In other words, when it comes down to tingles versus cash, tingles tends to win.
One time I knew a woman from Colombia. We used to talk online a lot. I called her on the phone a few times, and her upper class Bogota Colombian Spanish accent was one of the sexiest damn accents you have heard in your life. It almost sounded like French or Catalan in its cadence.
She ran with a rich crowd who spent half their time in Spain. A lot of rich Latin Americans are like that. It’s not uncommon for them to spend 2-6 months out of the year in Spain. They’re practically transplanted Spaniards, culturally anyway.
Her brother was an artist who painted very good paintings which he sold for $3,000-5,000/each, which I suppose is a small fortune in Colombia. They were always going off to Spain to sell paintings or go to art shows, etc.
I talked to her, her sister and I think a man there a few times, and they were some of the classiest, most polite people you have ever met in your life. You meet Colombians and it’s often like that. You think, “These are the nicest people on Earth. Why have they spent the last 65 years slaughtering each other?”
She claimed that she hated the Colombian guerrillas, but I don’t think she hated them all that much. A lot of rich Colombians pay war taxes to the guerrillas. There are serious consequences if you don’t pay. You drive outside of Bogota, meet some guerrilla guy at some pre-organized place, and hand over that year’s war tax. It’s not a tiny amount, but it won’t break the bank either. It’s easily payable. So a lot of Colombian rich have guerrilla connections anyway in one way or another.
Despite this woman’s hatred of the guerrilla, she confided in me that in her crowd of rich artsy Bogotans, there were quite a few FARC supporters, many more than you would ever think. The artsy crowd are always a funny type of rich. In a lot of revolutionary situations, quite a few artsy rich go over to the Revolution. They don’t have the class consciousness of a typical rich person.
At that time, I was working for a guerrilla group called the ELN translating some of their statements from Spanish into English.
Whoops! I wasn’t doing that at all! Because that would violate anti-terrorist laws!
Well anyway, I told her about it, and I expected her to scream at me, call me a Commie and never talk to me again, but instead she started teasing me in a really sexy, flirty, dirty voice, “Ohhhhhhhhhhh. Man of dangerrrrrrrrrrrr (hombre de peligro).”
It sounds a bit funny in English, but that’s the translation. I guess down there being a guerrilla supporter or working for the guerrilla is sort of like running Ultimate Bad Boy Game. I suppose you could even grab some rich women that way. In the female, class consciousness easily gives way to sexual consciousness. The lure of the Bad Boy transcends class interest.
