Yesterday the First Commission of the Colombian Senate approved a proposal to regulate the practice of euthanasia in the country. The initiative would allow terminally ill people older than 18, who are suffering from intense pain and with no scientific cure available, to undergo the procedure.

The proposal, brought before the Senate by Armando Benedetti of the Partido Social de Unidad Nacional, passed with ten votes in favour and four against.

“When someone has a terminal illness and their life is deteriorating, they have the right to resort to euthanasia,” Benedetti said.

Euthanasia is legal in Colombia. In 1997, the Constitutional Court granted Congress power to regulate the practice in a ruling that declared that “to order a person to prolong their life for a short time, when they do not desire to and are suffering from deep afflictions, is not only cruel and inhumane, but deprives them of their dignity.”

The new regulation will allow for healthy patients to give their consent to the procedure in the presence of a notary at least five years before a terminal or cerebral illness that would leave them incapable of communicating. Consent can only be given by the patients themselves. The legislation does not allow for family members to opt for the procedure.

Roy Barreras, president of the Senate, stated that the procedure should be passive. A doctor by profession, he emphasized the difference between passive euthanasia – that is, disconnecting the patient from life support – and “assisted suicide”, which involves greater participation on the part of the doctor.

Medical professionals with moral objections to euthanasia will not be required to participate in the procedure.

The legislation will now pass through a debate in a plenary session of the Senate.

Today, the Spanish judge responsible for investigating the death of Argentine citizen Juan Pablo Torroija has declared the death a suicide.

Torroija died in a hospital in Girona, Spain on 14th July. He had been brought to the hospital three days earlier by the police, who stated that he had attempted to commit suicide after being detained under charges of theft.

The authorities did not officially inform either Torroija’s family or the Argentine consulate of the man’s death. By law, the Argentine consulate must be notified of the death of Argentine nationals in Spain. The police also maintain that Torroija elected not to use the one phone call that all prisoners are allowed.

Torroija’s family found out about his death on 24th July, ten days later.

Early this week, authorities maintained that the suicide attempt led to Torroija’s death, and the hospital confirmed that the death was caused by neurological legions resulting from a lack of oxygen to the brain, consistent with this official story.

The victims’ friends and family, however, called for an investigation into the death, and claimed that Torroija died as a result of police brutality. While the official autopsy denied the presence of bruises and blows that would evidence this story, the family has called for a verification of the autopsy.

Today, the Judge Gemma Garces Ses of Girona stated that Torroija attempted to commit suicide and “the police acted correctly” in assisting him when they found him hanging in his cell.

Declaring the case closed, the judge said that she had seen images from security tapes in the prison that revealed that Torroija had “hooked himself on to the bars and hung himself” using his own shirt.

The announcement of Judge Garces Ses’ decision comes on the heels of an announcement yesterday by the same judge, where instead of delivering a verdict – as had been expected – she stated that she would accept the suit brought by Torroija’s relatives and keep the case open. The verdict was then expected to be delayed several days for a review of relevant evidence.

The victim’s father, Omar Torroija, today told C5N that the family has not yet received an official notice of the closure of the case. He also stated, “if my son hung himself, they have to show me; unless they show me, if they continue doing what they are doing at this moment, they are showing that I am right, because what they are seeking is to cover up and we are not going to let them do that.”

Omar Torroija further stated that once the family had received the official notice, they intended to appeal the decision and request to see the evidence mentioned by the judge.

“We are not going to remain quiet and if they would like to play in this dirty way, the way that they detained my son, we are never going to stop”.

The victim’s father also stated that the time between today and yesterday did not seem sufficient to him to have gone through all of the evidence, referring particularly to the need to verify the autopsy.

Torroija, 41, had lived in Spain since 2005 and was married to a Spanish woman, with whom he had a 7-year-old daughter. The Argentine was politically active, and had been involved in community organizing and protests, including ‘squatter’ protests.

For the return of Beyond Borges, Alejandra Pizarnik joins Alfonsina Storni and Silvina Ocampo as the third female to appear in the series and one of the most important and complex poets in Argentine writing.

In her 17 years of writing Pizarnik made a huge impact on Spanish language poetry, taking it down to its darkest depths and abandoning it there, leaving one of the most fascinating legacies in Argentine literature.

A Tormented Talent

Artist's portrait of Alejandra Pizarnik

Born in 1936, Pizarnik was a second generation immigrant of Jewish descent. She was raised in Avellaneda amidst a Jewish community and received education in both Spanish and Yiddish. In 1954 she began studying philosophy and letters at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) but later dropped out because she said it couldn’t give her what she sought.

Besides literature, she also studied painting under the surrealist painter Juan Batlle Planas but found herself either willingly or involuntarily tied to poetry.

