#120 – The Expat Files: Real Talk on Living 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. Now today I'm going to start with a few more emails on questions that people commonly ask me. Now here's one from Paul from my hometown of Chicago and he asks a lot of questions that I get all the time. So here it goes.

[00:48] He says, Dear Johnny, I just found your podcast and I'm catching up on all your old shows. I'm sorry if you've gone over this already in your old shows, but I have a few questions. Number one, how long have you been down there? Number two, what made you move? Number three, where are you living right now? Number four, do you still have American citizenship? Number five, do you have to return to the United States to keep it? And what country would you recommend to start a new life if you were going down there right now? I'm considering Guatemala, Panama, Ecuador and Uruguay and Australia. I used to have a lot more requirements, but now I only want good internet connections and no winters. I'm so tired of Chicago weather, people who are angry and depressed and the amount of

[01:33] paranoia we have come to live under in the United States. I have a lot more questions, but my boss just interrupted me. And by the way, when I read these emails, folks, I don't put in all those gushy salutations and when they try to butter me up and stuff. I know you don't want to hear people piling on the compliments in the BS because it just might be fake. My mother always told me to throw in a compliment at the beginning and the end of every letter too, so I'm not going to fall for that. I know you're just being polite, even if you don't mean it. Anyway, number one, he's asking, how long have you been down here? Well, I've been here just a little bit over 20 years now. And what made me move down? Well, about 20 years ago, after a successful business venture, I decided to take a trip around the world. I figured it would last about a year. Well, now I'm about 21 years into it and I'm still traveling. And what made me pick Latin America to finally settle in?

[02:21] Well, after traveling that first year around the world, I decided I wanted to learn Spanish. I liked the Latin countries best of all, and the Latin culture wasn't completely foreign to me like the Middle East cultures I visited and the Oriental cultures where I felt really out of place. And I found that, even though I knew almost no Spanish at all when I got here, I could still get around pretty well. So I came back after that year to learn my Spanish, and the first place I stopped was Costa Rica, naturally, because Costa Rica seemed to be the up-and-coming Latin American country at the time, and all the travel agents recommended it. In fact, Costa Rica was about the only Latin American country that first world travel agents did recommend. It was the only Latin American country that had pamphlets and tourist brochures on at the time, and the only Latin country, besides Mexico, that hadn't had a revolution or an

[03:06] armed conflict in the last 50 years. In fact, it was one of the only countries in the world that had gotten rid of its military altogether back in about 1947, which automatically makes you think the country's very safe. And there won't be bands of military guys with Uzi standing on every corner like it would see down in Paraguay or Nicaragua, which, by the way, were a couple of countries that I visited when I made my whirlwind one-year trip around the world. And guess what? I didn't see bands of military guys standing on corners with Uzis, though I'm sure there were guys like that somewhere. But I think that's more like a negative PR photo-op thing that first world newspapers like to use, because I know you can find that in almost any country if you look for it, including the United States. But they won't be used in Uzi's, they'll be used in M16's. Now, one thing about first world travel agents, they didn't push Costa Rica particularly hard

[03:54] 20 or so years ago, not like they do today. They were putting a lot bigger push on places in Mexico, like Cancun and Playa del Carmen, Ixtapa, Acapulco, and the package deal and prices on going down to those individual tourist spots in Mexico were a lot higher than going down to Costa Rica. In fact, I remember back then, about 20 years ago, for about $350 to $400, I could have gotten an entire week in Costa Rica, all-inclusive at a nice hotel on the beach or in the capital San Jose, airfare included. Yep, back then 20 years ago, that was the time to get into Costa Rica. That's when things were cheap. But forget about it now, believe me. So after my year-long trip around the world, I ended up in Costa Rica, specifically to learn my Spanish and to see what kind of business opportunities there just might be.

