#169 – The Expat Files: Real Experiences 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 if you stick around a while you'll find out. So, let's get started. Well today I'll be talking with my boys a little bit shat because I just finished off that big seminar that I had down in Guatemala where I promised 24 people I'd show them what it's really like to live down here in Latin America off the tourist trail. And yes we had exactly 24 people on the tour, no more no less.

[00:52] And of course along the way since I announced it 3 months before the actual event I had 3 or 4 cancellations due to various reasons but I had a long waiting list to pick from. So about 3 weeks before the event I had it all settled on 24 people. Then at the very last minute about 3 or 4 days before the event one of the participants that was coming in from China had to cancel at the last minute and I don't know what for but it could be anything coming from China. So I filled that spot and still we had 24 people exactly like we promised. Another no show was my buddy Rob Culpepper who was coming in from England or was it France I can't remember. Anyway, 2 days before the event he got stuck in the Madrid airport and while he was trying to juggle frequent flyer miles and all that and he has so many of those things. Turns out that that layover in Madrid was going to cost him $2000 US to come and make

[01:42] the seminar on time. So he did what anyone else would do in that situation. He sat down and he cried. Well actually I don't know if he cried but I bet he brooded a lot. And you know what at the seminar there were a lot of people that did want to meet him. Whether they wanted to shake his hand or punch him out I don't know but he'll get a chance next time if we ever do this seminar again. And was this seminar a success? Well I have to say if it wasn't I lost my voice for nothing. No based on the response I have to say that I actually proved my point just like I set out to do. To prove that the US State Department which disses certain countries like Guatemala, Honduras El Salvador, Nicaragua just to name a few saying that they're dangerous and not recommended for Americans and that you're really traveling at your own risk and you have to watch out for kidnappings, carjackings and muggings and everything else you find in abundance

[02:31] in all the big well-known cities. Guess where? Up in the US. A touch of home right? If it really was like that but if you're down here and you know your zones and districts and neighborhoods it's not at all like that. And while we're talking on the security issue now I have to say that one of our 24 guests reported that her camera just might have been stolen or missing in action at least. In fact when the word spread we did think it was stolen because what else are you going to think? Besides we were moving from hotel to hotel so something like that's not impossible. And in the end we called that hotel, the Barcelo by the way, in the business center of Guatemala City and guess what? The camera was in her room and they were holding it for her, isn't that nice? So we did have our false alarms.

[03:19] Oh yes and there was another report of a passport being stolen from one of our guests and guess where that happened? In the Houston airport. I know it's not funny, sorry about that. It's just a bit ironic you know? Oh and by the way a lot of our guests came in a week or two early just to explore around a bit on their own. And you should know that none of them had ever been to Guatemala before but they knew all about that State Department warning. And here's another thing, every single one of the people coming to the seminar was told by a family member or friend that they were nuts for coming. So none of them had any boots on the ground experience down here at all. For them it was a totally new adventure. Only my word versus the US State Department I guess which means of course my word versus

[04:05] the full faith credit and power and PR machine of Big Brother America. Now I'm not saying we didn't have any incidents here on this seminar tour because you know when you get 24 people together from five different countries, people who varied in age from about 20 to 65 and the fact that a lot of the time people bounded about on their own, well you're going to have some incidents. In fact the only incident we really had was one of our attendees neglected to tell us about his medical condition. Or should I say conditions. And because of that he just couldn't keep up so we had to leave him in the hotel. But he did get to see the whole lecture part of the seminar the first three days which was cool. But he had a cane and he couldn't get around too well so in the future if I ever do another

[04:50] one of these I'll have to ask about stuff like that. I didn't this time. I just assumed everybody would be able to handle it. And I also neglected to stress the fact that we were up at five to six thousand feet so some people were feeling that too. But we have a lot of cities like that up in the first world too like for example Denver Colorado you know the Mile High City. Anyway I should take this in chronological order so it makes sense. Some people actually flew in about a week early and you know the seminar started on a Wednesday and the majority of people of course then came in on Monday and Tuesday. And man did I hear the stories I mean the airport stories from people coming through the states. You know TSA, shoes off, pat-downs and all that. And then I heard stories from people who just checked in.