“I would have preferred to sing the blues in some smoke-filled hangout than spend the nights of my life scrabbling through language like a madwoman” she once said. In a letter addressed to her good friend Rúben Vela, she described her poems as “brawling” inside herself and, though her relationship with her writing was a difficult one, she produced some of the most remarkable poetry of the 20th century.

A regular user of amphetamines and hallucinogenics (she reportedly once spent seven days holed up on hallucinogenics listening to Janis Joplin records) Pizarnik suffered throughout her life from periods of psychological instability and depression. These emotional states probably only served to make her writing more original and more interesting but undoubtedly caused her difficulties throughout her life.

Having never felt at home in Argentina, she travelled to Paris in 1960 where she lived for four years, endearing herself to the city’s creative circles and Argentine writers Arnaldo Calveyra and Julio Cortázar. Recognised as a great literary talent by many of those around her, she was also counted the influential Argentine poets Rúben Vela and Raúl Gustavo Aguirre, as well as Silvina Ocampo, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Olga Orozco and Mexico’s Octavio Paz among her friends.

Besides receiving Buenos Aires’ First Municipal Poetry Prize, she was able to return to Paris a second time as part of a Guggenheim Fellowship awarded in 1968. Shortly afterwards Pizarnik was institutionalised following a suicide attempt in 1970, and eventually ended her life aged 36 by taking a sedative overdose.

Body of Work

Pizarnik published seven books of poetry and one book of prose during the years 1955 to 1972.

Her first book of poems, ‘La tierra más ajena’, was published when she was just 19 and still a student of philosophy and literature. She followed it with ‘La última inocencia‘ in 1956 and ‘Las aventuras perdidas’ in 1958, both written before her trip to Paris in 1960.

Portrait of Alejandra Pizarnik

Her 1962 collection ‘Árbol de Diana’, was written whilst she lived in Paris and is considered by many to be her best. Her most important work, however, would not arrive until 1968 when she was already grappling with her own mental illness.

‘Extracción de la piedra de locura’ and the long prose poem of the same name, are regarded as a pinnacle of the author’s expressive abilities. Both the poem and its containing collection demonstrate a darkness not seen before in Argentine writing and rarely found afterwards.

As the title suggests, the book contains the most elaborate of Pizarnik’s meditations on the subject of madness – a theme carried across her entire body of work along with themes of entrapment and her almost hypnotic attraction to death.

Her books, in fact, come wrought with intertextual borrowing and overlapping symbolism; often mentioning forbidden gardens, cracks and voices in walls and night time (symbolic of both madness and death).

Obsessed with the idea of madness, fear of madness and the containment of madness, Pizarnik’s specialty was to drag the reader down into a chaotic, nightmarish world where they would be subjected to the same doubts, despairs, schizophrenic voices, claustrophobia, and fears as her.

Linguistically, her use of repetition, contradiction and words with ambiguous or changeable meanings lent her poems obvious overtones of paranoia. Her poems often transitioned radically between the first person, and a second third-person voice, which may have been forcibly created, or may, more likely, have emerged as second nature given her emotional and mental state.

If the character of Juan Pablo Castel in Ernesto Sabato’s existentialist novel ‘El Túnel’ had been an impressive product of the author’s imagination, then the ‘I’ in Pizarnik’s poetry was too close for comfort. One critic described the relationship between the two as a “death grip” – something which Pizarnik sought to distinguish herself from towards the end of her writing career.

Pizarnik’s Personal Legacy

From 1968 onwards Pizarnik set out to untether herself from “poetic language” and write with different “voices”. Around this time she turned to the writing of Cortázar in an effort to free herself from what she described as “creative prisons”.

Interestingly, though the “I” in her poems was something Pizarnik deliberated a great deal over, many poets have returned to use the first person singular without any of the same concerns.

The vocabulary and sometimes playful structuring of Pizarnik’s poetry demonstrate her mistrust for language. Her writing often freely condemned its failures and inadequacies whilst also revealing feelings of being powerlessness towards it. Torn between her dissatisfaction with language and her dependence on it as a poet, she would occasionally write poems omitting all punctuation marks bar parenthesis, and included lines of only one word causing intentional ambiguity.

A Spanish language edition of 'La Condesa Sangrienta' (April 2012)

An inability to write prose fiction was one of Pizarnik’s biggest grievances with herself as a writer, and she considered her only prose book, ‘La condesa sangrieta’, to be one of her greatest achievements.

The book, published in 1971, is in fact more of an elegant essay about a 16th century Hungarian countess who allegedly tortured and killed as many as 600 girls before finally ending her life walled up alone. Pizarnik ends the book with the resonating line “the absolute freedom of a human being is terrible” – a concept which she personally grappled with often.

Her last work, ‘El infierno musical’ was also written in 1971, one year before her death. It included the poem ‘El deseo de la palabra’, often considered to be her poetic suicide note.

