New ONG stats

It was reported yesterday that there have been at least 2997 human rights violations in Guatemala during the first 9 months of 2008, including 94 extra-judicial executions.

Got the 'ump

"At eleven o'clock we came in sight of Puenta Gorda, a settlement of Carib Indians, about a hundred and fifty miles down the coast , and the first place at which I had directed the Captain to stop. As we approached we saw an opening on the water's edge, with a range of low houses, reminding me of a clearing in our forests at home. It was but a speck on the great line of coast; on both sides were primeval trees. Behind towered an extraordinary mountain, apparently broken in two, like the back of a two-humped camel..."
John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (1841).

A settlement of Carib Indians....

That these people are what we know today as Garifuna is made clear later when Stephens recounts a meeting with an extremely old lady in Punta Gorda who hailed originally, he notes, from the island of St Vincent.

However, at no point does Stephens suggest that these people might have mixed their blood with former African slaves or even that they bore any resemblance to the creoles and mulattoes he had come across on his previous stop in Belize City. This is interesting, because these days the differences between the Garifuna and the creoles in the rest of the country would appear to be largely cultural - any indigenous ancestry is pretty hard to pick out.

Just after I made my own recent stop in Punta Gorda I was reading Peter Chapman's Jungle Capitalists and it became clear that the United Fruit Company under Minor Keith had imported thousands of Jamaican labourers to precisely this area of the Bay of Amatique.

Therefore, it might well be the case that the communities living along this stretch of coastline today have more Jamaican blood than anything else, but have managed to retain more of the cultural inheritance of the Black Caribs of St Vincent. This makes sense- come to think of it - because, as Garifuna mythology relates, the original African element to their heritage derived from a single slave ship which floundered off the coast of St Vincent.

It's not...

....the economy, stoopid.

The ride continues...

I read an interesting piece the other day by Frank Furedi about how the unreal economy has come to outstrip the real economy, whilst the two have become so intertwined as to make any attempt at retrospective regulation very fraught indeed.

As I've mentioned before, globally the 'unreal' economy had got to a point where it was worth almost twice the real economy...but in Iceland, described by Furedi as a country which has transformed itself into "a sub-sub-sub-prime hedge fund" the banking and financial services sector had assets valued at NINE times its annual GDP of £6.8billion. As with Northern Rock last year bankruptcy was surely always waiting at the end of the cycle.

It's ironic that Coutts, 'the Queen's bank' is now 60% owned by UK taxpayers. Think of all those high net worth individuals and their socialised assets!

Idiomatic Chapin (3)

Prestar - verb: viz Colaborar

School's out...

Most of the kids here in Guatemala have finished their exams and this week begin a long break lasting until early January.

V's niece Amy had to go back for one last day however, because today is her head teacher's birthday and the school has kindly thrown a party for her at which pupils are expected to turn up with a present...if they care about their academic future, that is. 

That kind of thing was rife at Cambridge University, but somehow I expected that even Guatemala would be less corrupt!

A Tough Sell

Marxists aren't the only axe-grinders that have been turning with renewed energy to the task of compressing reality to such an extent that it begins to sparkle once again with proof points for their theoretical systems...it seems that certain sub-species of libertarian are also feeling largely unchastened by recent events. (Though others might surmise that the Chicago School was about to go into an extended recess.)

Blogger Brian Micklethwait reports the views of Antoine at the 'Libertarian Alliance' talk:

"The most interesting thing I learned, assuming Antoine was right about it, was that after the first mega-billion dollar bale-out package failed to be agreed by the politicians of the USA, the market immediately went up. But then, as soon as a revised bale-out package, containing more bribes, was agreed, the market went down. "We should do nothing" is a tough political sell, but the smart move, said Antoine."

Well, let's not assume Antoine was right about this. If the market really worked this way, in perfect chronological step with major external events, even some of the floundering suits in Canary Wharf could have easily survived the credit crunch. Even the most novice of investors has probably heard the old adage Buy on the rumour, sell on the news.

Markets take time to digest major interventions like this - one reason trading in London may be deliberately suspended tomorrow after the government injects some cash into HBOS and RBS.

I can lay no claim to being as all-wise as the market, but from my position here - cashed out, sold up and moved away some time ago - this is how it looked to me:

- When Bush and Paulson first announced the concept of a bail-out the markets rallied.

- Anticipating a vote against in the House and witnessing the systemic incompetence of both the individuals and institutions concerned, non-US markets crashed first, eventually dragging the Dow down with them. What they saw were American lawmakers too wrapped up in their limited belief systems to take effective action at the critical moment.

