El Salvador: In Prison for 30 Years for a Miscarriage Deemed "Fetal Homicide"

Abortion -- a woman's reproductive rights, in general -- was a discussion that I'd sworn never to further discuss, along with the Death Penalty.

Never think that you cannot be aggravated into speaking, again, on any subject, forsworn or not.

May it please the court, I offer evidence in the form of a previously published short story, Concupiscence.
And may it not offend too many of those Dear Readers not selected as part of a jury of my peers, I believe that Concupiscence should be republished, raised to the top of the blog's detritus. You'll find it now just after this post.

I thought that outburst of creative writing would slay the need.

But Daily KOS, whose daily digests of generalized outrage I more and more ignore, published a blog/article today that jumped out of my inbox and adhered to the vestiges of my retinas.

The reason they are more and more ignored here at The Manor?  A tendency for their bloggers, especially, to underperform in their due diligence. Usually, this is shown up, and, ironically, partially mitigated by, excerpting the original source information.

The beauty of like-minded people that we discover on these interwebs, no matter their journalistic acumen, is that we usually get to read what they are reading.  Ahem, and that "we" are too lazy and stressed to seek out for ourselves.  Sometimes "we" are snooty, too.

Anyway.

For the story in its entirety at Daily KOS, go HERE.
To by-pass Daily KOS and read the cited source material for the story, go HERE and HERE.

For my meager part, and note that this "breaking story" is seven years old, I give you writer Leslie Salzillo's introduction to the source material.  And, heck, seven years qualifies for SILENCE=DEATH treatment in Marlinspike Hall Land, though had there not been a bilious, gut-wrenching setback in "Guadalupe"'s legal case, the next 23 years of her now young life would likely never have reached a wider audience.

So, thank you, Leslie Salzillo -- whose journalistic skills are, in no way, in question.

With some stories, I'm not sure where to begin, because the news has me stunned and almost speechless. I want to turn away, block it out and find something happy to do, or something else to think about, or write about. But I can't. And so I will begin right here - and right now. 

Last week, a young woman in El Salvador who goes by the alias name of 'Guadalupe,' had very high hopes, and was all but assured she would receive a pardon from her 30-year sentence. She had already served seven years, starting in her teens. Her alleged crime? Fetal homicide. She miscarried, and was charged with murder. 

Her pardon didn't come. Guadalupe's freedom was one vote short. Her fate was determined by a Right-Wing congressional majority of 43-42. I can't write about something like this and not feel like I've been punched in the stomach again and again. Guadalupe represents every woman. This is what happens when abortion is illegal. El Salvador is known to be one of the worst countries in the world for women's reproductive rights.

Salzillo goes on to parallels in the USAmerica, in the form of Fetal Homicide State Laws.

If you, too, had tabled discussions of this topic, now is the time for your voice to be heard again.

An easy way to start? Become a signatory to the "Vote NO on National Abortion Ban," a petition drive being driven by Care2, a group supported by the vast citizenry of Tête de Hergé.

 © 2015 L. Ryan

For Rachel Jeantel

I've forsworn myself,

a thinning sin, a setting

sun, a skinning,

a skinning, an imprinting

punctated stigma,

the neutered past

participle of that

charismatic prick,

the concrete enigma

of pungere, 

 

from which we agree

to punctuate: we pause we delay we

stutter sinning we stutter in the juncture

we stutter we shudder with interruptions

and lines gone dead we end we

puncture we question we declame we

exclaim we cry we

die we delay we

structure the rupture

of the dominant language.

 

We disorient under

the thundering debris

of English.

 

(And Lo, the angel of the Lord,

yo, came on them and man,

were they sore afraid,

so afraid of the woe

of Lo, yo.)

 

There remains

no zen in me, my moi,

because there never

was any zen, just creole

patois for "english,"

that is, "angle,"

defrenchified anglais,

"mè" short for "mamè"

meaning nun, "chèsè,"

there never was any zen

just foreign din,

malevolent djinn:

"a welter of discordant sounds."

 

Djinn, tatted men

who send you 

-- not by brass-rubbed wish --

into a swirling tee,

that intersection 

of green and gravel,

sand, cement,

water and love,

no matter what,

teen love versus lawmen,

green love, gravel love,

sand love, cement love,

water love, no matter

what love, but not what

I cannot believe,

dead love, mean

love forcing me naked

before the world

of that swirling tee --

 

But he never said a mumblin' word

Not a word, not a word, not a word.

 

-- leaving just the running

mumbling stitch 

of her angry, abashed,

and afflicted trying,

 

astray and trying,

broken and trying,

bothered -- burdened -- beset -- and trying.

 

In most of the mixed-language

areas of this Babel world,

mixed by need, habit,

and daily use, no dictionary, no

linguists, no school, no

school marms' nun-knuckle-

rapping bruise to heed,

"English" can be

"an English,"

and came to be when serving,

scrubbing, raising children,

raising children of the mèt,

raising children of the chèf,

scraping, eking by, 

but needing to say

a thing or two

along the trodden way.

 

Words that come to be

in such a way

are fuses, short

and long, sluices

and dams.