[04:41] And I stayed there about three years, and in that three years, I did not learn my Spanish. As hard as I tried, I just couldn't do it. Because you see, Costa Rica's number one product is tourism. Even back then, and when the country is geared towards tourism and first world tourists, everyone wants to learn English. Because if you can speak English, the tourists appreciate that a little bit more than toughing out a menu or a cab ride in Pigeon Spanish. And naturally, first worlders who don't know Spanish prefer dealing with English speakers, whether they're busboys, hotel clerks, taxi drivers, or waitresses. And naturally, when you can communicate with someone in your own language and don't have to fumble around trying to figure out where the toilet is, well, you have the propensity to give a nice tip, and that tip's going to be in dollars. And since back then, 20 years ago, the average Costa Rican adult made less than $100 a month

[05:29] on a regular job, not in the tourist industry. But if he or she was a tour guide or a waitress servicing gringo tourists, and they dropped a $5 tip, which is completely reasonable for a first world tourist to tip. And in fact, when you're on vacation, when you give a $5 or $10 tip, you don't think much of it. Hell, you're on vacation, right? Well back then, 20 years ago, when a person made under $100 a month, a $5 tip was more than a day's wages, and the average Costa Rican working at a nice tourist hotel could make 5 or even 10 $5 tips a day. But hotels will always prefer to hire people who speak English. So obviously, every Costa Rican wants to get into some kind of tourism field. And that's why Costa Ricans with even the least bit of English under their belt will try to use it on you.

[06:15] Try speaking to them in Spanish and they almost always revert to English. And sure, I took my Spanish classes faithfully. I went to Spanish school every day a few hours for 6 months straight. But you know what? You just can't go to school and learn your Spanish or any language. You have to get out and use it. Well in Costa Rica, the only place you won't have the locals speaking to you in English is way out in the boonies, in the farm country. Or if you live down there and you happen to hire a housemaid or a gardener, because in that case, more than likely that person is going to be from Nicaragua. And that's because the Costa Ricans are suffering from some of the same problems that we up in the first world are. They don't like to do menial jobs, not when they can get into tourism and make dollars. Menial jobs being grunt workers on construction sites, gardeners, maintenance men, cleaning

[07:02] ladies, and basically any job that pays minimum wage where you have to get your hands dirty. Well it turns out, after the big boom in Costa Rica that started some 20 or 25 years ago, the Costa Ricans themselves started copying an attitude. Little by little, they just quit doing menial jobs. And to fill that gap, the Nicaraguans, whose minimum wage was half of that in Costa Rica, soon figured out they could double their income by sneaking into Costa Rica and snapping up those menial jobs. They didn't care because, well, they were making twice what they did in their home country. And that was happening even 20 years ago. And it's a problem that exists even more today. And you know, it's really funny to me and other first world expats who've lived in Costa Rica, when we hear the Costa Ricans complaining about the Nicaraguans. The fact is, Costa Ricans really treat them like second class citizens.

[07:49] They're always complaining about them, and every time the Costa Ricans read about a crime or a social problem in the paper, they blame it on the Nicaraguans, just too many of them in the country, stealing our jobs, taking advantage of our health care and our social net and our schools. The exact same thing you hear up in the United States when people complain about illegal immigrants that come from Mexico. But you know, the irony is, the Costa Ricans that complain about the Nicaraguans would never do the jobs that the Nicaraguans snuck in the country to take advantage of. Sound familiar? You know what they say, nature abhors a vacuum. But anyway, these Nicaraguans I've found, and I had a few working for me myself when I ended up building a house or two down in Costa Rica, well you see, these Nicaraguans, they speak Spanish, and almost none of them can speak English. And because they're actually in Costa Rica illegally, even if they did speak English,

