Life in Central America

The tortilla makers

In any self-respecting local market you will see a row of women, all making tortillas with great vigor, and talking all the while. This always makes me feel good, because this is the local economy at work. In the US, one tortilla machine would make many more standard tortillas, which would be more efficient, and employ far fewer people, and the tortillas would not be as good. This is progress.

If I had some drawing software, I could show you my concept of how an economy works, and it would be entitled Money circulates. In a local economy, it would be full of circles of many sizes, but all the action would involve local people. This is not the kind of self-sufficient local economy that the global financial institutions want.

They don´t want any local economies at all. They want everybody in the world to buy from them and sell to them. They call this ¨free trade¨, which is a misnomer if ever there was one. It just means they want to control all the trade in the world, and make most of the money.

I am not being paranoid here. I am reading a book by a former chief economist for the World Bank, called The Discontents of Globalization. It is sobering reading. At one point, for example, the US wanted to buy Russia´s enriched uranium, to take of the world market, and take it out of the hands of terrorists. The American uranium companies tried to block the purchase, because it would ruin their market!

Fish for breakfast, or turtle if you want it

This is Bluefields, Nicaragua, in the Caribbean coast. The standard breakfast, which I had this morning in the Mercado, is fried fish. The standard lunch is shrimp.

If you want turtle meat, it is widely available. I wandered into a turtle market by accident on Corn Island, and saw 13 large sea turtles, lying on their backs, ready to be slaughtered for their meat and eggs. I was shocked; every other nation in the world is working desperately to save the sea turtles, but in Nicaragua they eat them! I went to the police department to complain. The police officer, who spoke surprisingly good English, listened to my compliant, then said ¨So what is your problem?¨

Another man explained this was the turtle season, and soon they would be bringing on so many turtles that much of their meat would spoil. Many Nicaraguans oppose this, but they can do nothing to stop it. Obvously, the government doesn´t care.

Managua is a strange place

Ordinarily, I try to avoid Managua, and base myself in Grenada when I am in Nicaragua. But since I have to catch a flight out of Managua to Corn Island, I decided I should get more acquainted with this place. It's been a strange experience.

Everyplace in Central America is a mess, but Managua is a unique kind of mess. The contrast between rich and poor is striking. There are luxury shopping malls in a country where 30% of the people live in dire poverty.

It took our bus two hours to cover the last 50 miles into here, the roads were so bad. And this is the richest part of the country. When we got to the bus station, there were many people wanting us to go to their place of housing. I ended up with a nice family just two blocks from the bus station for $10 a night.

This morning, I went to a small cafe they recommended, and then went for a little walk. It's hard for me to believe people could live in such poor conditions, but for them, it is nothing strange. I saw a guy running a small shoe repair service on a street corner and have him resole my Birkenstock shoes, which were three years old and needed resoling badly. He did a great job, which cost me $7. I'm sure this was an outrageous price, but in the States it would have cost me $40 and taken a week.

It took him about an hour, and he stopped often to work on shoes for his local customers, while he was working on mine. This is capitalism on a very small scale. Maybe $30 of equipment, and old bench, and an umbrella to shade from the sun. No rent, because he uses public space. He does most of his small jobs for free, so this makes everybody happy. Every once in a while a gringo comes along and they can make some real money. Everybody cheats the gringos, but this is normal.

Now I have to go the airport and get on my flight. I could not book this in Costa Rica, you have to go to the airport here and get on the next plane going out, which might be 8 hours away. They have a nominal schedule, but this is subject to change without notice.

Off to Corn Island

I got these photos from the Nica tourist site, but I expect it will look pretty much like this. Tropical islands all over the world look like this, until they get over-developed. I hear Big Corn Island is suffering from these problems, but Little Corn Island should be more natural; it doesn't have any roads or electricity. But it does have some of the best snorkling in the world.

Later, I will check out some of the undeveloped areas on the coast. In a couple of weeks, I will give you a report.

American chemical companies poisoned banana workers

The anti-nematode Nemagon was developed in the US and touted as one of the wonder drugs of the Green Revolution. Unfortunately, it caused severe medical problems for agricultural workers and the EPA banned it in the Continental US in 1979, and then Hawaii in 1985. But it was still marketed outside the US, and used in Central America, the Caribbean, and in the Philippines until the beginning of the 1990s.

In Nicaragua, lawyers have filed large class actions against Shell Oil, Dow Chemical, and Dole on behalf of 20,000 Nicaraguan banana workers. The chemical companies retaliated by suing the workers in a federal court in California, claiming the workers violated the US Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Law. Last Wednesday, Judge Nora Manella threw out the charges.

Noriega was our friend

Noriega was not only our friend; he was one of our special friends, a key ally in our War on Communism (remember that?) and our War on Drugs. He is now as a special guest in the Miami Federal Correctional Institution, the only officially recognized prisoner of war currently held by the USA under the rules of the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of war, and the only military prisoner ever to serve simultaneously a prison sentence for violations of American civilian law—for crimes committed when he was the ruler of another country. How did this happen?

