I’m Holding Out for a Subaru Sandinista…

My colleagues have often discussed the dangers of globalization in these pages. Nevertheless, I fear they have overlooked one of the most pernicious: embarrassing car names. There are 2,261 different written languages in the world, essentially guaranteeing that at least some car names will mean something untoward in one of them. Witness the Ford Pinto, Portuguese slang for “penis.” The Opel Ascona, which refers to female genitalia in Northern Spain and parts of Portugal. The Buick LaCrosse, which refers to masturbation in Quebec. The Mitsibushi Pajero, which again refers to masturbation, this time in Spanish-speaking countries. The Mazda LaPuta, Spanish slang for “whore.” The Toyota Fiera, an ugly old woman in Puerto Rico. And, of course, the Honda Fitta, since renamed simply the Fit, which is Swedish slang for the dreaded C-word.

It’s not a sexual reference, but the embarrassing car name club has a new member: the Volkswagen Touareg, an SUV whose name comes from the French nickname for the Tuareg people of Northern Africa. From the New York Times:

Tuareg rebels attacked an army camp in northeastern Mali and 17 rebels and 15 soldiers were killed in one of the bloodiest clashes to date in a revolt by the desert insurgents, the government said on Thursday.

Military officers said the scale of the rebel attack late Tuesday and early Wednesday against the garrison at Abebara, 150 km (90 miles) from Kidal, was a worrying escalation of the Tuareg revolt that has hit Mali’s northeast Saharan region.

“They were two, three times more numerous than on previous occasions. We think it’s a coalition of all the rebel bands,” said one officer, who asked not to be named.

He added it was also believed the attackers included nomadic fighters from neighboring Niger, where a Tuareg-led revolt over the last year has killed more than 70 government soldiers, mainly in attacks in Niger’s northern uranium mining zone.

[snip]

Peace agreements after the 1990s rebellions aimed to grant Tuareg communities a greater degree of autonomy while at the same time integrating former fighters into the national army and promoting Tuareg politicians.

But since the start of last year, Tuaregs in Niger and Mali have taken up arms again, motivated by shared resentment against unsolved grievances and what they see as unwarranted interference in their traditional territories by government armies and foreign companies.

Keenan said many of the raids by the Malian rebels were in direct response to operations in the northeast Saharan zone by a Malian government army backed and trained by the United States as part of Washington’s war on terror.

“The last thing the Niger and Mali governments can admit is that there is a genuine political revolt going on,” said Keenan, who is about to publish a new book called “The Dark Sahara: America’s war on terror in Africa.”

Keenan said that rather than conceding political legitimacy to the Tuareg unrest, the Niger and Mali authorities preferred to portray it as falling under a wider campaign to fight terrorism and Islamic extremism in the Sahara, for which their militaries received U.S. training.

The Tuareg are the furthest thing from terrorists. Still, something tells me that “bloody insurgency” is the last image Volkswagen wants people to associate with their SUV…