- Yet just after the NO vote was announced the markets still tanked even further.

- Later in the week the Senate re-jigged the bail-out bill, but informed and not-so-informed commentators had already overrun the media, in many cases delivering a sceptical verdict on the capacity of the Bush-Paulson plan to free up inter-bank lending and recapitalise the system where it needs it most. Punters took note...

- By the time the bill made it back to the House, many investors had moved on psychologically to the end game. Any small rally that happened in-between these events was simply an artefact of the volatility that arises when drowning men thrash about in the water.

- Let's do nothing is surely not the smartest play right now...

Spanish Flu

Killed 50m people. Amongst its last victims was Sir Mark Sykes, a British diplomat and Conservative Party politician who died at the Hotel Lotti in Paris on February 16, 1919. 

Last week the Beeb tracked the exhumation of Sir Mark's mortal remains - which had helpfully been returned to Britain in a lead coffin - by a team led by a virologist called Professor Oxford.

As this all took place but a month ago the programme ended without any firm conclusions on how scientifically useful the biological matter extracted from Sir Mark's grave might eventually prove to be, but it was interesting for other reasons - such as the portrait it provided of a man largely forgotten by history who would certainly have ended up Prime Minister, his living relatives assured us.  And of the clash of religious, cultural (and bureaucratic!) notions that still surround the process of exhumation in Britain today. 

Jungle Capitalists (2)

Chapman characterises United Fruit as a precursor of the modern multi-national, setting against its multifarious abuses its equally numerous acts of 'social responsibility', a layer of corporate activity it might even be said to have invented. (The company built an excellent hospital at Quiriguá, where it also funded the excavation of the Maya ruins.)

While there is a degree of truth in this, my own perspective on el pulpo is closer to that of García Márquez when he referred in his autobiography to the "absolute empire" of UFC - the late nineteenth century Americas were self-consciously post-colonial, so entities such as this were the only way that the great new power was going to be able to participate in the frantic imperialism of the period. (Something similar was achieved by the British in Argentina which joined our own empire at the same time in all but name.) 

Chapman also notes that UFC was one of the ways that American capitalism could experiment with its purer 'liberal' form long before the advent of Reagan and Thatcher. Back home in the democratic West welfare systems were taking shape, but down in bananaland, United Fruit maintained its own labour laws, generally paying its workers in scrip which could only be spent in company stores.

Yet the power of United Fruit proved to be, in Chapman's words, "a huge confidence trick", seemingly built on smoke and mirrors, and it evaporated all very suddenly - a tendency we can observe today with other systems built on unadulterated economic liberlism! 

Men like Keith and Zemurray could well have aspired, deep down, to bring material and cultural progress to Central America, but they were also highly opportunistic capitalists, who insinuated their organisations into countries like Guatemala and Costa Rica by invitation, because they had at their disposal the resources for rapid modernisation that were largely absent in these nations. The very nature of this relationship encouraged them to behave in a similar fashion to filibusters like William Walker. 

When necessary United Fruit destroyed its own crops to keep prices up and always held kept vast quantities of land un-cultivated, as a hedge against future adversities, such as the ever-present danger of disease. When the inevitable happened and their banana trees perished, they even went about dismantling the infrastructure they had constructed, ripping up railway track and chucking it into the sea.

Few of the railroads that UFC managed across the region are in use today, and as Chapman puts it. today "Central America follows broadly the US public transport model whereby the better-off travel by air and the poorer by bus, if at all."

Naked Ceviche

When I was living down on the farm with my father back in April I got into the habit of knocking up what I have come to call 'naked' ceviches, which contain everything except the main ingredient, meat or seafood.

Last night we had just finished chopping up the tomato, onion and mint when we realised that we had more or less run out of limones. And then V made the serendipitous discovery that mandarin juice works pretty well too!

Neither of us ever really knew what to do with aubergines back in the UK, but over the past few weeks here in Antigua they've become one of our favourite ingredients. Guatemalan aubergines - berenjenas - are more pear-shaped than the ones you find back home, which tend to be shaped like the balloons used by kiddies' entertainers. They are delicious simply fried in thin strips and are great for adding to meat dishes.

We've also been cooking with a lot of uniquely Central American ingredients recently, such as loroco, chipilín and miltomate. Guatemala is also one of the world's biggest producers of French beans and we've been buying around 4lbs of these a week, for which our greengrocer-on-wheels charges just Q10.

