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.

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.

Pacheco sounds like a patriot

Abel Pacheco is the President of Costa Rica. I have not been too impressed with him up to now, but an article in the latest Tico Times (July 16) has changed my mind. For one thing, he has pushed CAFTA, the Central Americal Free Trade Agreement, which will make Central America nothing more than a small part of the American economy. At this point, I assumed he was just a pawn for the Tico power structure.

These talks were supposed to have been made in complete secrecy, by anonymous negotiators. But, as everyone knew, the business community was calling the shots. The article in the Tico Times gives us the details.

The union of Private-Sector Chambers and Associations (UCCAEP), an umbrella group that represented more than 40 business chambers, said it had played an active role in every part of the CAFTA process, working alongside the Foreign Trade Ministsry (COMEX) to prepare the country’s official negotiating stance, and being present during every negotiating round.

No doubt, the same thing was happening in the US. The CAFTA agreement, which was deliberately designed to be incomprehensible to non-specialists, is 2,400 pages long. Different groups in the affected countries are pretending to study this document. The President of Guatemala even promised to have it translated into the indigenous languages of the country so they could study it too.

But this is just an empty ritual, because nobody can change the agreement, it has to be accepted entirely or rejected entirely. The business interests (as usual) are in control.

But Pacheco is bucking this trend. He has been detirmed, almost single-handedly, to put Costa Rica on a firm financial foundation, to eliminate its constant borrowing. Everyone else agrees, of course, but in reality they have fought his tax reform bitterly. Now Pacheco says he won’t send CAFTA to congress until his tax reform is passed. He is holding CAFTA hostage.

During his weekly cabinet meeting, Pacheco said he is “not interested” in CAFTA and the wealth it would create if that wealth is not distributed fairly among all Costa Ricans. He said, “The people who earn the most money must pay taxes. That way we’ll have schools, roads and hospitals. We won’t allow a small group to take the meat, discard the bone, and leave it for the rest.”
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I friend of mine down here in Costa Rica has reminded my that Pacheco got elected because he promised to crack down on corruption, but this has not happened. He seems to be a corrupt as anyone else.

Ticos have no feel for computers

Everybody in my Tico family uses Augusto’s computer to play solitaire, many hours each day. As far as they are concerned, this is the ultimate use of the personal computer. They get nervous if I start using it for something else—some serious writing, for example. People in their culture don’t do this.

They see a personal computer as some kind of computer game, nothing else. This gives them a huge cultural disadvantage. They have a similar attitude towards all technology: they are just new toys. In this sense they are like the ghetto Blacks or the ghetto Hispanics in the States. They cannot see anything below the surface. They live in a world of appearances, where everything happens on a kind of TV screen.

I came from a culture where technology is something you work with—a world where people build things in their garages or basements, or in the corner of the lab at work. Technology is something they build themselves—and continually improve on. It is something they control, not something that controls them.

Open veins of Latin America

This book was written by Eduardo Galeano, an Uruguayan journalist, writer, and storyteller. In the introduction, Isabel Allende says of him:

Galeano denounces exploitation with uncompromising ferocity, yet this book is almost poetic in its description of solidarity and human capacity for survival in the midst of the worst kind of despoliation.

The quote at the front of the book is:

“We have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity” —From the Revolutionary Proclamation, La Paz, 1809

I have taken some quotes at random:

I am not particularly interested in saving time: I prefer to enjoy it.

We, the living, are askers of questions and givers of answers, and we have other grave defects unpardonable by a system that believes death, like money, improves people.

To awaken consciousness, reveal identity, —can literature claim a better function in these times?

We are what we do, especially what we do to change what we are.

He quotes from the log of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to America:

Of gold is treasure made, and with it he who has it does as he wills in the world and even sends souls to paradise.

And later:

Poverty is not written in the stars; underdevelopment is not one of God’s mysterious designs.

The right wing is correct in identifying itself with tranquility and order; it is an order of daily humiliation for the majority, but an order nonetheless; it is an tranquility in which injustice continues to be unjust and hunger to be hungry.

Everything can be financed

Ticos are discovering this, to their intense delight. In this sense, they are about 50 years behind the US, but they are catching up fast.

I have been puzzled by all the new houses going up, and by all the new cars on the roads. Where did all this money come from? The answer is obvious: from the banks.

The global financial community is taking control of Costa Rica, like they have the rest of the world. The nominal owners of all these consumer goods get to live in them, drive them, and play with them, which makes them feel good. They feel they are powerful, but the real power is elsewhere.

The real owners of the world get to control all of the money, and they get to control all of the governments. But they will let the little guys have everything else.

Maria hates auto inspections

Last year Costa Rica started requiring annual safety inspections for all vehicles. They knew they couldn’t use a Tico outfit to do the inspecting (because of the endemic corruption) so they contracted out the work to an Italian company. For many Ticos this was an outrageous situation. They had a God-given right to run any wreck of a car anywhere they could make it go. But the people who could afford decent cars thought otherwise, and they prevailed.

After a while, the police started giving out millions of tickets to uninspected cars. This was quite a jolt, but most people soon got used to it. The inspection company seemed to be reasonable and honest, and people got used to this strange state of affairs—everybody but the owners of marginal vehicles. They wanted a more normal situation, one they could bribe cheaply. Maria is one of these people.

She doesn’t have a car, she couldn’t begin to afford one, but Javier does have a beat-up old SUV. Two days ago he took it in to be inspected, even tho he knew it wasn’t running very well. It was in such bad shape that they yanked the license plates. Maria was outraged; now Javier would have to spend money getting his clunker fixed—money that was rightly hers.

This drama is played out on many levels. Ticos like living in a relatively affluent country (they are buying four times as many cars this year as last), but they also want to keep their old, third-world ways. They don’t see why they can’t have both.