[08:38] they couldn't get jobs in the tourist business, because the Costa Ricans are notorious for calling the immigration police on Nicaraguans, who seem to them to be advancing beyond their stations and thus getting a bit uppity, but they'll never call the immigration police on a Nicaraguan who's working a menial job. And so there's a glass ceiling for Nicaraguans working in Costa Rica, and that glass ceiling is in the basement. Now I should explain a bit about how immigration works within Latin America. If you are a Latin American and you want to go to a neighboring country let's say, a neighboring Latin country, well the way it works is like this. Let's say you're from Panama, well you can go to any country in Central America or South America without a visa, you get a 90 day trip in and out as a tourist, just like you and

[09:23] I would get with our American passport, an automatic 90 day tourist visa. You don't have to go to an embassy and fill out a bunch of forms, you just go to a border crossing or an airport, they punch you into the computer and you're off. Now the only country that's much stricter on those rules is Mexico, and that's because Mexico butts up against the United States, so every Latin who wants to get to the United States illegally has to do it through Mexico. So it turns out for the last 50 years or so, because of Mexico's geography, it's become the dumping ground for all the dredges of Latin America who want to escape to the United States illegally, and at any given time, there's at least a few million people in Mexico who aren't Mexican residents but residents of other Latin American countries just waiting for their chance to slip into the United States, and even though quite a few Mexicans make

[10:10] a living off of illegals coming into their country trying to get to the United States, and I'm talking about coyotes and corrupt government officials and corrupt cops and stuff who make money from illegals who have to pay them off, anyway those millions of illegal Latin Americans from other countries stuck in Mexico waiting for their chance to slip into the United States, well over the years, and it's even worse now, they've caused a lot of internal social problems within the Mexican system, because these illegals stuck in Mexico waiting for their turn to slip into the United States, these are people from the lowest socioeconomic ladder within their own Latin American country and have almost no money on them and nothing to lose, and the Mexican government doesn't want people like that loitering within their country, they've got enough of their own poor wretches hanging around waiting to escape into the United States, they don't want every other

[10:57] Latin Americans dirt on their doorstep, and because of that, some years ago the Mexican government passed a law forcing every visitor from other Latin American countries, that is every Latin American who wants to visit Mexico legally, to go to the Mexican embassy within their country and apply for a visa, even before you step foot in Mexico, and that's a process that could take weeks or even months, just like you have to apply for a visa at the US embassy in your country, if you're a Latin American trying to get into the United States, and you have to show that you're not a low class poor campasito or a deadbeat, you have to have a job, you have to show proof of your job, you have to have letters of references, and you have to have a visa or mastercard with at least a $2000 limit, and you have to show proof of that, and the reason why Mexican immigration people ask for all that

[11:44] is because they're copying exactly what the United States requires for a Mexican to get a 90 day visa to come to the United States as a visitor or a tourist, so as you might imagine any Latin American who's got a stable long term job, and he makes enough money to qualify to get a credit card with at least a $2000 limit, well that's the kind of tourists they want in Mexico, because that's the kind of person who will spend some money, and he's not going to be a freeloader using Mexico as a way to get to the United States illegally, but those regulations also limit about 80% of the Latin American population from ever being able to qualify to get a visa to go to Mexico, which was the intention all along of the Mexican government, however the statistics show that at least 10 million Latin American illegals pour into Mexico from south of their border every single year, and these are people

[12:35] that could never qualify for that 90 day tourist visa, so how do 10 million people slip into Mexico from only two little countries directly below them, Guatemalan Belize, well it turns out on Google maps alone if you check it out yourself, you can see that there are over a thousand places that a person can slip through the Guatemalan Mexican border, because you see it's not like the US Mexican border, where there's an actual double fence, a deep trench, surveillance systems, border control guys with vehicles, night vision goggles and even sophisticated spy drones, the Mexican border between Guatemalan Belize doesn't even have a simple chain link fence running the whole distance, much less border control cops with vehicles and high tech equipment, remember this is the third world man, and don't forget

