Taking Note
Virgin Appears in Sky; Woman Gives Birth to Chicken "THE OLD IS DYING, AND THE NEW CANnot be born," Antonio Gramsci once reflected in his Prison Notebooks. "In this interregnum a...
...But how was she manufactured...
...A teen-age boy, who had spent most of his life in state institutions, began to tell locals that the Virgin Mary had appeared to him in the clouds...
...Shlaudeman acquired his field experience first as assistant to Special Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker in the wake of the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic...
...T HE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION, MEANWHILE, has designated a new special envoy to Central America, to replace the unlamented Richard Stone...
...Here are two recent illustrations...
...Within no time, the place had become a veritable tourist attraction for the faithful or the gullible...
...Hologram...
...Or was it all done with mirrors...
...Her swipe at local church activism was also neatly timed, for in November the Catholic Church was giving important backing to the swelling protest movement...
...After all, she provided a useful distraction from more troublesome contemporary issues such as the Sixth National Day of Protest against the Pinochet regime, or the public call for the CNI to be dissolved...
...In Latin America, there is no better place to find these symptoms than in the conservative press...
...Not surprisingly, Sefiora Amanda Carballo, the unfortunate woman in question, could find no explanation for the event...
...All the ingredients were there...
...Nor could the neighbors, who had watched for a month in mystification as "a small protuberance" grew in the stomach of the mother-to-be...
...Nor, most importantly of all for La Prensa's readership, could "a little nun from the College of Christ the King," who was conveniently on hand to answer the bewildered reporter's questions...
...In the town of Villa Alemana, just east of the seaport of Valparaiso, stands the house of a retired Navy officer...
...There, according to La Prensa's final paragraph, it became "the principal topic of conversation among neighbors of the Barrio Dimitrov, who offered their conjectures about this event that violates the laws of nature...
...Though she hovered in the clouds, in living color and 3-D, she declined to speak again, much to the disappointment of the multitude...
...Later, he served from 1969-1973 as deputy chief of mission in the U.S...
...First Chile...
...A team of investigators set up by the Bishop of Valparaiso declared that the Virgin in the clouds was "a false image...
...first, that the Chilean people should "pray for Russia," and second, that "the priests have taken the wrong road...
...La Prensa has also regaled its readers with two-headed calves, UFOs and earthquakes-all the proof you could wish that the universe cannot be subjected to the diabolical forces of dialectical materialism...
...Mother, gives birth to chicken...
...From Chile, Shlaudeman was given onward postings as Ambassador to Venezuela, then Peru and Argentina...
...The transplanting of his Chilean experience to Central America could be intriguing to watch, especially if La Prensa begins to replace its folksy bottled chickens with high tech Virgins in the skies over Managua...
...even the slum where the dire omen was witnessed seemed well chosen: it was the Barrio Jorge Dimitrov, named for the famous Bulgarian Communist leader...
...I N NICARAGUA TOO, "FALSE IMAGES" OF THE Virgin have long been a staple feature of the daily La Prensa, which alternates between conservative polemics and National Enquirer-style sensationalism...
...In November of last year, strange things began happening in the sky over his back yard...
...Even so, La Prensa outdid itself in February...
...Like the Virgin of Villa Alemana, the chicken's message was clear...
...In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear...
...Plainclothes secret police of the CNI...
...Who were they...
...The name may already be familiar to our readers...
...Combine an editor's awareness of the power of media and the depth of many readers' religious beliefs and superstitions, and the result can be crude political manipulation...
...Embassy in Santiago, Chile...
...The rest is history...
...The right-wing press took up the case of the suspended Virgin with alacrity...
...Reports circulated that strange-looking young men with trucks full of equipment had been seen close to the naval officer's house...
...Meanwhile, the two pound black and white chicken (born dead, unfortunately, so unable to tell its side of the story) was placed on public display in a glass jar...
...The message was clear and topical and the right-wing press lapped it up...
...She had delivered two messages to the overawed teen-ager...
...By now the local bishops were disturbed and suspicious...
...There was one, for example, whose statue sweated (tears, supposedly, for Sandinista Godlessness...
...During that tour of duty, he was responsible for drafting the "Shlaudeman Paper," an influential contingency plan for dealing with the new socialist government of Salvador Allende...
...This is something abnormal...
...Slide projection...
...I can say nothing," said the Sister ominously...
...The newcomer is Harry W. Shlaudeman, admittedly a stranger to Central America, but by no means unfamiliar to the tricky ways of Latin American politics...
...The Virgin dutifully appeared to the crowds on several occasions...
...proclaimed the headline...
...Next, went the joke in Chile, she will tell us that it is un-Christian for housewives to bang their saucepans in protest against the dictatorship...
Vol. 18 • May 1984 • No. 3