To find the answer to this question you will have to read Shooting the Moon, by David Harris, as I am doing now. This is not an easy book, so let me give you a quick summary: Noriega was a victim of the Iran/Contra scandal. I know this doesn’t make much sense, but nothing about this story makes much sense—but sometimes reality is complicated, especially at higher levels of our own government, where there are all kinds of nutty characters running around. This book is proof that freedom of the press still exists in the US, because it doesn’t say anything flattering about our rulers. It makes them look like a bunch of lunatics.

Of course you already knew this, but you don’t know half of it. Take the relationship between General Noriega and William J. Casey, the director of the CIA and Reagan’s campaign manager in the 1980 election. These were two thugs if ever there were any. Casey was an anti-communist nut and he went berserk when the Sandinistas took over Nicaragua. Suddenly, Nicaragua was the most important place on the planet. Panama also became important, and of course, the brutal dictator of Panama, General Noriega, who had been a nobody before.

But he was not a nobody to the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration). He was a valuable player in the War on Drugs, including several undercover operations. The Washington headquarters of the DEA described the General as “the best goddam friend the DEA has in all of Latin America.” Of course they overlooked the General’s own drug dealing, because everybody was doing this, including the CIA itself.

The crazy conflict here between drug enforcement and drug profits in high places has not gone away. Drug enforcement keeps up the prices and supports one of the largest industries on the globe—which includes a large penal system. But let me get back to General Noriega’s story, and the CIA’s support of the Contras in Nicaragua (or Nickawoggwha, as Bill Casey pronounced it.)

The contras were Bill Casey’s pet project, and the General helped him all the way. He allowed Panama to be used as a staging base for their supply lines, and through his close connections with the Israelis, acted as a middleman in providing weapons. He even made a personal contribution of several hundred thousand dollars to the Contra cause. This seemed like a smart strategy at the time, but the General had no understanding of American politics.

In 1984, the Democrat majority in Congress passed legislation prohibiting American support of any sort for the Contras. That left Bill Casey with two options: he could either cease his campaign or he could wage his own private war with the Sandanistas outside the framework of constitutional government. Casey decided the CIA was more powerful than the rest of the government, which made sense to the General, because this was the way it worked in Panama. Both Mr. Casey and the General were wrong.

The history of their demise is complicated, and it involved Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, USMC. He became a fixer for the whole operation. One of his operations was this:

A Honduran colonel had helped secure base camps and staging areas in Honduran territory next to Nicaragua. But the FBI apprehended the colonel when he attempted to smuggle cocaine into Florida, the proceeds of which were intended to finance the assassination of the elected president of Honduras, and the installation of a general in his place who was sympathetic to Casey’s underground enterprise. Ollie went to bat for this creep. In total, some eight high-ranking officers from the Army, the Defense Department, and the State Department (including Elliott Abrams) urged the court to be lenient. He would normally have gotten 25-30 years. He got two concurrent five years terms instead, in a minimum-security prison, and he would be allowed to stay in the US when he was finished. He did not sing on his friends.

Only a few months later, the whole Iran-Contra scandal broke. All of the Generals supporters were out of power, and he was fair bait for some gung-ho drug prosecutors who felt they were on a “Mission for God” and Noriega was the devil. In 1986, twenty thousand American solders invaded Panama and seized Noriega.

Many years later this process would be repeated, only the devil in this case would be Hussein.

The future of the underclasses in America

When I started to write this posting I was thinking of the underclasses in the US, but as soon as I touched the keyboard I realized this was a much larger problem. There are ghettos all over the world, and they are growing all the time.

Costa Rica didn’t have any until recently. It has plenty of poor people, but most of them lived in rural areas. The Central Valley, where everybody wants to live, is turning into a minature version of LA. But even worse, are the shantytowns which have sprung recently on the outskirts. I was shocked when I first saw them.

The cardboard shacks with no water or sanitation were bad enough, but the realization that Costa Rica let these developments spring up was even more shocking. They could of easily made it impossible for them to happen. Most of the inhabitants are Nicaraguan imigrants, many of them illegal, and the crime rate is shocking. But the Ticos don’t do the obvious thing and get rid of these developments, which take jobs away from the poor Ticos and increase the demands for free medical services.

Why is this? The answer is simple, as it always is: greed. Being slumlords is profitable, and cheap labor is profitable. And Ticos, like everybody else, don’t care about anything but their immediate gain. This is the sad fact of our times. And this situation is going to get worse. We are on a downhill slide to nowhere.

The economists keep saying development will solve all our problems, but this hasn’t worked, and it will keep on not working. I am now reading The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin. His kind of thinking provokes the wrath of conventional economists, but it makes sense to ordinary people, especially those on the economic fringes—and these people do exist.

He has a great chapter on Technology and the African-American Experience. This also applies to other recent minorities, especially the Hispanics. It is about how blacks went from being slaves to being nothing at all. Between 1940 and 1970 more than five million blacks moved from the South to the North, one of the largest and most rapid mass internal movement in history.

For a while the North was able to absorb many of them, but this did not last long. Their unskilled jobs were eliminated by automation and suburbanization. They were trapped in ghettos as bad as those anywhere, and there was no way out.

