Archive - April 16, 2012

More stories from the streets of Cartagena. HCNs are saying that the SS agents refused to pay the young ladies (?) for the ‘services’ they performed when they found that they were transvestites! I doubt that is true. It appears that one lone SS agent ‘overslept’ and when his ‘guest’ wasn’t out of his room at 7 a.m. in accordance to rules of the hotel, the police were called (the agent didn’t answer his door) and then the police, as required, reported the incident to the Embassy and all ‘hell broke loose!.” Much more serious (for the Peace Corps) is the belief within the PCV Community of Colombia that the Ambassador may have played a role in keeping the President away from the Volunteers. The Embassy has never been happy about the Peace Corps being back in Colombia. They, for example, restrict Volunteer travel, keep their thumb down on anything that PCVs . . .

The President did not meet with the new PCVs while in Colombia this weekend. His trip to Latin America was, as we know, overshadowed by the Secret Service who managed to make the President and the US look bad. The story in Cartagena, I hear from PCVs in-country, is that “Americans came to Cartagena to bed our women.” What the Secret Service agents did not know, I’m also told, is that Cartagena is the capitol of the Transvestite community in Colombia. The in-country joke is that the agents may have had one or more transvestites in their rooms. No wonder they didn’t want to pay the ‘guests’ fees! According to news reports, the agents were “relieved of duty Thursday — prior to the president’s arrival in Colombia.” Ronald Kessler, a former Washington Post reporter who has written a book about the Secret Service, called the incident “clearly the biggest scandal in Secret Service history.” . . .