An Ode to Marta Lucía Ramírez Blanco, Vice President of the Nation

Jaime Diez

Imagine for a second that you live in a country in which it is illegal to be gay. But this particular country has its cosmopolitan side too, so it’s no surprise that some people fight back against the party line. At a party for intellectuals, a woman rocks back and forth on the heels of her pristine purple Doc Martens: “You have to understand that this is a pretty conservative place. But fuck that. The faggots are people too. You’ll try and talk them out of it, maybe. But spraying poison on them from an airplane… fuck me, fuck me.” A long pause as she continues to rocks back and forth. “It’s too much.”

The minister is having none of it. “You can’t understand,” she says in the newspaper. “Fumigating them was the only way to make sure.”

Many years later, we are unsurprised when the national dailies splash the headline that the minster is, herself, gay. There is nothing surprising there. Most of the faggots who were crop-dusted back then are long ago dead and buried in shallow graves. A few of them are still with us, but almost all of those who are still alive, it seems, are wrestling in silence with one cancer or another. They are certainly too sick to tend to their crops. The statute of limitation for what some have called the crime of their killing is up. The minister danced behind sequined doors, all those years ago. And now she remembers nothing. Dancing salsa with the faggots on a sticky dance floor, nothing. Hung over the next day, ordering the chemicals sprayed down in a gentle mist on the dancers from the night before. Absolutely nothing.

Jaime Diez is one of the most celebrated young poets currently working in Wellington, New Zealand.

Ignacio Gómez Jaramillo was a Colombian painter and muralist. He was born in Medellín in 1910. He was one of the most important colombian visual artists of the 20th century. He was co-founder of the Colombo-Soviet Cultural Institute.