#131 – The Expat Files: Life, Power, and Challenges in Latin America

Automatically transcribed from the original recording; names and wording may contain errors.

[00:03] Hi everybody, I'm Johnny Mueller and you're listening to The Expat Files, living in Latin America. The show that tells you what it's really like to live, work, play and or retire in Latin America. I tell it just like it is, not the version they give you in those glossy travel magazines, or the picture they paint for you in those international traveler websites, where they're only trying to sell you something. What's it really like for expats living in Latin America? Well, it's time to take off those rose colored glasses and find out. So let's get started. Today before I get to talking about some emails, and I'm getting a lot of them lately, the other day I was talking to a lady from El Salvador, and she looked to me as North American gringa as any California surfer girl, believe it or not. But she had a Latin first name, Claudia, and a pure German last name, and a second last

[00:51] name which all Latin people have, which denotes the family name of the mother. And the Spanish she spoke was pure Salvadoranian Spanish. Which got me thinking that you do run into people like this down here now and again. Actually very infrequently when you're bopping around town, mixing with the local brown short people. But when you go to the high end malls, you do see people like that now and again, usually trailed by bodyguards. And of course you see them in the high end restaurants all the time. And at those notorious embassy parties I always talk about, which are always populated with the movers and shakers in the country that you're living in. And in those places the only short brown people you're going to see are the ones that are serving you dinner. Now I did mention before that there is a certain class of people that exist down here in Latin America, the very upper crust, less than one half of one percent, that have the bodyguards

[01:36] and the range rovers and the hummers and the beach houses and all that. Down here they're called criollos, which is an old Spanish word meaning the ruling class, the big landowners, the oligarchs. And I know I mentioned before that these people nearly always look like they came from European stock and in fact they try so hard to be gringos and gringas and they have more than enough money to do it. That to expats like me and the average gringo tourist, they can easily pass for rich American waspy types on vacation. Not to mention their skin is very white, they're tall, and most of the women are into lightening their hair. And the thing is after you're down here a while like me, you begin to wonder how they remain looking well so northern European or waspy US American. Well that's easy, they only hang around with people like themselves. And they keep the bloodlines pure by marrying within Latin families of similar rank.

[02:24] It's kind of an unwritten rule among the oligarch classes like that. That white is right and the lighter you and your children are, the better. And the best of all is to have your children white, tall, light haired and with green, blue or gray eyes. Also known as ojos clados or clear eyes in Spanish. That look, the Brad Pitt look, is the be all to end all in these upper class Latin families. And they only maintain that preferred look by marrying people of northern European ancestry like themselves, or by hooking up with waspy first world North American types. And many expats fall right into that category. And for you expats who have that goal in mind, you don't have to be rich, you just have to look the type. Now don't let it ever be said that these people are just an archaic remnant of the past and they really don't hold any sway or power anymore, not like they're used to.

[03:11] If you think that, you'd be completely wrong. Because the thing is, every single Latin American country, with the exception of Cuba, though the Castro family is the ruling class over there. Anyway, every Latin country has its own particular class of ruling families between 10 and 20 in number. And I don't mean ruling, as in being a president or a senator or a vice president, though these families certainly control the politicians and donate huge amounts of money to their campaigns and have these guys right in their pockets. Anyway, what I mean by these small groups of families that are the wealthy ruling classes is that they own huge tracts of land and vast amounts of mineral resources and the franchises on most of the big international companies that are household words, the ones that first landed down here in the 60s and 70s like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and McDonald's.

[03:58] And they also have a huge stake in traditional food and produce markets like coffee, sugar, tobacco, rice, and cocoa. And they also own a huge share of manufacturing materials like cement, lumber, and steel. And some of these old-time families have had control of those segments of the economy ever since the Spanish conquistadores came over and the king of Spain handed out land grants and appointed Spanish governors to various Latin American regions that later became countries. Back then, what a Spanish king would do to colonize a newly discovered or conquered area was to give out land grants to an already wealthy Spanish family back in Spain provided they sent one of their male family members over here to Latin America to rule as governor and take over the province, settle the place, rule over the locals, collect the booty, and

[04:43] send one third of it back every year to the king on the throne in Spain. So it turns out a lot of these very wealthy oligarchs that own so much of everything down here in Latin America can trace their descendants back hundreds of years. The fact is if you ever go inside one of these guys big old houses, mansions actually, you'll usually see the wall of fame somewhere, the old relatives with their pointy helmets in their suits of armor and their knobby knees in leotards, forever looking down on those lazy entitled family members that they spawned. You not only have the great great great great grandkids and relatives of those Spanish conquistadores who got those land grants from the king with those solid old world Spanish names like Castillo, Monterosso, Torres, and Castañada to name a few. But you also have rich Latin American families of oligarchs with German and Belgium and Dutch