Derivatives....UR doing it wrong

The great irony right now about the global derivatives market which has been approaching a valuation representing twice that of the entire world economy - is that these financial instruments were first introduced by commodities traders as a way of reducing their exposure to risk!

Today's New York Times takes a 'hard loo' at the Greenspan legacy.

What weather...que hueva

The tail end of the rainy season has been especially soggy this year, apparently a result of the phenomenon known as La Niña, el Niño's frigid little sister. Last month was the wettest September in twenty years.

Parts of El Panorama are assuming a somewhat Venetian aspect. This is the road running alongside the ex-Spa which pupils at the school behind the yellow wall must pass each day.

For some reason the Muni thought it would be a good idea to start cobbling the street that skirts the northern flank of the church last month, rather than waiting a few weeks for the start of the dry season. Every time they dig a hole it fills with water so they have had to keep sending in huge trucks to remove all the mud. This is then sloshed around the rest of the town as the exiting trucks make an even bigger mess of the uncobbled roads of the town. Good plan.

The weather polarity seems to be reversing now - the afternoons this week have been pleasant, following some fairly grotesque starts to the day.

There are essentially two seasons here in Guatemala, the warm and wet one just ending, followed by a cool and dry one which, although we are still north of the equator, is known locally as verano (summer). During the transitional months at either end of the seasons, Guatemalans experience the other two available variations of weather: warm and dry and cool and wet respectively.

Guatemala in the good ol' days

Thanks to Scott for this short compilation of old films shot in Guatemala. It includes footage of the 1930 opening of the now defunct northern railway linking Guatemala City with the Atlantic coast. The well-dressed folk in the foreground are contented funcionarios of the United Fruit Company.

Under Minor Keith UFC's modus operandum in Central America was to offer to build a railway in return for the gift of massive banana estates alongside the route. In Guatemala however, the majority of the line and the port of Puerto Barrios itself had already been built with public money. This didn't stop United Fruit from twisting the arm of President Estrada Cabrera, so that in 1904 the dictator signed over to them all the rolling stock, stations and telegraph lines as well as Puerto Barrios and the railroad itself.

UFC's rep in the country, one Percival Farquahar, was to insist at a grand dinner thrown by the German Legation that no bribes had been involved prior to the signing of this contract. The oligarchs laughed, but in truth Cabrera Estrada's inducement turned out to have been but a handfull of railway shares. (According to Peter Chapman, no more than the price of a drink!) At the time a sudden flood of Brazilian coffee into world markets had left the Guatemalan government in queer street.

In Honduras the government tried to strike a different deal with an independent American railroad constructor called John C. Trautwine, offering to reward him for every mile of line completed. As a result the railroad wound its way around the coastal plane never quite beginning the ascent up to Tegucigalpa, which remained isloated atop its escarpment, whilst Trautwine retired home a wealthy man...his railroad incomplete.

Judging by this film, bus travel in Guatemala City was a lot more civilised in the 30s! One has to suspect that it reflects some of what García Márquez has described as the "falso esplendor" of the Banana Company.

The Great Unwinding

Let's face it, historians are not going to say many kind things about the Bush presidency. American author Paul Auster recently reported that he has been having the feeling we've all been living in some ghastly parallel universe for the past eight years. Back in the real world, Al Gore is completing his second term...

In 2001 the economy of Argentina went off the edge of a cliff. Amidst cries of 'Ar-gen-tina...Ar-gen-tina' the response of local lawmakers was the biggest ever sovereign debt default in world history - $81bn. That figure should give us an idea of the size of the problem the wider global economy now faces. For example, the £500bn bank rescue pledged yesterday by Gordon Brown will take the UK's national debt up to 65% of GDP.

Argentina should be a lesson to us all. Its economy was bigger than that of France and Germany before World War I and even after half a century of political and economic mismanagement, 60% of Argentines in the 60s still considered themselves to be "middle class". These days however, in terms of income distribution, the country has little to distinguish it from its neighbours...other than its peculiarly anguished sense of entitlement.

It took the Argies 7 years to turn things round to a point where they could start to pay off some of the debt they had defaulted on. They needn't have bothered...

My Bulgarian friend Stefan joked yesterday that he has now lived through both the fall of socialism and the fall of capitalism! He has only the fall of New Labour to look forward to now.

And last night Jim Ellis, Assistant Managing Editor of Business Week told his CNN interviewer that what we have witnessed over the past few days is nothing less than "a giant socialisation of the banking system".