I have some experience working with these people. When I was unemployed in LA, I attended training programs with some young, inner-city blacks. And later I tried to teach Vietnam immigrants English. And the sad truth is this: for the most part they are untrainable. You can’t teach them anything. I know I sound like a bigot here, but I am only saying that cultural changes are difficult to reverse. I have utmost respect for those who try, and I wish them well, because they are going to need it.

But the new information economy has made it worse. This economy needs trained workers, highly trained workers with a high level of intelligence. The average high school graduate, with his rudimentary education and disinterest in the work ethic, hasn’t got a chance. Parents who want their children to suceed make sure they attend upscale school districts, or private schools. This is especially true in developing countries, which have less and less money available for public education.

The upper classes have trouble finding jobs, but the under classes are much worse off. Previously, they were exploited for their labor. Now they are not needed at all.

The effects of the industrial revolution in England

The conditions of the English working classes after the Industrial Revolution were appalling, and their situation did not improve for a long time. Indeed, when I toured Europe in the sixties, as a young man just out of college, I was shocked by the English people I saw on the ferry across the English Channel. They were the unhealthiest people I had ever seen.

But the conditions at the beginning of the 19th Century were almost beyond belief. Before the revolution, the English countryside was populated by self-reliant farmers who also had cottage industries, quite often weaving businesses. There were a still large oak forests were they could hunt, fish and graze their livestock. Wildlife was abundant.

But the enclosure movement changed that forever. From 1770 to 1830, 3,280 bills were passed by Parliament by which 6 million acres of open field, meadows, wetlands, and forests were put into private hands and improved, which made their owners wealthy. But evicted farmers could no longer make a living.

They moved to the industrial cities and lived in slums where “the loss of life from filth and bad ventilation are greater than the loss of life from death or wounds in which the country has been engaged in modern times.” People (including small children) worked 14 to 16 hours a day, in horrible, dangerous conditions for wages that were not enough to buy food. Life expectancy for all of England was 40, for the laborers it was no more than 18. Fifty-seven percent died before the age of five.

The defining achievement of the Industrial Revolution was the creation of a society in which people were reduced to a choice between wage labor and starvation.

Taken from Rebels Against the Future, a history of the Luddites, by Kirkpatrick Sale.

Jockeys can now have advertising on their britches

A group of jockeys filed and won a federal lawsuit allowing them to have corporate advertising on their racing pants. They told the court this was a First Amendment issue, their right to free speech. Of course this freedom could earn them $30,000 each.

There are some limitations:

1. They cannot advertise gambling (at a racetrack?)
   
2. A jockey’s advertising cannot conflict with the track’s own sponsors (what about free speech?)
   
3. The advertising cannot be inappropriate (perhaps a label saying, “Ride me.”)
   

Thanks to the Hightower Lowdown for this little jewel.

Affluence has destroyed the performing arts

It is much more costly today to go to the theatre than buy a bible, although in Shakespeare’s time the opposite was true. Publishing has benefited from technological progress; the theatre has not. When Shakespeare’s works were first performed, there were on average 50 major plays produced each season and 25 “afterpieces” between the seasons. The costumes, the number of actors, and the set designs were far more dazzling than those of today.

How is this possible? Don’t technological progress and productivity allow everything to be cheaper than in Shakespeare’s day? Isn’t it easier now to light stages, sew costumes, and transport actors? Certainly, but these advances lead to the same result: things cost less and less, but humans became expensive.

In 1771, the Covent Garden Theatre had to earn £157 per production. In 1963, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre had to advance £2,139 per production, representing an increase nearly twice the average inflation rate. In 1960, 80 percent of the operating costs of the theatre came from receipts and 20 percent from subsidies. Today, the proportions are reversed. Still this has not hindered things from running their natural course.

Why is a world in which machines are subjugated to humans so unfriendly to activities in which humans are the live resource? The answer is simple: Technology appears to eliminate humans, and indeed it does limit their usefulness. But this economic principle causes an irresistible increase in the price of humans in comparison with objects. We are given to think that the economy will allow the completion of a truly human scheme in which activities such as flute playing and storytelling will regain their rightful places. This has not happened, and this is where the disappointment comes in.

The foregoing was taken from the chapter Sad Tales of the Death of Kings, from Our Modern Times, by Daniel Cohen.

I want to add a few comments of my own. Technology, in the form of the movies, TV, videos and audio recordings has made live artists obsolete. I used to be addicted to classical music, and I had the latest music system and stacks of records. Even when I lived in Manhattan, I would rather listen to my recordings than get dressed up and go to Lincoln Center. By contrast, I much preferred the live theatre to the movies. But the cost of theatre tickets were much less then. Everything was much cheaper; you could have a wonderful time for nothing. I could not afford to live in Manhattan now.

The situation in poor countries is much worse. People are cheap, but things (like food) are expensive. It was not always this way. India before colonization, for example, had an abundance of arts of all kinds; it was one of the world’s great cultural centers. There are no world cultures anymore. Everybody looks at the same TV screen.