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.