[05:36] After they landed and were checking through the Guatemalan airport they just breezed right through like pre 9-11 in the states. No scanners, no pat-downs, no dogs, no shoes off, none of that stuff. And guess what I was told by some people that the little questionnaire that you have to fill out before you come into the country well it's in Spanish and most people didn't know Spanish on this tour. And so they had to ask for help with that thing from somebody, anybody in the airport. Because that's what you hand in to the customs and immigration guys when you check on through. And I was told by many people that they didn't quite know how to fill out that thing and they left a lot of parts blank. So guess what happened the Latin bureaucrats in charge at the airport just waved them right through. Yep that's why I call it the gringo advantage.

[06:23] That's what you see when you're off the tourist trail. I see that kind of stuff all the time. You're not going to see that happen in Panama and Costa Rica I'll tell you that. Now as people were coming in I did get quite a few reports about bad airline connections especially with a carrier called Spirit. I guess they're like the cheapo airline and they canceled a few flights at the very last minute so people were shuffled around to other airlines and came in many hours late in fact one guy I think had a seven or even eight hour delay. And some people actually got moved to flights a day before and even a day later. But I had people at the airport all the time waiting to collect folks. Oh and by the way I have to tell you I had six females five from the bilingual expensive university all but one perfectly bilingual because of course they went to the expensive

[07:11] bilingual schools all their lives and they were available for the first three days of the seminar and a few of them tagged along later when we went on the tour of the maquilas the factories and the IT technology center stuff. And you know these young ladies who spoke perfect English all but one and she was there because four or five of our attendees did speak a little Spanish and they asked if they could have someone available to bone up on their Spanish during the tour. Besides the young ladies on the seminar and at the tour were me of course and Jose our lawyer and legal representative and Mauricio a very special technology guy who led us on the technology tour and gave us a short presentation at the seminar about what's going on right now in Latin America regarding IT stuff with his focus on Guatemala of course.

[08:01] Now here's a guy who was a producer on the production team for a number of blockbuster Hollywood movies and you wonder how could that be. Well Hollywood is figuring out that they could send a lot of their work down here to Latin America and outsource some of the more expensive stuff the computer graphics the background you see in these movies like skies and waves and boats and everything that's not exactly involved with the principal actors you know they stand mostly in front of green screens these days. Well who do you think does the computer graphics that ends up in the green screen in the background. Well they outsource a lot of that to guess where down here in Latin America and at our seminar we had Mauricio a crack producer and IT guy doing his bit for all of us and leading us on a guided tour.

[08:48] So I guess a lot of you are wondering if we talked about things that we can't talk about on the radio of course we did but I didn't the first day the first day was just a general orientation to Latin America and Guatemala then the first afternoon we headed off to Antigua Guatemala one of those off the gringo trail small towns that I have on my 17 top picks list you know that free report you can download from the expat wisdom website. Anyway we went there and checked into a boutique hotel and we booked the whole thing like I said we could only have 24 people because they could only hold 24 people in my little staff then of course we went out on the town and the next morning we had our legal presentation by our attorney Jose in the back garden area of the boutique hotel a very unusual but cool

[09:37] place to have a PowerPoint presentation I might add and then I spoke a little bit and mentioned quite a few things that you could never talk about on the radio well I guess you could but you'd have to save them anonymously that's for sure and as far as the people attending that message was all good as far as they were concerned I know that and then we spent an afternoon at a small to medium sized coffee plantation where they sell their top grade coffee for about seven or eight dollars a pound and they ship most of it to Japan where they sell it for $50 a cup not a pound a cup and then it was another night on the town and you know Antigua is a colonial city of about 30,000 people with over 200 fantastic colonial Spanish ruins from a couple of big earthquakes that hit a few hundred years ago and because

[10:27] it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site you really can't mess with the look of it it's all cobblestone streets and stuff too so if you start a business there you have to do it behind the colonial walls or you can buy one of the 200 ruined convention churches and make a restaurant or a hotel out of it too or even a health spa or an auditorium or a concert stage Antigua is one of those little gems almost no one in the first world knows about and the tourists well they're almost all local Latin Americans usually upscale ones with a little money or Europeans coming in and Antigua is noted for Spanish language schools and immersion programs too and by the way I forgot to tell you at the airport there were a lot of people sometimes maybe even up to a hundred waiting for people arriving