[13:20] even the United States with it's fences and trenches and night vision goggles and drones, well even with that a few million illegals slip through every year, and you think I might have gotten off the subject a bit, but it does relate specifically to Nicaraguans working illegally in Costa Rica, because you see Nicaraguans can't get into Mexico either without a visa and they'd have to sneak through to get to the United States, and it's no easy straight shot for them either, sure they'd be able to go through Honduras and Guatemala and Salvador and Belize, because they could just walk right in and get a 90 day tourist visa, it's automatic for Latin Americans, but once they got to the Mexican border they'd get no visa so they'd have to sneak in, and being illegal they'd be at the mercy of corrupt cops, bureaucrats and coyotes, and once they got into Mexican southern border they'd still have to go quite

[14:06] a few hundred miles north to get to the states, quite a long exhausting and miserable trip, and that's why so many of them end up in Costa Rica, they have a border with Costa Rica and they get an automatic 90 day visa just walking in, and though it's technically illegal for them to get a job in Costa Rica because they're on a tourist visa, a good 90% of them go through that border to do just that, to get a job in Costa Rica making twice what they could make in the same kind of job up where they come from, I mean what would you do if you were a dirt poor Nicaraguan, would you want a chance at 800 mile trip north to the United States and suffer the indignities of what might happen to you in Mexico on the hopes that you might make five or ten times the Nicaraguan wage once you got to the states, though since 99% of lower class Nicaraguans don't know any English there's a good chance that if they did get to the states they'd eventually get picked up and deported right

[14:53] back, people in the know say that there's about a 50-50 chance that a person who knows no English going to the United States illegally will get picked up by United States cops or immigration within the first year and get deported, not very good odds and that's why so many of them walk right across the border for that sure thing in Costa Rica and here's something else that affects that situation, on this program I've mentioned a few times that there are four Latin American countries that are trying their damnedest to introduce first world levels of government and bureaucracy and first world style taxation and those four countries are Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica and Panama and since Costa Rica is one of those countries it directly affects that situation where Nicaraguans are working illegally in Costa Rica because you see now that Costa Rica is instituted so many first world tax

[15:41] and social measures including national health care and a government social security and retirement system it's becoming more and more difficult for employers in Costa Rica to afford the extra contributions that they have to pay to the government for each person that they have on the payroll just like we have FICA and social security taxes in the United States where the employer has to contribute half of that tax to the government for each employee that he has on the payroll and if he's an employee himself the owner of a business has to pay a hundred percent of that tax well the same thing has happened in Costa Rica businesses with employees are now being forced to contribute to all the social net programs that Costa Rica has instituted over the years in their efforts to keep up with the first world and those programs cost so naturally the cost of living has been creeping up faster than any other place in Central America and their wages are also higher than any other

[16:29] place in Central America in some cases more than double than their neighboring countries which is why it costs twice as much or even more to do business in Costa Rica than it does in the adjacent Latin countries like Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Belize but that's not all because of the ever rising cost of living in Costa Rica and the employer contributions to the government that every business now has to contribute for all its workers it's become more and more tempting for Costa Rican businesses and individuals to hire workers off the books so they don't have to keep up with all that paperwork and pay those extra fees to the government and the vast majority of people in Costa Rica who are working off the books like that are Nicaraguans and according to inside sources the problem of illegal Nicaraguans working off the books is on the increase in showing no signs of abatement sound familiar okay but getting back to Paul's email he's asking

[17:19] me where am I living now well presently I hopped between three or four Latin American countries and the last few years I've been spending in Central America and when I'm done wrapping up a few business things here I'm gonna be heading down to Columbia again and I've got it in my plan to be there for the next few years and about that American citizenship question you asked me Paul of course I'm still an American citizen and I have an American passport and no I don't have to return to the United States at all to keep my citizenship you have that for life and you do have to renew your passport every five years so all you have to do is go to the local US embassy in whatever Latin American country you're in or for that matter any country in the world that has a US embassy you can renew it there and believe it or not I've only been back to the United States for two weeks in the

