Dear America, we’re just not that into you

In my latest piece over at rabble.ca, I explore how Canada's evolving relationship with the U.S. reflects much more than just political tension—it’s about identity, values, and what it means to forge a path forward in an increasingly polarized world. I take a hard look at the historical dynamics between our two countries and ask the question: can Canada offer a better example for the future?

The piece, Dear America, We’re Just Not That Into You, dives into everything from the rise of political extremism in the U.S. to how Canada’s commitment to solidarity, equity, and compassion could become a guiding light in these turbulent times. It’s a bold take on what might be next for our neighbor to the south and the role Canada could play in shaping a more hopeful future.

Grandpa's Newspapers

Nostalgia, memory, love: all powerful emotions. And what can trigger them? In this case, Pop Rocks exploding in a sensory sugar rush. In Spanish they call them Peta Zetas but it's a story that could easily be told in German, Russian, Romanian, Albanian or Cambodian. It's a story that will be told again in Argentina and in the good 'ol US of A. This week in the Camino a Ítaca, a disturbing memory of someone loved. Click over to read the original version in HOY in Spanish or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

Bitten Tongues, Buried Truths

The Peta Zetas hit your tongue like a .44 magnum in a janitor’s closet—a chemical blast that made Sydney’s New Year’s fireworks look like damp sparklers in trembling hands. FACT: Even now, nearly fifty years later, just closing your eyes summons the ghost of that taste, and your taste buds explode.

It wasn’t just the sugar slamming your bloodstream with the raw voltage of a faulty electric chair in one of those backwards states where governors still get aroused signing death warrants—no, it was the savage anticipation that wrought your young brain. After a week of pure psychological warfare dished out by the penguin-suited masochists who made Dante look like a travel brochure writer, this was the reward.

But that torment was only half as excruciating as waiting for that dead-eyed priest to finish his cosmic threats about your immortal soul being flame-broiled for eternity, just for the audacity of thinking a human thought. But that was Grandpa's rule, man—that duplicitous rogue— No candy until after Sunday mass.

Sunday morning memories with your grandfather were like those Peta Zetas—intense, intoxicating, impossible to shake. These candy rituals became the scaffolding of love in your developing brain—twisted, perhaps, but genuine. Old men don't reveal themselves to children directly. They speak through rituals, through candies after mass, through calloused hands on shoulders. You hold these memories like delicate birds, afraid to squeeze too hard. Because while you were busy chasing sugar highs, he was feeding you something else entirely—stories.

They started sweet, those tales. Heroic yarns about order, discipline, the glory of the ‘before times.’ But bite down too hard, and the cracks showed. A sneer at the ‘weakness’ of democracy. A toast to men in crisp uniforms who ‘knew how to clean up the filth.’ By the time your tongue caught the sour beneath the sugar, it was too late—the aftertaste was already in your blood.

Funny, how the brain works. It lets you keep the warmth of his laughter, the wrinkled grip of his hand around yours, even as it tries to vomit up the rest. You can still taste the candy, yet you can still hear the sermons—both kinds. The ones from the pulpit, and the ones from him.

But time is a savage editor. The older you got, the more you noticed the newspapers he read and the hateful programs that droned through Sunday afternoons after church. The casual remarks about ‘those people’ that slithered into lunch conversations. A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory, especially when a civil war is concerned. We all hunt for rationales for believing in the absurd, some are just better at it.

Maybe that's what haunts you most about those Peta Zetas—not just their explosive sweetness, but how they represent your own complicity. Every Sunday you took the candy without question, building monuments of affection to a man whose ideological compass pointed straight to hell. Was your childish love blind, or was it bribed into silence for a few pesetas?

There's no neat resolution here, no morality tale with a tidy lesson. Just the wrenched reality that humans can simultaneously be sources of tenderness and vessels of hatred. Some memories remain fundamentally corrupted, like beautiful fruit grown in poisoned soil. Kundera warned that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Ominously, it seems that many have willfully chosen the latter. In burying history, Spain doesn’t just forget its sins—it sugarcoats them, passing poisoned sweets to generations to come.