[11:14] on a plane but most of them maybe 60 to 80 percent were the short brown indigenous people in classic indigenous hand-woven Mayan styled clothing now there were some gringos coming in here and there and they were all involved in some kind of do-gooder church groups like the Lutheran Christian Council coming down for a couple of weeks to work on some kind of project a school or a hospital or whatever out in the hinterlands and how do I know that that's because all the buddies that were meeting them had signs saying Christian this and Christian that step right this way and you know I was at the airport a lot too picking up people and I should have said just look for the tallest guy there but then there were a few holy rollers walking around too so I guess that wouldn't have worked who knows there might have been a Mormon around named Johnny and you could have gotten off to a really

[12:01] different adventure if you've gone with him so anyway that just proves one thing you have these countries like Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Salvador, Bolivia and Paraguay on the State Department's feces list so the only kind of people you really see at the airport are the locals and the non-profit religious groups and the occasional first world businessmen down here minding a call center or a franchise plus the occasional European backpacker but rarely a pure American tourist and by the way somebody asked me why are all those indigenous people waiting at the airport who are they waiting for some kind of indigenous superstar that's made it big in the first world and it was come back as the conquering hero well you'll be surprised to hear that that's pretty accurate nearly all of the indigenous people in Latin America are in the lower socio-economic

[12:50] class they're really the uneducated and downtrodden class here anyway every one of those lower class families has people who want to escape to the first world sneak in illegally of course since they can never get a visa because like I said before you know what it takes to get a visa to the United States that is anyone from a Latin American country first of all you've got to have a letter from your employer that you've been working in that company for at least three years and since most indigenous people work off the books for cash there is no employer so they strike out on that count then you have to show the US embassy a credit card that has at least a two thousand dollar maximum on it and about 90 percent of indigenous people don't have a credit card and the ones that do don't have a maximum anywhere near two thousand bucks the locals don't

[13:40] have a US dollar denominated credit card what would they need that for and all these rules are down at the US embassy when you're implying for a visa because the US figures if you've got a steady job and a credit card you have no reason to go up to the states and just drop everything overstay your visa stay illegally and get a job somewhere in the underground economy that's why they make it so tough to get a visa now people who qualify for a visa like that are upper middle class to wealthy by Latin standards of course and believe me only about one in 50 Latin American adults can qualify for a visa like that the legal way so when indigenous people go up to the states 99 percent of the time it's slipping through illegally like a wetback or as they call them down here mojados which is Spanish for wetback mojado means wet and believe it or not the word

[14:30] mojado is so common it's not even a derogatory term but if you say wetback to the wrong person up north you get a knuckle sandwich out of it so back to the question why are all those indigenous people standing around at the airport waiting for people to come in on a plane well that's because they are waiting for their families conquering hero you see every once in a while an illegal alien up in the united states does pretty good for himself he gets a steady job dry walling or painting cars and after staying under the radar for some years not getting caught and being a pretty good citizen that is being a pretty good citizen as far as illegal citizens go anyway every couple of years congress or a president or someone in office announces an amnesty program for

[15:16] illegals for certain people that are in the country a long time who can get a lawyer or an employer or a relative to sponsor them then they can get a green card and go back and forth to the home country legally i'm sure you've heard that goes on i've seen it in the paper a bunch of times myself in fact i think jimmy carter did it a couple of times during his term in fact i remember in 1986 there was a huge amnesty program where hundreds of thousands of illegals got their green cards anyway so here's what happens illegals are in the country they have a job for a long time and they send back a hundred or two every month to the poor folks back home in nicaragua or guadamala or whatever the folks who are just getting by making only about 250 a month now obviously in