[05:31] last names too and that's because somehow most of these guys ended up intermarrying with the Spanish oligarchs along the way and adding their northern European names and blood to the mix. Now like I said every country has about 10 or 20 of these very powerful families and they just don't own one or two things like all the rich coffee lands in the Pepsi and the Coke franchise. Nope over the years they've bought up everything including the newspapers, supermarkets, they've built malls and stadiums and racetracks and casinos and hippodromes because let's face it they all have kids and grandkids and great grandkids and all along the way they had to set those kids up in their family businesses too. That's way down here in Latin America the tentacles run deep when you're talking about the wealthy and because they all live in the same wealthy subdivisions belong to the same

[06:18] gyms and clubs and send their kids to the same schools and of course intermarry they almost always seem to be white tall and European looking and because they have all that wealth and power and money they love everything first world like shopping in Miami and because their kids attend wealthy bilingual private schools they all speak English quite well including the parents because let's face it you do need to speak English if you own a huge sugar tobacco or coffee plantation or even a mining company because you're going to do international business and English is the language of business. Now if any of you first worlders up there don't believe that this is true that there are 10 or 20 families like that in every Latin American country if you have any doubts about what I'm telling you here it's easy to prove it all you have to do is go to any Latin American country except Cuba of course we know who the ruling family is there pick up the biggest

[07:05] local newspaper and flip back past the classified ads into the obituary pages well the first thing you're going to notice in the obituary sections is that they're voluminous they're big could be 5 10 or even 20 pages long on any given day now I'm not talking about obituary listings people who have just died the actual obituary listings might only be three or four columns wide on a single page maybe even less you might just flip right past those what I'm talking about are the huge amount of condolence ads taken out by individuals families and businesses to mourn the passing of someone who's just died and the bigger the condolence ads that you see the more important influential and powerful is the family of that person who just died so on any given day when you look at the paper and you see quarter half page

[07:54] and full page condolence ads taken out for an individual who's just died you can be sure that the person who just croaked is a member of one of those oligarchic ruling families and here's a trick if you want to find out exactly what the names are of those 10 or 20 oligarchic families without actually walking up to someone who lives in that country and saying hey just out of curiosity who are the 10 or 20 ruling families in your country well if you do that you just might scare that person away because that's certainly not a common question that you'd ask someone you just met on the street however if you were in a bar or a restaurant or even at a party and you were having a conversation with a local that might be a legitimate question and they might be willing to rattle off the 10 or 20 most powerful families in their country but don't count on it they might still think you had some kind of ulterior motive because that's a very uncommon question to ask anyway just look at the

[08:42] obituary ads for a few days and you'll figure out who those oligarchic families are because everyone wants to kiss their asses for favors and those high-powered families are making lists and checking them twice believe me and one of the best ways to stay on their good side is to buy a big obituary ad when one of their family members kicked the bucket because of course if someone like you or me died no one would give a damn no one would take out a half page or a quarter page or a full page ad with some schmaltzy bible verse or some poem on it to try to convince the world what a good guy i was while i was living well that's not going to happen to you or me believe me but if you're a member of an oligarchic family down here everyone is brother who knows you or who does business with you is expected to pony up for a schmaltzy condolence ad and though like i said things are pretty cheap down here in latin america and even newspaper

[09:32] ads cost 10 or 25 percent of what an equivalent ad would cost up in the first world but still down here a full page ad in black and white costs anywhere from two to three thousand dollars so think of it suppose you own a body shop and have a contract with the local toyota dealership to do the body work on toyotas that have come into their repair shop that have been wrecked and of course all toyota dealerships throughout latin america are owned by one of that country's oligarchic families and that's just the way it is and that means you'll have to send your condolences by way of an obituary ad in the local newspaper every time someone dies in that family just because you're doing business with those people and if you don't pony up for a quarter page ad at least you just might not have your body shop contract next year because believe me someone in that family's keeping score in fact about a year ago here's what happened to expat eddie

[10:21] for some reason or another expat eddie ended up on a bowling league sponsored by none other than the salvid oranian chamber of commerce if you can believe that or maybe it was the san salvid or rotary club i can't remember anyway you and i know that bowling is kind of a very middle to lower middle class sport in fact you might even say it's like shooting pool on a pool league kind of a borderline white trash truck stop kind of past time but not down here in latin america remember what i said latin's love everything and anything first world and bowling well it's first world so quite a lot of upper middle class even upper class people are on bowling leagues believe it or not and believe me i was shocked too the first time i was invited on a date to go bowling by some people and i saw the black mercedes suvs and the bodyguards out in the parking lot