Although it would perhaps be wrong to read the poem in this light, it does appear there was a literary suicide some time before Pizarnik’s real suicide took place. The poet and her poetry are at times so intertwined and bound up in each other that it almost seems her destiny was written out for her, by her.

Estranged, helpless and anguished, Pizarnik’s haunting words have garnered a 40-year following, earning her a reputation as perhaps Argentina’s most important female poet.

A man was charged today in Bogotá with the murder of two priests, who had paid him $15 million Colombian pesos in a ‘suicide pact’.

It was originally thought that the priests were murdered in an attempted robbery.

A court ruled that Rafael Reátiga, 36, and Richard Píffano, 37, paid Isidro ‘Gallero’ Castoblanco US$ 8,500 to kill them on 26^th January 2010.

“Two Catholic priests hired a band of assassins for the murder when they learned that at least one of them had AIDS,” said the Attorney General.

Days before his death, Reátiga asked his parishioners to pray for him and spoke of death. From the autopsy, it was discovered he had AIDS.

Reátiga and Píffano hired four men from a gang, of which only two are detained. Castoblanco accepted the charge of murder, meaning he is liable to serve between 16-60 years in prison. Gildardo Peñante, the other alleged assassin remanded in custody, denies his charges. Both men have been previously linked to drug trafficking, money counterfeiting, and theft.

The two priests had previously tried to commit suicide by jumping off a canyon, but were unable to commit suicide as security fences were in place. After, they approached a local gang arranging exactly how and when they would be assassinated, paying a high sum.

It was initially believed that the priests were killed in a failed attempt to steal their car.

There have been an increasing number of priests being murdered in Colombia. In 2011 alone, six priests were murdered, and another priest’s body was found in the jungle, supposedly murdered in 2006, by members of the FARC.

An indigenous community that reside in the remote northern Mexican mountains are suffering from food shortages after very cold temperatures and drought.

A local official has claimed that 50 of the indigenous, known as the Tarahumara people, have committed suicide as they are no longer capable of feeding their families. However, other sources claim that this information is false.

The Red Cross are considering it a food emergency and are delivering tonnes of food and blankets to the impoverished community. The Mexican government claim to have sent millions of dollars in aid too.

The community are well known for their ability to run long distances. They run 60 miles regularly through mountains wearing just sandals.

The sub-secretary of Argentine commerce, Iván Heyn, was found dead in his hotel suite in Montevideo this morning.

The 34 year-old was found hanged in his room in the Radisson hotel, in the centre of the Uruguayan capital.

Heyn travelled this week along president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to Uruguay for a Mercosur summit.

His body was found this morning, after people noticed his absence in the Mercosur building.

President Fernández had a nervous breakdown after hearing the news and is being taken care of by her personal physician in the building were the meetings are being held, according to sources who organized the summit.

Heyn was an economist, president of the Puerto Madero Corporation and took office as a sub-secretary of exterior commerce less than two weeks ago.

Rarely left out of anthologies of Argentine writing or directories of modern female poets of South America, the next author in our Beyond Borges series is a writer who also finds herself among the stranger-sounding titles ‘Argentine people of Swiss descent’ and ‘Suicides of Argentina’.

A widely-known poet, lesser-known playwrite and unfaltering feminist, Alfonsina Storni was one of few women to move in the male dominated arenas of literature and theatre, and as such, developed a unique and valuable voice that holds particular relevance in Latin American women’s poetry.

Talk to me about Alfonsina Storni

Perhaps better known among the current generation for the way she chose to end her life than for her literature; her supposedly serene suicide, by walking out to sea at Mar del Plata, has rendered her an almost mythical figure.

The author of poetry that is at once painful, disturbing, and rewarding, her razor-sharp writing has been described as “poetry of fatal beauty that leads to an unavoidable death”. But to appreciate the significance of her work, she must be looked at in the context of early 20th century Argentina.

Portrait of Alfonsina Storni

The daughter of an amateur actress and a beer industrialist, she was born in Sala Capriasca, Switzerland, in 1892, and moved to Argentina when she was only four years old. After living for some time in San Juan, her family settled in Santa Fe, where her life unravelled a course of constant obstacles that would inevitably become themes in her literature.

Having toured for little under a year with an amateur dramatics company, she returned to Rosario to graduate as a teacher in 1910. Sustaining herself with teaching and newspaper journalism, she moved to Buenos Aires in 1913 where the social and economical difficulties faced by Argentina’s growing middle classes were inspiring an emerging body of women’s rights activists.

Herself an unmarried mother, Storni turned to poetry to boldly confront the repression and denial she recognised, employing paradoxical verse that was rich in eroticism and passion while harbouring strongly feminist notes.

A Voice of Modern Feminism

Winner of the first Municipal Poetry Prize and the second National Literature Prize for her book ‘Languidez’, Storni wrote in several phases: the first from 1916-1920, a second from 1925-1926 and a third from 1934 until her death in 1938.