The Birth of a Civil War in Yemen in Counterpunch

Sana'a, Yemen

Over twenty years ago, I lived in Yemen. Decades later, I found myself receiving WhatsApp messages from friends and former students in Sana’a—as bombs rained down around them. Real-time updates from people I cared about, living through hell. That experience will never leave me.

What I didn’t expect was to see that same war discussed in a Signal group chat by U.S. officials—punctuated with emojis, fist bumps, and the tone of a frat party watching drone footage like it was Call of Duty.

This past Sunday, CounterPunch, one of the few American outlets with the guts to run it, published my longform piece:
👉 “Yemen in Flames: From Depraved Spectacle to Signalgate”

It’s a dark, sharp, and deeply personal chronicle of how Trump-era officials planned airstrikes on Yemen with the casual detachment of gamers, turning mass death into a grotesque kind of entertainment.

📌 From screenshots of chats to the dehumanization of entire populations, the piece shows how modern warfare has become performance art for sociopaths in positions of power.

📰 Read the full piece here:

The Great Unravelling

"For a moment, it felt like we had won. The bad guys were relics. Fascism was a lesson Spanish schools didn't teach, and liberal democracy was what all the cool countries were wearing."

The Camino a Ítaca climbs the Statue of Liberty this week for a look around to see what is left of something precious that we once took for granted. It's not gone...yet. But it is clear that what we once thought immutable is nowhere near permanent. This week in both English and Spanish. Click over to read the unravelling in Sur in English here or a slightly shorter version (word count issues) in HOY in Spanish here. (PDF en castellano abajo)

The Age of Mean

Ages rise and rot, and this one smells like cheap cologne, pancake make-up and cold, hard cruelty. The Age of Reason left town long ago, probably hitchhiking with Elvis, and in its place slithers the Age of Mean—petty, ugly, and proud of it. Welcome to the golden era of the selfish, the crass, the smug boor with a megaphone and a middle finger raised to anything resembling decency. In this week's Camino a Ítaca, a long, bittersweet gaze back to when empathy wasn’t a punchline, and "love thy neighbor" wasn’t just another blunt object for hypocrites to swing at their enemies. This piece, apparently too radioactive for an English-reading audience, fell victim to the silent chokehold of self-censorship. The shadow of Musk looms large, its stench thick and suffocating, proof that even across the Atlantic, the game is rigged, and the referees have left the building.

As one rejection email advised: "Thank you for submitting this to the Post-Gazette. It's not an article we can use, partly because we favor a cooler, more humanistic style (not referring to people as "slithering," for example)..." 

But then one light shone out of the cowed darkness. Rabble.ca took at chance. Click over and see what the fuss was about.

Globalization and its Discontents

I've been called a lot of things in my life. My surname alone has had people thinking that I'm from a lost tribe to an island in Japan. In this week's Camino a Ítica, the way my name can cause consternation among some. Life on the peninsula is no longer so monochrome, or monotheistic. Click over to read the English version on page 22 of the PDF in SUR in English or in Spanish in the HOY. (PDF en castellano abajo)

The line between continents blurs up here, lost in the madness of these mountains—great, hulking beasts with snow-drenched peaks, their ridges twisting like the spine of some prehistoric leviathan sprawled between the Black and Caspian seas. Less a boundary between East and West than a stone-fisted barricade between the East and the even more bewildering East.

For centuries, they’ve loomed like bouncers at one of history’s rowdier saloons, keeping the Indo-Europeans and the rough-and-tumble Caucasian and Turkic tribes apart. The Russians and Persians have played tug-of-war over this place for generations, and yet, in one of history’s great absurdities, these crags somehow manage to carve Orthodox Christian Georgia and Armenia away from the Muslim-majority north—except for Azerbaijan, which juts into the Caspian like a defiant middle finger.

