Over Grazing

One of the abiding features of La Antigua is that there is hardly any business opportunity with relatively modest start-up costs that doesn't quickly turn into a sort of plague.

Spanish schools, cybercafes, spas, barista cafés, fried chicken outlets, animal rescue charities, taco shops etc. etc.

Just yesterday we learned, in the light of the welcome prohibition on horse-drawn carriages for animal welfare protection, that there were TEN different operators in this space.

It's a variety of perpetual and endemic over-grazing of the commons and very few of our mayors have been able to get a grip on it.

In fact the only time I have ever seen one of these plagas controlled in time was during the great tuktuk boom of the early noughties — a moment when it seemed that half of the households in our neighbourhood were planning to invest in a brand new red mototaxi.

The end result is invariably that the flood of new suppliers effectively kills off the opportunity for everyone.

Now Susancio and co are trying to impose some (punitive) control on the heladeros of La Antigua with predictable displays of displeasure, though as ever the Muni is acting more like a mafia than an elected body which has given due consideration to the sort of fair regulation that would settle things down.