[18:05] last 20 years so I'm pretty much disconnected with all the rotten things I've been hearing about the United States specifically with the government the banks Wall Street and housing I don't know much about what's happening in the US first hand except for what visitors and expats tell me what I see in the internet and in documentaries and of course all the shows on PR and radio and what I see in the twisted corporate run media so as the first world cracks and crumbles I'm in a pretty good seat to watch it happen and Paul also says in his email now that he's getting older all he really needs is a good internet connection and some nice warm weather he says he's tired of Chicago and the angry depressed people he meets and the amount of paranoia all Americans have come to live under and you know Paul that's the reason why I don't even want to go back to the United States to visit I still

[18:51] have friends and relatives up there and they've all given me such sad reports just like you've given and you know down here in Latin America I'm experiencing absolutely none of that and they do have very good internet connections everywhere down here and terrific weather if you know what I know about geography in Latin America that is it took me a while to figure this out like it does every expat but I prefer to live in the Altiplano region those are those special little places in Latin America above 3,000 feet in elevation where you have eternal spring weather all year round so not only is it perfect weather when you go outside you don't have an air conditioning or a heating bill imagine that if you're living in a town or a city in an Altiplano region and believe me there are hundreds of these places you'll find that you never really sweat unless you go to the gym and it's never freezing

[19:37] unless you walk into a meat locker and you know that's one of the reasons I don't want to live in southern Brazil Argentina Chile or Uruguay they have the four seasons there and I just don't like cold I don't like ice and snow 25 years of living in Chicago cured me of that in fact nowadays even living in the Altiplano sometimes once or twice a year it can get way down to 45 or 50 degrees at night and it can feel some of my joints starting to get a bit stiff now I don't know if that's old age creeping in or just a knee-jerk reaction from 25 years in Chicago and believe me I tried the beach life down here too I had two nice beach houses in my day but I can only stand that really hot sweaty human weather for a week or two at a time even though when I first came down here I had the idea like so many first worlders of opening

[20:24] a beach bar and laying around in a hammock with my guitar like a poor man's Jimmy Buffett and believe me I tried that but it doesn't really work well at all for a transplanted type a personality but after a few years down here even type a personalities turn into type B's and with that your heart rate and blood pressure go down and you don't pop up out of your chair like a jack-in-a-box every time the phone rings in fact if you're down here long enough you might even get to the point where you actually turn your phone off for hours even days at a time that's when you know your body and your mind is in the right place if you want to live longer that is but I know a lot of first world people up there who honestly think it would be worse than the end of the world if their phone was switched off so the question is would it be more or less stressful if your phone was switched

[21:10] off and if your answer is more stress then you really should think about coming down to Latin America anyway then Paul asks in his email which Latin American country if I had to choose right now would I move to to start a brand new life well depending which way you figure it there are 20 Latin American countries and about three-quarters of them are still great places to work live play retire and or do business in and I can't really tell you which one would be the best for me or for you but I can't tell you the ones that I wouldn't recommend the ones that I would never move to to start a new life number one is Mexico because it's a country out of control narco-infested corrupt and absolutely ruined because it's got a border with the United States you can blame a lot of it on that huge revolving door for illegal immigrants who go to the states with their own low-class

[21:57] bad habits pick up even worse ones in the big cities like LA and Chicago and when they get deported they end up back in Mexico even more low-class and jaded not to mention Mexico is completely contaminated by the gringo dollar and remisses so forget Mexico and forget Costa Rica and Panama they're overhyped nearly first world expensive and trying their damnedest to create a huge big brother first world style bureaucracy and along with that comes first world style debt and taxation not to mention Costa Rica has been contaminated completely by the US dollar and the cost of living is soaring due to the influx of first world tourism and Panama too is overhyped on the internet and by all the tourist agencies and they've been contaminated by the gringo dollar even longer than Costa Rica has Panama for nearly a hundred years had more than 15,000 US soldiers