We had left the sleepy village of İlisu in Azerbaijan and were hiking toward Russia, following the glacial Kurmukh-chai River as it cut deeper into the mountains, pushing forward with the simple plan of going as far as we could until someone in a furry official-looking hat stopped us.

Along the way, we met a shepherd who greeted us in a singsong Azeri. When it became clear we understood nothing, his wizened, weathered face darkened with suspicion before he switched to the language of the empire, the tongue of the Tsars. Still, nothing. Our blank stares unsettled him.

How could we not speak Russian? To unravel this mystery, or perhaps to confirm we weren’t extraterrestrials, he pulled out an old bottle of homemade honey vodka, still stamped with the fading letters CCCP and poured us each a stiff drink. Through wild gestures and, eventually, song, we pieced together his bewilderment: that someone might not speak Russian simply did not compute. It was as if we had told him the sky was not, in fact, blue. This did not fit in with his worldview.

I was reminded of this the other day while out for cañas. I don’t even remember how the conversation started, but at some point, one of the older parishioners of the bar looked over and said, “What kind of name is that? Troy? I mean, what’s it short for?”

I wasn’t sure where this was going, but I told him it wasn’t short for anything, it was just Troy.

“Impossible! That’s no name. There’s no San Troy. It must be short for something, like… Troncio.”

In no mood to argue, I explained that it came from the tragic city of Priam and turned back to my drink. But he wasn’t finished.

“Impossible! Troya would be female, and you have a beard!”

I tried to steer the conversation toward football or jamón, safe topics, national pillars, but no. He was deep in the trenches now, determined to restore order to a world where all proper names must have a saintly origin or at least a good Catholic ring to them.

Finally, he delivered his verdict. “You need a real proper name.” He thought for a moment, then grinned over his half empty glass of Veterano. “Something like… Manolo.”

“Sí, Manolo!” A name as sturdy as a pair of alpargatas, as dependable as a midday siesta. The matter was settled and he ordered another drink.

I nodded and accepted my fate. After all, at least he didn’t suggest Jesús.

Imagine if I had told him my surname?

What Is, Isn't?

JD Vance comes to Europe

Poor Chicken Little, after everyone ignored the little guy for so long, saying he was exaggerating, that what the fascists were saying was only electioneering, peanuts for the gallery, not to be take seriously...
And then came Vance to Europe to let everyone know that they are playing for keeps. Not only are they dismantling the little saftey net built over the decades in the United States, but that they want the same for Europe too. In this week's Camino a Ítaca a Japanese kitsune fable. When will the enchanted be able to see the foxes for what they are? Will it be too late? Click over to read the originally published version in Spanish the HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

The landscape unfurled like an ancient scroll painting, revealing a world cloaked in the pristine silence of winter as a farmer named Tadahiro, one of those sturdy tillers of the soil who formed the backbone of feudal Japan, was walking home. The snow in Hokkaido is unlike anywhere on earth— it falls in a blanket so thick that it seems to muffle the very air, as if the gods themselves had hushed the world.

Then to his wonderment, through the settling snow came the most magnificent parade he had ever witnessed. The lantern-bearers came first, their paper lights casting pools of golden radiance across the whiteness. Behind them processioned ranks of samurai in silk hakama, their sword hilts gleaming. Musicians followed, their flutes sending haunting notes into the winter air. The gifts came next - lacquered boxes bound with silk, their contents worth more than a farmer would see in a thousand lifetimes. And there, at the heart of this splendor, moved the bride herself, her wedding kimono so fine it seemed to float above the snow.

As Tadahiro let this assembly pass, his old friend Taro happened upon the scene. What followed was one of those moments when reality itself seems to split along its seams. For where Tadahiro saw nobility and splendor, Taro saw only a troupe of foxes, padding through the snow with twigs in their mouths.

"Have you lost your senses?" Taro demanded and then mumbled something, watching his friend bow deeply to what appeared to be nothing more than common forest creatures. "They're only foxes!"

