel of the Aztec gods, and the Metropolitan Cathedral just off the great Zocalo plaza in the heart of the old quarter here, tens of thousands of Mexicans descended upon the site determined to catch a glimpse of what the press had dubbed "La Diosa" (the Goddess.) Police had to be summoned to contain the onlookers.

by JOHN ROSS
Blindman's Buff #152

ALBUQUERQUE (March 12th) - The snow was frozen to the gutters and a gritty wind blowing hard out of the north this past Valentine's Day when I kicked off this odyssey at an anarcho outpost down by the railroad yards, La Semilla, in Albuquerque. Two hardscrabble hoboes eyed me through the chain link fence when I walked out into the front yard to bust a joint. Could they come inside and get warm, the white guy asked. He was from New Jersey and the black man with him from Brooklyn. That's what he called him: "Brooklyn."

MEXICO CITY (March 3th) - This past Christmas, family members of 26 political prisoners taken during brutal repression of militant farmers in San Salvador Atenco just outside Mexico City last spring, came up with an ingenious strategy to visit their loved ones in the Santiaguito prison where they have been held practically incommunicado for months.