Belonging neither to modernism or the avant-garde, her writing did not align itself with either movement until they’d each begun to fade. Criticised for not slotting in to a style typical of the time, she comes bundled under the ill-defined label of postmodernism, whereas in truth she simply stood alone.

Writing on humanist thoughts and her responses to nature, as well as on the alienation of urban life and the pervasive presence of death, her poems return again and again to themes of family, sorrow and women’s issues, occasionally overshadowed by the spectre of violence.

Her first book of poetry, ‘La inquietud del rosal’, was published three years after her move to Buenos Aires and introduced the themes of love and feminism that although in their infancy, would come to dominate much of her work.

Developed along openly erotic lines, two further books were each divided in to two parts. At first amorous and passionate, then bitter and tempestuous, they showcased well Storni’s increasing preoccupation with the collective concerns of women. One of her most talked about poems, ‘Tú me quieres blanca’, famously denounced double standards and served as a literary indictment against male macho character.

By 1919 she seemed an unstoppable voice – authoring six short stories, two short novels, and a series of essays in a year of remarkable productivity. But with the publication of ‘Languidez’ the following year, she effectively closed the door on one creative period and opened a new one.

The arrival of ‘Ocre’, five years later, essentially heralded in a new phase without making much of a departure from the form and content of her earlier work. Described as a transitional text, it shifted in tone and ushered in the irony that would characterise her work from then on.

Whilst her early poetry might have been the most striking, it was marred with immaturity and the signs of a beginner. The ardent feminism and eroticism of her work at one time opened her up to accusations of publically ‘undressing’ herself, but as time passed she learned to temper her voice, which for critics, meant her writing matured.

After a book of love poems that slipped away unspoken of, and an almost eight-year absence from poetry, Storni returned with two books that together mark the height of her poetic maturity.

‘Mundo de siete pozos’, written in 1934 at a time when cancer had taken hold of her, and ‘Mascarill y trebol’, written in the year of her suicide, represented the most definite diversion from where she’d begun. In 52 unrhymed and sometimes obscure sonnets, Storni finally proved herself a ‘poetess’ as good as any poet of her time.

A Lone Woman in Theatre

Far from stepping down; during her apparent eight-year absence, Storni actually stepped up to the literary stage.

More human and restless in her writing than her contemporaries, what distinguished her from other female and even feminist authors in Chile and Uruguay was her foray in to theatre.

In four plays for adults and several more for children, her writing demonstrated the obvious yearning she felt for an alternative outlet of expression, and verged on dramatic poetry in terms of intensity and rhythm.

The Cervantes Theatre, where 'El amo del mundo' opened briefly in 1927 (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

Following much the same path as her poetry, her plays progressed from the confessional autobiographical to the more experimental, but despite combining political clarity with social subtlety, most never saw a stage.

Inspired by her encounters with Spain’s post-war artistic movements, ‘Dos farsas pirotécnicas’, brought together the genres of tragedy and farce in two plays that were especially acute in revealing the conflict between women’s public and private lives. Focusing squarely on the same themes of class and gender tensions as modern drama elsewhere, they contrasted sharply with the traditional repertoire of Argentine theatre at that time.

Straddling the breakthrough aesthetics of the avant-garde and the early activism for women’s rights, Storni stood as one of the most radical playwrights of the period, and had the absence of women playwrites and an unfavourable climate not sided against her, she would surely have developed in to one of the most important.

Honoured during her lifetime as Argentina’s foremost female poet and one of the three most prominent in South America, she is credited with authoring work that was not only of great value and originality, but which established the foundations of feminist discourse in Latin American literature.

Authorities in Chile will launch the first investigation into death of ex-president Salvador Allende’s death in 1973.

726 complaints of human rights abuses alleged to have taken place during General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship have been brought under investigation in Santiago.

Allende’s death was officially ruled as suicide following the discovery of his body in the presidential palace after it came under attack in the 1973 coup d’etat that put Pinochet in power. An official autopsy saying that he killed himself with a gun given to him by Fidel Castro was confirmed by his doctor at the time.

Questions are now being raised over whether he was in fact killed by members of the military on 11^th September 1973 while the palace came under fire from air force bombers and soldiers. The coup, backed by the United States, marked the beginning of Pinochet’s 17 year rule – which saw over 3,000 political opponents imprisoned or disappeared.

He died in 2006 while under investigation for corruption, murder and torture.

Mario Carroza, the judge assigned to rule in the investigation said that it was a “tremendous responsibility”. Prosecutor Beatriz Pedrals, the prosecution who brought the cases to court said: “What has not been investigated, the courts will investigate. This will finally establish what happened.”

Allende, who came to power in the 1970s was Chile’s first democratically-elected Socialist president.