Taro’s harsh words acted like a spell-breaking charm. In an instant, the magnificent procession dissolved like melting snow, leaving only a line of foxes trotting through the snow, carrying nothing but sticks that Tadahiro's enchanted mind had transformed into all the trappings of a noble wedding.

Japanese kitsune legends remind us that sometimes the veil between worlds is as thin as a snowflake, and reality itself might depend entirely on who is doing the looking.

These mischievous foxes still have the power to enchant. Just recently, the branches in their mouths spelt out in enormous letters a headline in the Economist, “Spain shows Europe how to keep up with America’s economy.” It then ranked it the best performing economy of the OECD based on performance in the last year. 

Yet even though the Economist isn’t precisely known as radically left-leaning, enchanted right-wing commenters steadfastly believed the pablum spooned to them by the Spanish conservative press. They assured that the country had banned private property and was two small steps away from becoming a bankrupt Maoist dictatorship.

Their confirmation bias simply wouldn’t allow them to see the foxes for what they were. They weren’t seeing a cadre of billionaires and their evil minions openly moving to gut the Welfare State. Instead of seeing things like Milei’s chainsaw for what it is, a tool designed to take away their pensions, socialized medicine and education and do away with limits on working hours and minimum wages, they saw a magic wand that was going to make them too wealthy and upwardly mobile. Just like hardworking Abascal and his patriot friends.

Just what did Taro mumble that broke the spell?

San Cristóbal in Montánchez, Spain

Castillo de Montánchez

Longform read published in the February issue of Perceptive Travel Magazine. (click over)
A family trip to a curious festival where the blessed are not the meek, but in fact their modes of transport.

"The sweep before us was more than 180 degrees. The savannah, some 1300 feet below, rolled off into the far-off confines of the horizon and was fringed with the blueish humpbacks of breaching sierras. The checkerboard of holm oak trees that made up the dehesas pixelated the undulating topography of differing shades of green and parched beige. White specks of small villages broke up the scene like tiny errors on a tactile screen."

The Gulf of Fragile Masculinity

It has begun, even on this side of the Atlantic. The pernicious slide into self-censorship has started to happen in the press. Lately I have been publishing my Camino a Ítaca articles in Spanish, as always, in the HOY but have also been publishing them in English in the SUR in English. But it seems that this week's was a step too far for the outlet in English and they decided not to publish it. 
True, it could be for other reasons, but unfortunately it seems clear that it was done not to rock the boat, precisely when the boat desperately needs to be shaken up. I'm afraid it's not coming, it's already here. Click over to see the Spanish version in the HOY, who were brave enough to publish it or read the longer, condemned piece in English below.

Rising up in the southeastern corner of Türkiye, the toothy Zagros mountains briefly zigzag like the hose of a hookah pipe down the partition dividing the Kurdish lands of Iran and Iraq. They then cleave through the eminent domain of the Ayatollahs until the chain withers out in the barren deserts bordering one of the world’s most vital sea passages, the Strait of Hormuz. From its southern flanks the arid plains of Marvdasht unroll like a dusty Persian carpet that blankets some of the most ancient settlements known to humankind.

Some 60kms to the northeast of Shiraz, a series of broken columns rise out of these plains, standing as a mute testament to the transience of imperial ambition. The pulse of history once beat here in Persepolis. The Achaemenid Empire ruled an estimated 44% of the population on Earth. Hollywoodized rulers like Cyrus the Great, Darius and Xerxes issued decrees from these ruins that were felt as far away as modern-day Crimea, Afghanistan and Somaliland.

Today only the wind polishes the bas-reliefs that lead up the grand stairway to the empty audience hall. Sumptuously robed figures from 23 nations are depicted bringing precious gifts in tribute to the absolute despot. Elaborate yet subjugated ambassadors frozen in stone while contributing the wealth of their nations to a deified foreign ruler. A ruler that himself would be subjugated in 330 BCE by another apotheotic King. A ruler named Alexander.