[11:08] now that's one for the books isn't it a night out at the bowling alley which is white trash all the way and the parking lot's filled with pretentious jerks and suits and sunglasses talking on two-way radios to each other talk about bizarro world so anyway eddie's on this bowling league in al salvador and actually since every rich latin guy wants to hang around with a gringo a couple of eddie's new buddies on his bowling team were actually entitled rich kids from very wealthy families of course with bodyguards in the parking lot and all that anyway it turns out that one of those rich kids on eddie's bowling team actually he wasn't a kid he was about 25 years old but he acted like a kid a lot of the times which is par for the course for the kids of the wealthy and one night after bowling he got so drunk that he smashed into a brick wall and killed himself and and the following week when eddie went back to the bowling alley to resume the tournament play

[11:57] one of the guys on eddie's team went around to all the members and asked each one of them for 200 bucks apiece so that the bowling team could put in a nice big obituary condolence ad for the guy and the guy collecting the money assured eddie that they needed at least a half a page ad which was about 1500 bucks or it wouldn't look good they didn't want to come off like a bunch of cheapskates not with a family like that and eddie being eddie told him to stick it where the sun don't shine i'll go to the funeral he said and i might even bring some flowers but that guy's family was richer than sin and eddie was certainly not into impressing the family and then he said to the guy i'm supposed to give you 200 because the guy couldn't hold his booze so three cheers for eddie and he was the only one that didn't chip in and eddie said the surviving members of his bowling team were not happy about it but they never did excommunicate eddie from the bowling team

[12:46] because well he's a gringo and he has that gringo advantage and rich latins love hanging out with gringos even tecanos like eddie and by the way tecanio means cheapskate in spanish and speaking of these top 10 or 20 families in every latin country these guys and their families are often in the local news because they belong to so many committees and boards of directors and sometimes because these guys own big chunks of the media radio tv and newspapers some of the members in the family want to be media stars and they'll have their boring weekly newspaper op ed piece or often their own weekly politicized radio or tv program and why not no one's going to fire them for bad ratings because well they own the station but the point is no matter how much lip service they give to democracy women's lib voting rights equality workers rights and human rights

[13:31] in general it's really only lip service because you have to remember the way that their families accumulated the massive wealth that they did over the centuries was by completely disregarding the rights of the common man forcing the wages of the lower classes to be unthinkably low keeping the indigenous population in campesinos undereducated and by maintaining a rigid class system which they do to this day and the fact is the so-called ruling class the oligarchs don't really have to work too hard at all to keep the indigenous people downtrodden because you see even though there are huge numbers of indigenous poor in latin america in some countries it's 50 of the population living on three bucks or less a day well the oligarchs aren't really worried about that they're not worried about them gaining power because most latin american countries don't have just one

[14:17] indigenous group each country has many different tribes in fact take guadamala has at least 25 different tribes that speak 25 different languages and even before the spanish came and conquered these 25 tribes in guadamala alone were occasionally at war with each other for land and resources and even today 400 years later these tribes don't like each other much not that they're at war with each other they're not extremists like that but they just don't like the neighboring tribes in fact each indigenous tribe in guadamala wears a certain kind of indigenous typical outfit that to us expats gringos tourists and europeans all look exactly the same and we just can't tell them apart at all and they all have their own language too but expats and tourists just classify them all as indigenous they all look and sound alike to us sure all the indigenous people speak

[15:06] spanish that's the official language of the country but oftentimes a first world person like you or me will be walking down the street and we'll hear a completely confusing language and sometimes if you're in one of their stores or tiendas and you're buying something you'll hear a couple of people behind the counter speaking to each other in a different language while the guy at the cash register is speaking to you in spanish and the fact is just like north american indians those languages can be so regional that only five or ten thousand people in the whole world speak that language and they're all in one little tribal group but the point is these indigenous tribes don't like each other much they're always in some kind of competition with each other they've yet to find one central person to unite under a charismatic leader type who can get them to agree on enough things to get a big powerful voting block going and if they could that's when

[15:54] the ruling elite would really be worried because right now for example if someone could politically unite all the indigenous people in salvador let's say or guadamala or honduras or nicaragua if one of their own indigenous leaders could consolidate power and could get all the local indigenous tribes to vote for an indigenous leader for president vice president and congress they could completely throw out the ruling elite that's been in power for three or four hundred years just like evo morales did in bolivia which is the first time that's ever happened yet even though he's the first indigenous president in latin america he's having his troubles too if you've been reading in the newspaper you'll see that his coalition of indigenous tribes are starting to fight amongst themselves too and now every day you read about volivian strikes and work stoppages and roadblocks and sit-ins apparently he couldn't deliver on his