[16:01] the eyes of the family back home these guys are heroes they've just about doubled the income of a family haven't they and they do it sometimes for years and years as illegals and they don't like to chance coming back and visiting the family because being illegals they could always get hung up at the border or robbed or whatever you probably know it's a dangerous thing traveling illegally from the united states down through mexico and stuff so meanwhile these illegals up in the states are sending a hundred or two back every month sometimes for years and back home in latin america that money's helping out the whole family so now comes an amnesty period like i mentioned before suddenly fernando's got a green card and he can go back and forth legally and because indigenous people by nature are very frugal he's been living up in the united states frugally and saving his

[16:48] dog and when he goes back to visit for the first time in five or even ten years he takes a plane like a conquering hero that's why there's such a welcoming committee at the airport you get the you got every extended relative that's ever benefited from the dough he's sent back over the years and they're just waiting to hoist him up as the conquering hero which in a way he is but let's get back to the seminar another thing people mentioned as soon as i picked him up at the airport was the fact that the airport did not look third world at all it's a typical modern building structure without the typical hordes of people at the door trying to sell you trinkets and stuff off the tourist track in the big cities down here almost none of that goes on because there's not a lot of tourists why should the locals hang around the airport when there's

[17:36] no one to sell their junk to so off the tourist trail the airports are pretty modern uncrowded and actually kind of clean some people arriving for the seminar were actually kind of surprised about that you know no one pulling on your pants leg asking for money and stuff there's just none of that at the guadamalan airport so anyway after the first part of the seminar was over that went from wednesday to friday evening on saturday some people went home just a handful actually and the rest of them split up because we weren't going to meet again till monday morning to go on the private business tour so some of the people went to what's considered the most beautiful lake in the world lake at titlian a mile high lake surrounded by three big volcanoes and by the way

[18:22] there's only one city you can get to by car it's called panachell and the rest of the cities are dotted around the lake and they're not really big each of about a half a dozen towns with only a few thousand people or less but the only way to get there is by boat so when you hit these towns they have very few cars in them in fact almost none just the occasional scooter and tuk tuk to motor people around now this area is also on my 17 hidden paradise report on the expat wisdom website so you can check that out if you want and i know what you're thinking everybody thinks there's some lake in their state or their county that's considered the most beautiful lake in the world but let me tell you you shouldn't say that until you see this lake now i didn't say it's the most

[19:10] beautiful lake in the world just look on the internet all this huxley you remember that author of brave new world and others like the doors of perception which jim morson named the band after the doors huxley said it a hundred years ago and built a house there the areas around the lake are low key enough that very famous people have built houses there all on the qt of course like for example brian wilson of the beach boys cat stephens well he calls himself usef something now mel gibson sylvester Stallone and a lot of others and i'll bet a hundred to one you've never even heard of the place except of course on this show anyway the seminar group that split off from there came back with glowing reports and i hooked him up with a rather spectacular hotel that

[19:57] cost all of 42 dollars a night and i'm willing to bet that's the best 42 hotel they've ever stayed in in their lives and not because of the hotel which was a nice hotel but for the million dollar view off the balcony and while that happy group was at lake at it land for saturday and sunday jose our seminar lawyer and i took our group on a city tour of guatemala city you know one of the so-called most dangerous cities on the state department hit list and believe me we took him around we showed him the good the bad and the ugly we showed him the good the places you could walk day or night no problem perfect security the bad places that were okay during the day but you'd never want to walk around at night and the ugly places you could drive through day and night in your car but you just don't want to get out at all if you don't have to kind of like in certain

[20:45] places in cleveland in chicago and new york and atlanta and los angeles you get the idea and we took him to some places that are absolutely first world in every way except for maybe the prices and if you didn't know that the signs were in spanish and the people spoke spanish you'd think you were in an upper middle class section of any big city in the first world in fact i kept on getting comments like that all the time to tell you the truth there were a lot of statements like wow i can't believe this is the third world i heard things like that every day throughout the seminar oh and i have to mention it did rain a little bit here and there and we supplied umbrellas of course now on sunday we made a little detour and i took the people on a real estate tour

[21:30] showing them the mini bubble that exists in guatemala city and in fact many bubbles like that exist all throughout latin american big cities but not the smaller towns i showed them massive stretches of construction commercial centers private homes residential towers office buildings huge construction sites buildings going up down here like they once did in the 90s back in the states it's an obvious bubble just looking for a pin to pop it and there's so many ways you can tell it's just about to blow some of them being of course no money down cheap financing realtors thinking it's never going to end 20 story business towers with only two floors occupied all that kind of stuff it's a classic bubble and since we have hindsight and the gringo advantage