Fast forward to today and we see the return ofsupposed Roman salutes. There are rumors of gigantic orange phallus sightings around the world. Romanesque fetishes, erected in tribute to an autocrat promising a return to expansionism and greatness, no matter the conflicting reports given by the prostitutes and pornstars he paid off.

From the Casa Rosada to the Via Appia and the Calles Genova and, of course, Bambu, far right leaders and wannabe autocratical satraps are falling over themselves for the privilege to climb the White House steps and kiss the ring.

These sycophants will do anything to indulge the petulant tangerine tyrant, even if it means eschewing their national interests amidst his threats of protectionism and raised tariffs. They share a religious conviction that the Orange Clown’s return is a victory against wokeness and the perceived ills of empathy and political correctness. For them, only he can put the genie back in the bottle and time warp the West back 70 years to when everyone knew their place.

Back to a time when you could openly mock the disabled, when the only ‘good’ immigrant was one that didn’t dream of a day off, when women had to get their husband’s permission to get a passport and bled to death from coat hanger injuries in dark back rooms. A return to when it was socially acceptable to expound racist views and a time when the past was narrated as a single story complete with good white guys and bad dark guys.

But genies are non-returnable. Freedom once tasted isn’t so easily relinquished. The decent majority will realize that this movement wasn’t in fact about the price of eggs, but something much more sinister and this crass episode will just become another Darius in the dust.

As Time Goes By

With just days before the freely elected orange Himler assumes the most powerful office on earth to disassemble the world order from inside, the Camino a Ítaca takes a look back at how eight decades of anti-Nazi propaganda on the silver screen have proven to be no match for the masses of disinformation fed to all through their tiny screens. What was once bad is now good and what was once evil is now accepted. The hundreds of thousands who lost their lives fighting these extreme righ-wing ideals now sleep uneasily as the very real threat of fascism returns. This time not by violence and force, but mire insidiously by fake news and misinformation. Click over to read the published versions both in Spanish in the HOY and in English in the SUR in English. (castellano abajo)

I’m starting to suspect that everything that comes out of Hollywood isn’t quite real. I’ve been there on many occasions, seen the white letters up on the hillside and tripped over the junkies on Hollywood and Vine. So, I know that the place in fact exists. It’s what it has produced that I am no longer certain of.

I’m picturing Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn climbing the cliffs of Navarone. Or maybe something lighter when Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson make a Luftwaffe colonel’s life impossibly complicated as they try to escape.

We don’t even have to reach so far back to find more films on the same theme. We’ve seen Stephen Spielberg direct Liam Neeson in a most harrowing film about a terrible list and Tom Hanks searching for Private Ryan. Or perhaps more recently, Christoph Waltz’s unparalleled quiet, yet menacing depiction of pure raw evil. One that might even approach the heinous malevolence of someone like Reinhard Heydrich in Tarantino’s inglourious remake.

For eighty years Hollywood has churned out constant reminders of the monumental struggle that took place in the 30s and 40s. All are, in their own fashion, depictions of a time when things were remarkably black and white. The false Hollywood narrative of cowboys and indians temporarily replaced by something more easily digestible. On one side we had people fighting for supposed freedom and democracy. While on the other, supporters of authoritarian regimes who had no compunction about sending millions of people who didn’t fit into their mold to their deaths in purpose-built extermination camps from Fuerteventura to Rivesaltes to Birkenau. Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito’s defeat and the subsequent freeing of the concentration camps have flooded our screens ever since.

In Spain however it would take another 40 years. Franco was never toppled He died peacefully in bed with his death marking the beginning of the end to perhaps Europe’s longest dictatorships. At last, the good guys had beaten the baddies and fascism seemed to have finally been put to rest.

But then something happened. It came back.                                 

