YOU CAN SEE SCOTLAND FROM MY HOUSE

But first, a little more about hands. Colombia has, as every country in Latin America, a catholic tradition, and it was in the constitution until 1991 that the country belonged to the sacred heart of Christ, whatever that means. For most people, it meant a rather esoteric picture of a heart pierced by knives and pumping fire out of a cut arteria. What does it has to do with hands? Well, this catholic faith, or whatever it is, got mixed with the colorful lore of the local cultures, and got some influences from outside as well, generating things like "la mano poderosa", the powerful hand. This hand has, at least amongst colombians, connotations of magic and superstition, perhaps rather far from its original theological meaning, and even from its popular european origin.

The next hand is depicted in the second image, taken from an irish political blog, in a post about the current financial crisis.

To be fair and not talk only on the pre-modern aspects of the country, I will now mention a second hand closely related to the first one. I am referring to the invisible hand of the market. From a couple decades ago, colombian presidents (some more than others) have been trying to join the rest of the world in the mandatory path of capitalist development. As we already had a big enough number of graduates from the main centers of technocratic training, it was a natural process to have an increasing number of narrow-minded but relatively literate economists dictating much of politics, and leading us to open ourselves to the world, wich, for them, meant simply international capital. Most of these technocrats put on the invisible hand all the faith their parents put on the powerful hand. I cannot help but think of the two as the same hand, only for two different generations.

With this modernisation, an increase also came of the power of the lobby-makers for the big corporations, wich had been already played a nice role in our economy since a long time ago. And, of course, a dreadful process started to turn the whole country into a proletarised palm plantation to calm the schizoid thirst of the locust-plague capitalism for oil.

But there is yet another hand. Long before the modernisation rush came, we had a long war between liberals and conservatives. A war that did not end completely, but left a guerrilla that was liberal at first, then communist, and corporative-drug-dealist now. This guerrilla have come in very handy for the government to get popularity out of nowhere, and allow them to apply unpopular measures. A series of spectacular military hits on this guerrilla has hidden all the corruption scandals in which the current government is sunk up to the neck, and gave it some room to try (sometimes unsuccessfully) some doubtful moves.

Some of these spectacular actions were properly military: hi-tech attacks from the air, mainly, followed by land troops attack. The first one in the row produced a diplomatic crisis, because it was on Ecuatorian land, in a clear violation of international treatises, as was confirmed by the Organization of American States. And the last of this military actions was not actually military, but more similar to something a drug lord would do. The government pays quite an amount of money for information leading to capture guerrilla leaders. So far, so good. But there is a defecter from the guerrilla who claims that a general of the colombian army suggested him to kill his leader and give them informations about the whereabouts of the dead body; so this guy shot the guerrilla commander and cut his hand off to take it to the general, to give that as a proof that they would really find the body where he said. In the image, some forensic officials examining the hand. Did the general ordered a murder? Difficult to say. But nobody can deny it is a very picturesque matter, and sounds like something that could happen in a banana republic.