[22:46] and their families living down in the Panama canal zone and the US and the US dollar influence was so heavy in Panama that they actually use the US dollar as currency down there they haven't used their own paper money since 1941 so you can imagine what that effect has had on the cost of living down there and I wouldn't want to start a new life in Chile or Argentina either not only for the fact that they have cold winters actually they have cold summers because down in South America the seasons are reversed anyway both of those countries though very beautiful and charming and have a lot to offer in so many ways the big problem is that they too are trying to be first world in regards to government big brother bureaucracy and taxes so if you don't mind spending first world money to live like a first worlder down in Chile or Argentina sure those

[23:36] two countries are great places to live but you don't have to pay near first world prices to live like a first worlder down here if you know which countries to stay away from and two of them I would stay away from Chile and Argentina and I wouldn't like to live in Brazil either no matter what positive propaganda you've been hearing about that great Brazilian economic machine still half the population down there live in some of the worst decrepit slums you've ever seen in your life the only ones I've ever seen that are worse are down in Africa so it doesn't matter if that big economic motor in Brazil actually does someday in the future have the effect of lifting half of the population solidly into the middle class the problem is the other 50% are living like wild animals with tin roofs and bare feet in some of the worst slums you've ever seen and if you get a

[24:22] chance to drive through those slums and I don't recommend that you'll see eight and ten-year-old kids sporting rifles and pistols and they're loaded so forget Brazil unless you want to buy some farmland and live way in the boonies like 50 to 100 kilometers away from the nearest big city then you could live like a gentleman farmer I'm sure but when you do have to drive into town do remember to bring along those bodyguards and you have to rule out Venezuela as a place to live too because since Hugo Chavez recently nationalized some of the big companies down there and is decidedly on the path to socialism in the last few years not only have they had the highest inflation rate of any Latin American country they've had the second or the third highest inflation rate in the world and it's running about 35% a year now and just considering the

[25:08] inflation rate alone it's no place you want to go and live work or do business and besides that they have a two-tier currency system and a huge black market in everything including the currency itself the Chavez government has pegged the bolivar their currency to a very artificial rate against the US dollar to about twice of what it's really worth on the black market so if you do legitimate business transactions through the banks with your bolivars you're getting screwed out of 50% because the people on the street using the black market are getting double for their money and for that reason alone forget about the inflation that's one place you never want to move to and those are just a few things on the big list of Venezuela's problems so forget about it now there's three more South American countries that I don't recommend you go down to to start a new

[25:53] life unless you truly want to live like your great grandparents did about a hundred years ago or perhaps you're so into ecology and nature that you wouldn't mind living in a sweltering rainforest style jungle for the rest of your life I'm talking about Suriname, Guyana and French Guiana and if you look on a South American map you can see that they're all huddled up there together on the right hand bulge of the continent in the South Atlantic now the problem with those three countries besides the fact that they're absolutely impossibly wet and hot is that they have such small populations that they don't have much infrastructure at all even the capital cities in each one of those countries is nothing more than Mayberry in the tropics and the problem is by 10 o'clock in the morning it's so damn hot you don't even want to get out of your chair because you're already in a pool of sweat but they are great places if you want to have a coconut tobacco

[26:42] or rubber plantation and who knows maybe that's your thing but Paul you're asking me where I'd go if right now I was looking for the perfect Latin American place to live and in response of course I told you the ones I'd never want to live in which makes answering your question a lot easier for me really and by the way these three countries Suriname, Guyana and French Guiana some people don't even consider part of Latin America because Spanish is not their primary language because they were settled by the Dutch and the French and not only that I wouldn't recommend any of those three places for even a short vacation because remember when I told you that 80% of Latin America only has two seasons the rainy season and the dry season well for Suriname, French Guiana and Guyana guess what they actually don't even have a dry season in fact it's always the rainy season

[27:29] and I'm not exaggerating go ahead and google it you've been listening to The Exped 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 America The Exped Files at gmail.com once again The Exped Files at gmail.com see you next time