Four years ago the world watched a violent mob try overturn a free and fair election. Nazi flags were seen flying in the Capitol building of a country that lost 400,000 plus lives fighting the very ideology invading its legislative core. Worse yet, the coup attempt’s leader, Donald Trump, has now been reelected. In Italy, an open supporter of Mussolini now runs the country. At the same time, in the cradles of the most atrocious crimes of the 20^th century, Germany has seen a surge in support for the far right, while in Austria Nazi supporters may form a government.

In Spain, young people blithely sing fascist songs on school outings while more and more women look back fondly on a dark period when they had next to no rights. Regime apologists now sit in all levels of government and in attempts to whitewash the past, the traditional right has joined them in attempts to repeal laws reminding us of past horrors.

In a world where Mayor Stasser has become the good guy and Rick Blaine the bad, you no longer need dystopian movies, just pay attention. Please Sam, don’t play it again.

Marco Polo and the Three Wise Men

The Three Wise Men woken by an angel Maestre Gislebertus, h. 1130

In an age when American culture seems to permeate and even obliterate traditions around the world, it's refreshing to local traditions hold strong against the ceaseless tide. Here in Spain they have incorportated Santa Claus and the mass consumerism of America into their Christmas season, but the main event is still the Three Kings Day (Epiphany). The thing is, as with many aspects of Christianity, the Spanish have really turned it into a nativist narrative (the legends of Santiago or Saint James and the pagan inspired Virgin cults). In this week's Camino a Ítaca, a reminder that the foundational myths of the faith looked East before looking West. Click over to the version published in English in Sur in English (PDF p.16) or the Spanish version in the HOY. 

Modern-day Tehran tumbles out of the Elburz mountains like an unspooling roll of chimerical fabric. It starts out fresh and clean but as its splendor runs out, it becomes dustier and more frayed at the edges as it loses altitude and peters out on the doorstep of Kavir, the Great Salt Desert. In a question of 30kms the metropolis plunges 600m down from the modern, wealthy mountain heights in the north, through the dense smog that perennially chokes the megacity and then fades into the humbler, haphazard developments and villages it has swallowed up along the fringes of the desert.

In one of these towns, now engulfed by the metastasizing capital, still stands the ancient caravanserai stop of Rayy. A place where a young Italian named Marco Polo just might have passed through in the XIII century enroute with his destiny with the great Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan.

Further along the Silk Road in Saveh (or Kashan depending on your transliteration), the Genovese youngster encountered a square building housing three sepultures, each boasting an unblemished corpse complete with hipster beards and stylized hair. He asked around but no one was able to tell him who these incorruptible Methuselah were.

It was another three-day journey until he found out that they were three ‘kings’ who had set out from the East to worship a prophet in Judea. With them they carried the classical bling of the day, Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh. These gifts were in fact chosen to ascertain whether the prophet was a God, an earthly King, or a Physician. If he took the Gold, then he would be your typical Bourbon or Windsor, that is to say an earthly king. If he fancied the Incense he was a God and if he was after the mysterious Myrrh he was a Healer.

After conferring with Herod, these magi finally found the baby prophet. The youngest went in first and found the child apparently just like himself. The middle one entered next, and like the first, he found the prophet seemingly of his own age. Lastly, the eldest went in and wouldn’t you know it, the same happened to him. To clear up this circus trick they agreed to go in together and to their surprise found a baby that was just thirteen days old. Amazed by the miracle, they presented their gifts and in a truly trinitarian move, the child took all three. In return, the child gave them a small, closed box.

We know curiosity kills cats, and the same might be said for camels. The three kings couldn’t wait to get home to open the box and when they finally did, they only found a small stone. In their disappointment, they tossed the stone into a well only to be surprised by a flame bursting up and creating the everlasting light that would become the foundation of another of the monotheistic faiths, Zoroastrianism.

With so many of its followers xenophobically insisting on their faith being the basis of the West, Polo’s account serves as just another reminder that Christianity was not only born in the near East but once looked further in that direction in its foundational stories.