[22:20] going for us we can just wait around a year or two watch the bubble blow and buy in at 25 cents on the dollar if we want so anyway on monday we all met up for the business tour we went to the it center and a place called the business incubator where you can rent a little cubicle and set up an office for 50 bucks a month and all you have to do is bring a computer and a business idea and you're off and running and we visited a building with floor after floor of it companies all were modern open loft style offices and if i remember correctly one of the it companies had 2600 square feet of business space and i think they were paying 500 a month in rent anyway that night we went out and partied as usual and the next day we went to the maquilas the textile factories

[23:08] that everybody calls sweat shops up north but believe me they are not sweat shops not in the least first we went to an ultra modern clothing silk screening place which was all computerized of course and i think i heard the owner say he had more than 250 employees anyway the owners are insider friends of mine and they gave excellent presentations of the kind you're never going to get on a regular tour believe me and by the way just try to get a regular tour you can't because you see these guys are extra gun shy of people coming down from the first world and trying to get into their factories for two reasons because they're worried about people stealing their designs secondly because textile factories have that sweatshop stigma that's carried over from first world media reports you know that kathy lee gifford and the puff daddy sweatshop connection

[23:58] in the media a few years ago anyway you're not going to get a tour unless you know the right people believe me and i do want to thank my friends michael and jeffrey for allowing us to go in there because that was mighty cool of them to let us do that and i want to thank them for answering all the questions my group threw at them and by the way both of them long term expats gave us a nice history of just how they ended up down here and how they made their fortunes and by the way both of them repeatedly said to people in our group that they never go back to the states they just love it here and they both said they don't miss anything from the first world and they don't feel in any way threatened or in danger down here even though it's on the state department's feces list and you know my friends jeff and michael the mikilah owners were good enough to tell my group certain things that i can never talk about on the radio and i do thank them

[24:47] for being candid and really open about that kind of stuff too you know the personal questions you always like to ask people who are living a completely different life than you you want to know what's going on behind the scenes but you usually really have to know a person before you can get that kind of information out of them and still sometimes you just won't get it so the bottom line is i'm sure my group walked away from this seminar with a lot of very strong impressions which in some ways is mission accomplished in itself now i'm sure some people had their complaints because while you get 24 people together they're not going to agree on everything you wouldn't want them to in fact this group was so intelligent and diverse to me this seminar was worth just getting to know these guys and gals anyway if i ever get tossed out of latin america i've got 24 basements i can crash in at least i think i got the invitation

[25:38] to crash i'm not sure and as to what my seminar group thought about the food down here the price of things the roads the traffic the people the scenery the weather well what i plan on doing in a couple of weeks is getting some audio testimonies from these guys and posting it up on the expat wisdom website so y'all can hear what they have to say about it in detail in their own words the bottom line is this i think everybody had a good time i did even though i blew out my voice did the seminar accomplish its purpose well instead of me snapping to judgment here why don't you just wait and go to the expat wisdom.com website and in a few weeks we'll have some of those testimonies up there and you can hear for yourself who knows they might dump on me

[26:25] oh and by the way you might be wondering did anybody get sick well yes some people actually did a handful of people did come down with a stomach flu but i also noticed that my hygiene recommendations weren't all being followed like they should have been you know the stuff i mentioned on the show all the time many of the group were sucking on ice cubes and drinking out of glasses instead of strictly out of bottles which i always do and almost never get sick in fact i haven't been sick in over five years except for the occasional migraine so the question is am i going to do another seminar like this someday well i'll have to see depending on what kind of email response i get from you guys out there were they really having a good old time in that god-forsaken country that begins with a g well judging by the fact that some people came strolling into the

[27:15] hotel at 4 30 in the morning you be the judge by the way an international committee just rated guadamalans as the fifth happiest people in the world out of 190 plus countries i wonder why the u.s state department doesn't warn us about that revolting development south of the border 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 america the expat files at gmail.com once again the expat files at gmail.com see you next time