Recent economic downturns in the West have resulted from sudden contractions of consumer demand. This time though there will be something of a double-whammy effect - with little credit in the system the market itself seizes up causing production itself to slow, regardless of how tight consumers' belts may already have become.

The local reckoning

I'm expecting there to be a bit of a shake-out amongst businesses in La Antigua. In almost every business area there are simply too many operations chasing after what will soon be a dwindling number of visitors and their cash. The rather obvious surplus of 'boutique' hotels should be curtailed fairly quickly.

Guatemala isn't that cheap relative to Mexico or other parts of Central America. The capital is recognised as the most expensive city in the region for example.

Menu prices in La Antigua might be 30-50% cheaper than London equivalents, but eating out (especially at the establishments that suck in the gringos) is comparably expensive when one considers what it costs to buy the ingredients at the market and cook for yourself at home.

Fast food has to be one of the biggest rackets running here. Even with Sterling still quite strong against the Dollar, a medium-sized pizza at Domino's costs roughly the same as it would in the UK, yet the chain's overheads in Guatemala would have to be significantly lower surely?

A number of foreigners who have been living here off local ventures for years appear to be selling up and shipping out, one of our closest friends here amongst them. He states that mounting concerns about security and the increased scrutiny of start-ups by the local tax authorities are further discouraging ex-pat entrepreneurs.

Many of Antigua's most high profile businesses have changed ownership in the past couple of years (La Escudilla, Welten, Rainbow Cafe etc.) and in some cases from foreign to local hands.

Ragnarok

I came here to quietly sit out the death agonies of the 'new economy' and sit them out I will.

When I graduated in 1989 the last of the really big downturns was just about to gain real momentum. In the past I have referred to a 'lost generation' of top graduates from that and the following couple of years that failed to land those dream jobs and went into a kind of limbo from which many had to extract themselves by resorting to an entrepreneurialism that perhaps wasn't in their fundamental mental make-up.

I wouldn't want to have graduated in 2008 - the current crop of grads will be carrying significant debt and the City will be much harder hit this time round.

The system shuddered quite severely back in 2001 but crucially the financial castle in the air didn't itself come crashing down, and subsequently western governments went out of their way to make sure that it continued to elevate. The current mess can't be blamed entirely on a bunch of city spivs.

'Jews and Cuban Food'

Taken

Neeson plays Bryan, a divorced CIA 'preventer' who has retired in order to spend more time with his 17-year-old daughter Kim, now living in palatial circumstances with her mother and wealthy step-father.

Kim needs his permission to go on a European vacation starting in gay Paris. Bryan at first refuses. He knows what it's like out there...

In the end he caves in and no sooner have Kim and her friend Amanda arrived at Charles de Gaulle than they have been hit on by a charming Frenchie acting as a hook for a gang of Albanian 'scummers' whose business is an unlikely kidnapping and people-trafficking racket.

Kim might be a spoiled brat, but she is crucially also '100% pure'. Her friend Amanda however is blonde and also a bit of a go-er, and so conclusively marked as a likely non-survivor from the outset.

After the pair have been abducted, Bryan legs it to Paris, with the words of a former colleague ringing in his ears - he has at best 96 hours to locate little Kimmy, who is most likely already being pumped with drugs and gang-raped by Balkan low-lifes.

Although the prologue had clearly established Bryan's relationship with his daughter as more than a bit obsessive, his subsequent treatment of dodgy flic Jean Claude's altogether innocent wife is a clue to just how personally he's decided to take this.

The ingredients from what follows derive from a range of action-unintentional comedies such as Commando (retired special forces guy systemtically kills men who kidnapped his daughter), Frantic (American man seeks wife in Paris, snatched from her hotel bedroom by horde of sharp-suited Ahmeds), Hostel (attention all Yanks, watch out for those well-organised Eastern European scummers) and Kiss of the Dragon (Paris is a cess-pit of thuggish and corrupt cops, sadistic pimps and all-round slime-bags).

I had to see this movie after Kermode's hilarious review, because I just knew I would enjoy it immensely. In truth it's no more packed with 'racist stereotypes' of foreigners than Hostel was, and that was conceived by an American. Taken was instead co-scripted by Luc Besson - creator of the original nettoyer (cleaner) - and takes its cues with regards to the state of France's Gendarmerie and its baroque criminal underworld from native exemplars. (These stem from a genre within French cinema that is as absurdist as Guy Ritchie's guns n' geezers.)