 

"English" can be 

"an English"

 

-- and often is --

 

and it means:

not me.

Not us.

Non-me, non-us: 

 

"You got it?"

"You. Got. To. Un. Der. Stand."

 

You might have noticed

-- which is precisely

and concisely what

smut rut we need

to discuss:

that twitch

of knowing;

the obscenity

of pretending

not to know;

and the running

mumbling stitch 

of her angry, abashed,

and afflicted trying.

 

Let me tell you

of freeborn slaves

or the leeway

of tidal waves

of a girl

who cannot read

yet can, who cannot

speak, yet does:

 

"You got it?";

"You. Got. To. Un. Der. Stand."

 

She who knows

depravity when

she hears it

pull a gun,

 

in the din, 

in the greeny djinn glen

 

-- and the running,

mumbling stitch 

of angry embarrassed

trying, knowing a mumbling

word, and crying.

 

But he never said a mumblin' word

Not a word, not a word, not a word.

 

Leaving just the running,

mumbling stitch 

of her angry, abashed,

and afflicted trying.

chris leben murder

Deconstructing the possibilities of how and why someone googles their way to this facetiously fecund fiction that is elle est belle la seine la seine elle est belle is sometimes alarming, sometimes a sad commentary.

Two people arrived yesterday after searching for "chris leben murder."

I have to confess to swallowing that possibilty hook, line, sinker.

It was completely within the realm of possibility that Chris Leben might have murdered someone -- and outside the octagon, too.

Action, reaction, over-reaction: There I was, googling away on Chris Leben and homicide.

This is what I found.

First of all, I have added an expression to my repertoire! Apparently, in MMA commentary, winning "by murder" is not a bad way to win, and usually does not involve leaving anything in the hands of the judges. In fact, the image that sticks in my visual cortex is a rude ground and pound, with lots of "short elbows" and "hammer fists" (I will never be able to get rid of the sound of Matt Serra when he was cornering fighters on TUF -- elbows/hammerfists, "you can do it all day long..." and "we're breathing, we're breathing...")

Outside of winning an MMA match by means of murder, the only recent allusions to the imposition of death comes from the sad news that Justin Levens has apparently murdered his wife and then killed himself.

(Levens -- Leben -- imagine hearing it on the radio or bleeping from a television... imagine kind of expecting to hear something along these lines... about LEBEN. You might end up on a weird blog trying to find a reliable police report midst a bunch of virtual kitsch.)

So... it is a matter of Levens. It is a matter of his wife, Sarah McLean-Levens, presumably killed by her husband's hands.

Allegedly, presumably, probably. And the immediate impulse is to hypothesize 'roid rage. He was known to have a problem with prescription pain killers, which were apparently found in large quantities at the scene and at their home. That would certainly resonate with crazed behavior -- but the search for anabolic steroids is on.

I am glad it wasn't Chris Leben and sorry that it had to be anyone. The fact, though, that anonymous people, unknown to one another, had no trouble imagining it to be Chris Leben? Well, he may want to consider why that is, and what he can do to squash any further unfortunate Google search terms.

"Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart."

Believe it or not -- and, likely, you do not, given my latest postings -- I don't think that videos and photos are sufficient to a blog.

Fred sent me a link to this YouTube video last night. Neither one of us can figure why we had never heard of this... event -- before. Late to the party and irrelevant, I nonetheless found myself belatedly typing away as if something might depend on it beyond my own sanity, outrage, and sadness.

This is a remarkable piece of footage that chills the soul. Knee-jerk leftist-leaning liberal that I am -- because real socialism is not available in a ready mix formula here in the states -- I respect the authority of police and believe, à la Anne Frank, that "(d)espite everything... people are really good at heart."

Usually, tossing in a laden quote from such a heavy source as Anne Frank translates as nothing short of cheesy -- and mightily lazy.

But I think I can pull it off here. The "ceremon(ies) of innocence" are so well documented, by the diary, by surveillance film, that assignations of guilt and innocence should be rote and incontestable.

Thesaurus.com claims these synonyms for incontestable: hard, inarguable, incontrovertible, indisputable, indubitable, irrefutable, positive, sure, unassailable, undeniable, unquestionable.

And yet, in both cases, all we really know is that the principles are dead -- and only in rereading do I see the double entendre, that ethical rigor is as much absent to these situations as mercy or justice, individuated or girded by systemic approbation.

Oh, big words, grand thoughts.

In this video, Michael Pleasance is murdered by police officer Alvin Weems.

When I read about the ensuing cover up, scary in its extent and practiced nature, I found myself humming Dylan's Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. (Really! Not a song I normally reference, it had been recently in mind due to the title of my post about Evan Tanner.) Most of the lyrics, I remembered, but not the all important last strophe wherein William Zantzinger faces the judge and is sentenced to six months for Carroll's murder.

When so much has gone so wrong, we all would like to be able to isolate the blame and forget that an ultimate necessitates a penultimate. When so much has gone so wrong, we forget that no event is discrete.

You who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,

Bury the rag deep in your face,

For now's the time for your tears.