[16:42] promises to his people either politics as usual but back to guadamala for a second like i said it's got 25 indigenous tribes and a few years back during a general election an indigenous guadamala woman named rigoberta menchu ran for president and all us gringos thought if anyone's got a chance to unite the indigenous people she does because she actually won a nobel peace prize and because she was an international hero winning the nobel prize and no one else in guadamala had ever done so expats and gringos in the no thought hey she's the one that's going to do it she's going to unite all those indigenous people and toss out the ruling elite and guess what in a 50 indigenous voters she got only five percent of the vote and again that's because those 25

[17:29] indigenous tribes in guadamala just don't like each other she got the vote of her tribe all right but the other indigenous people they didn't want her indigenous tribe to have the power i think they called that cutting off your nose to spite your face but i could be wrong and that's why that small group of ruling families in all these latin american countries are just not worried very much they saw what happened to nobel prize winner rigoberta menchu who had a thoroughly embarrassing loss and now they're watching evil moralists latin america's first real indigenous president jumped from crisis to crisis he's spinning his wheels and not getting anywhere either so it looks like those 10 or 20 ruling families have nothing to worry about in the next few years that's for sure so just remember every time you buy a coca-cola a pepsi a toyota a bag of cement or a cup of coffee you're helping to support the extravagant lifestyle of a long long line

[18:19] of entitled rich kids okay enough of that and now i'd like to get to some emails and i'll probably only have time for one but here goes it says dear johnny in the past you have discouraged buying land and moving to mexico i've been speaking to a woman who has some land in yucatan not far from a bnb in the website below and then he has the link then he says may i ask you to explain your aversion to mexico looking forward to reading your comments regards adrian well adrian you're right i don't recommend mexico unless you're gonna go on a cheap vacation to cancun or somewhere like that where you can get a good package deal and you know mexico is a very big country so you're gonna find little towns and pueblos that are very safe and quite nice and off the tourist track like i recommend but the point is when you do find a place like that your next step is to

[19:05] remain safe and out of the direct path of the lawlessness that's so persistent these days in mexico you're gonna have to find a nice safe place and stay there because the fact is it's not really safe to travel between cities in mexico anymore not like it used to be the countryside has become completely lawless and it's never a good idea to travel between cities and departments at night that's for sure and another thing people often ask me if it's safe to drive from the united states down to mexico on through to central america down through guadamala through nicaragua san salvador all the way down to costa rica i've met a lot of americans who have done that in the last 20 years or so and here's what they report it turns out back in the 1980s and 90s you could drive all the way through mexico pay a little bit of a bribe here and there maybe 50 to 75 dollars

[19:54] to get all the way through without any other kind of problems at all and back then it was pretty safe as long as you didn't drive at night and when you did pull over and get a hotel you make sure that the hotel has a guarded fenced-in parking lot and back then you could get a decent hotel if you were off the tourist track for 15 to 25 dollars a night and your car would be absolutely safe but in the last five years or so things have changed a lot everybody i talked to who has made that trip down has paid three to five hundred dollars in bribes and sometimes double that because these days it seems that every time you cross a border of a mexican state and by the way mexico has 25 states you get hit up by a cop for a bribe as soon as they see a gringo license plate you've been marked and to tell you the truth my feeling is that every mexican policeman is on the take and

[20:40] they're not just looking for a small 10 or 20 dollar bribe like the cops in honduras salvador and nicaragua though i can tell you that the costarican cops have really jacked up their bribe prices and they still have the nerve to call themselves the switzerland of latin america sheesh ever hear of swiss cops taking a bribe i doubt it anyway it's still cheap compared to mexico where every time the cops stop you they hit you for at least a hundred bucks and you know it has almost nothing to do with a moving violation it's a pure bribe because they want you to pay it right then and there and that never happens when you get a legitimate ticket with any police force but you know you're getting scammed when they give you the opportunity to pay it right then and there so i repeat from what i can see every mexican transit cop is on the take the fact is a few years ago i was on the caribbean side outside of talum and i was pulled over by a stationary radar