The problems with the plot go far deeper than 'who's driving the boat? I loved the way Neeson was able to gain entry into the lair of the Albanian mobsters by convincing them he was a senior French cop, while speaking only English with an Irish-American accent. Elsewhere though he moves things along with unusual CIA techniques that are both resourceful and original.

Worst Nightmare

For a while now it has been bothering me a bit that Governor Palin reminds me of someone...

And then last night during the VP debate it came to me in a flash - she's an amalgam of all my worst nightmares from two decades of working in advertising and PR. 

The sort of well-presented individual for whom connecting with the audience - 'getting the chemistry right' - is vastly more important than having some depth in their grasp of subjects about which it is fairly important for them to be properly knowledgeable. 

The kind who can keep an ickily insincere smile in place as they discourse forcefully, if without genuine passion, on matters safely within their comfort zone - and have a practiced knack for steering discussions back there whenever they seem prone to wander into trickier territory.

Biden may be a bit old school, but he appeared throughout last night's debate at Washington University to have access to factual information that he hadn't picked up in the last few days.  

And he could easily have been rougher with her - by pointing our her creationist credentials and the fact that her own track record up in Alaska indicates that she is anything but tolerant of diversity - yet such is the state of American politics that this would probably have lost him points overall. Instead he ended up playing the role of indulgent uncle. 

Heck, by the end of the debate I was even beginning to feel sorry for her myself. Hick charm works, darnnit. 

The Living Dead

"We are so fucked" is pretty much the only funny line in Scary Movie 4...and is also as good a way as any of summing up the present situation as the global political and economic clusterfuck shifts into a scary new phase. 

At times like these I'm glad that most of our money is under the bed - metaphorically speaking - but it's been tempting this week to have a bit of a punt on The Campbell's Soup Company, one of the few leading American firms to see its market capitalisation rise as Bush and Paulson's bail-out plan hit a brick wall on Monday.

Campbell's was a major beneficiary from 9-11 too, the assumption amongst investors apparently being that Americans typically respond to perceived end-of-the-world scenarios by stocking up on tinned food. 

More than anything this week, the spectacle of American lawmakers digging these kind of mental bunkers for themselves has had outside onlookers staring on in wide-eyed panic. The separation of powers that underpins the US Constitution has only served to exacerbate the failure of proper perspective we somehow already suspected them to be guilty of.

"The slippery slope to socialism," some whined as the house of cards built on interlocking debt started to collapse around them. What's in it for 'Main Street' others pondered as the wealth-generating systems of the whole world hang in the balance. 

For years now a failure to fully comprehend the world politically has characterised the generally de-stabilising effect of American leadership. But the spectacle of them misapprehending (and therefore mismanaging) the economic situation is now causing consternation amongst even those who generally support the free market value system atop which sit the crash-diet cats of Wall Street. 

If the petty ideological hobby-horses and the naked self-interest in Congress weren't bad enough, there's also the lame duck President (a 'dead duck' now, according to Democratic strategist Paul Begala) to factor in, plus a pair of presidential candidates who are already starting to hobble around discomfitingly. 

Last year Guatemala finally got itself a President with a social conscience, but as the local economy founders in 2008 he is already being threatened with a lynching by some sectors of the rural poor that formed his power base just a short while ago. 

Senator Obama might conceivably get himself an eight year stay at the White House, but if some economists are right, he ought to have waited a few more years before applying for the job, because it may well be very hard for him to make a success of it now given some of the expectations raised during the early part of his campaign. 

Professor Nouriel Roubini, AKA 'Dr Doom', reckons that the recession to come will be L-shaped not V-shaped, because of similarities he identifies with the Japanese banking collapse in the early 90s. This resulted in a decade of depression, partly because of the way the government allowed 'zombie banks' to continue to shamble around the sector, so that investor panic was never quite quelled. 

Roubini calculates that over a hundred major international financial institutions are effectively insolvent right now and that the best approach would be what he describes as 'triage' - allow the truly fucked banks to fold and then recapitalise the remainder. Simply using public money to pick up some of the toxic debt won't be enough to restore confidence, he asserts, because the banks still won't trust each other enough to restore liquidity.

It's a compelling argument, but the problem I have with it is that a row of wounded and dying banks is not quite the same thing as a row of wounded and dying soldiers - because there are interdependencies between financial institutions which make the process of triage especially tricky in current circumstances. 

"We are so fucked..."