[21:29] cop for speeding and though i probably was speeding and i did end up paying the cops some bribe money which is usual i also noticed that the cop's radar gun which he pointed down the road at everyone looking like the big and powerful authoritarian figure that he was anyway when he put it in the back of his pickup cruiser and i caught a close glimpse of it some frayed wires were hanging out of the side of it it was obviously broken and the screen showed nothing because there was no power to it it was just a nice prop to snag stupid gringos like me but here's the real reason i don't think it's a good idea to invest live and or retire in mexico and here it is knowing that about 10 to 15 million illegal aliens actually live up in the united states as you might have figured at least 80 of those are from mexico and every year about one million of those illegal

[22:17] immigrants in the united states are caught and shipped back to their home countries in latin 80 of those are shipped back to mexico so statistically every year about a million are shipped back to mexico now of that million that are caught up in the states about 50 or a half a million of them are caught pretty close to the border being nabbed by us border control or being abandoned by their coyote or whatever but another 30 to 40 of the people that are picked up and deported in the united states they've been picked up because they're criminals they've been caught stealing murdering raping involved in drugs or prostitution trafficking in persons or any number of illegal activities and these people are sent straight back to their home country mexico after of course having become better and wiser criminals from their time spent up in the united states in

[23:07] the big cities hanging with sophisticated criminal street gangs and learning the tricks of how crimes are done up in the first world or they learn from the best after being thrown into a first world jail until they're deported and now these guys are a notch above third world criminals they know all the first world criminal tricks only now they're in their home country of mexico and also being up in the first world for a while before they were caught and deported of course they're no longer third world hay seeds coming up to the united states looking to put food on the table by stealing a few cds plasma tv's and toasters that's maybe how some of these petty criminals started out but once they've fallen with a sophisticated street gang in la or chicago or new york they've got to have all the first world pleasures cars and girls and hot tubs and jewelry and drugs and a lot of

[23:54] them probably had that for a while up in the states but now they're down in mexico deported and who do you think they've got on their sights for their next score those good old neighborhood gringos that have moved into the local sleepy little beach town thinking it might be a very nice place to retire after all they've seen the advertisements on the internet and those international traveler magazines so what i'm getting at is this you might find your little spot of paradise in mexico but chances are a few doors away there's going to be some bad boy who's been deported who's got his eye on you and your things and what's worse he's got friends and they're all bad guys and they're going to take their turns pouncing on you so it's just a matter of time before you become the mark and i'm not saying there's a hundred percent chance that that's going to happen to you i mean if you live in some kind of gated guarded gringle community

[24:42] and don't go out much alone you just might be all right but it's just so much easier and so much safer to just skip mexico and hit the countries a little bit south plus you'll have that added advantage of all those dozens if not hundreds of cities in the altiplano regions where you get that eternal spring weather all year round and you don't need heating or air conditioning you won't find many places like that at all in mexico except of course the federal district mexico city that's an altiplano city however it's so over-populated and polluted so disorganized and chaotic that i'd never recommend that city on a long-term basis for an expat either and the last reason i advise you to stay away from mexico is the fact that it's been thoroughly contaminated with the gringo dollar sure you can live in a city in any barrio quite cheap if you don't mind living

[25:31] third world style with a tin roof cold running water and even brackish water coming out of that and you'll probably only get that crappy water eight or ten hours a day you could live like that for a thousand bucks a month easy but if you want to go down to mexico and live like a first world person you're going to pay twice or three times that or even nearly first world money to live in the style that you're accustomed to and that price inflation is due to the fact that everyone and his brother locals that is have some family member living up in the first world sending back money called remissas they're sending money to family members by western union or bank transfer in order to help the folks out back home but what that influx of unearned dollars does it causes localized inflation it has to because that money's not being earned locally no one's making a product

[26:19] or performing a service to actually make that money it's just truckloads of extra money flowing in increasing prices in the long run it's like a smaller version of the california gold rush that you've heard so much about around the gold camps all the prospectors were pulling out nuggets every day then they go to town on the weekends and buy stuff with them well everybody had gold nuggets so prices inflated and got artificially high for example out on the east coast a shovel cost a buck or two but in the towns close to the gold camp she couldn't buy a shovel for less than 50 bucks so eventually the price of everything artificially creeps up and a good example is right here in that email adrian sent me he's given me a link to a nice bed and breakfast style spa near talum which i know pretty well and the cheapest rate for one night is 125 with a two-night minimum and during

[27:07] the high season like christmas it's 250 to 275 bucks a night for a single room now i don't know about you but no one's getting a deal going to that place no matter how well the services and how good the views in fact last week i was at a place so nice that it was probably one of the top views and top hotels i've been in my whole life and the cost 68 bucks a night and i wasn't in mexico you've been listening to the expat files living in latin america coming to you each week from somewhere south of the border and don't forget you can email me on anything at all about latin the expat files at gmail.com once again the expat files at gmail.com see you next time