Go South, Young Man

In the mid-1990s, a Guatemalan songwriter released a song called Si el Norte Fuera El Sur. Ricardo Arjona takes a few jabs at North American mono-chromic – or money-chromic – culture and war-loving politics and plays with how things would be different if North was South. In the last line, Arjona concludes that if North was South, it would be the same shit. "Si el Norte fuera el Sur, sería la misma porquería."




I've been traveling in El Sur for the past 2+ months. I started in a country that is currently fighting off El Norte's imperial influence (Venezuela), and then moved on to countries that overthrew US-sponsored military dictatorships in the 1980's (Argentina and Brazil). It's quite amazing what people "left" to decide to their fates are capable of.

But the US learned a lesson in the 1980's and made sure that the alternatives to the dictatorships it sponsors in the oil-rich Middle East are created by them and scary enough to make people hang on to military tools – or bring them back to power in a "popular-coup".  That term sounded as a joke at first, but it's starting to sound like a popular joke.

The progress South American countries have made over the past 30 years puts them on track to bypass El Norte at some point in the future. At the pace the US keeps droning itself in its military-booted-foot, that future might be soon.

While the US war freak is juicing up on economic steroids, countries to its south are being built around self-sufficiency and sustainability.

When was the last time you heard the word sufficient in english? According to the google ngram tool, it's becoming extinct.

I know I'm oversimplifying and not really getting into the details and the problems of these countries. But in reality it's even much more basic than that. It's the societal mindset on which countries are built. Some countries decided to harvest human energy, while others are obsessed with fossils. 

Guess, who I'm betting on to have a better future? 

That's why I disagree with Arjona. It will not be la misma porquería.

Carnaval Propaganda (Part 1)

Rio along with the rest of the continent and other pockets around the world celebrate Carnaval this weekend.

Wednesday marks the start of lent, but at some point in history the revelry surpassed the piety involved with this event.

I must admit I left Rio before Carnaval, but you're going to have a hard time convincing me that the 2 weeks I spent there weren't Carnaval. But we'll get to Samba later. 

There's more to Rio de Janeiro than dancing, and that's saying a lot because dancing in Rio is HUGE.

Rio is the second biggest city in Brazil, and the 3rd biggest in South America and Southern hemisphere for that matter.

According to travel guides, the most advisable thing to do in Rio is to lock yourself in your room. Actually, it's not even advisable to leave the airport because the evil taxi drivers will rip you off. So by paranoid travel publishers standards, I cheated death about a million times during my stay.

I did feel unsafe a few times, but that was only because the drivers of city's buses are all aspiring to be the next Ayrton Senna – not Formula 1 champions, but rather just someone who dies for ramming a speeding vehicles into a wall. I don't blame them though, their buses do sound like they have jet engines installed on them.

Another problem with the bus system is that there really is no way to know which bus to take. Rio, a city of 7 or 8 million people, has 830 bus lines. In comparison, the more populous Buenos Aires has 190. So I guess there is some redundancy in the routes. In any case I have a personal issue with buses. I can never request a stop right. I either pull the chord way too prematurely, or way too late. If the bus ends up stopping within 3 kilometers of where I wanted it to stop I consider it a success. Even with that, my success rate is under 50%.

So I prefer the metro. In Rio I had an extra incentive to ride the metro. I fell in love with the female voice that makes the announcements. I know all she's saying is, "Next stop, Botafogo. Exit on the Right side of the Train." But damn it sounds so musical when she says it. Actually, all Brazilians sound like they're singing when they speak. The heavy enunciation of the vowels is what does it, but you need strong vocal chords and jaw muscles to pull it off. 

Not only do they sound nice, the Cariocas are genuinely nice people. Too nice. Annoyingly nice. 

They are so nice, that even when they kick you in the face they purposefully miss it. They call it Capoeira. 

I do speak Spanish, which I thought was close enough to Portuguese for me to survive. It's not enough. I couldn't have proper conversations with people. I even had trouble ordering food in some instances. Thankfully, Brazilians have a solution for that. 

Before getting into that, let me tell you one thing.

I hate the Bento Box. Food should not be compartmentalized. Foods of all kinds and colors should mix creating what in Arabic we call a Khabsa. The Bento Box is Culinary Apartheid. It's basically the Israel of food serving vessels.

The opposite of the Bento Box would be the Food by the Kilo, or Quilo, buffets. They are quite popular in Brazil. Pile it all on one Plate and weigh it. All food is equal in the eyes of the Cashier. 

To be continued…

Real Propaganda from Venezuela

I guess it's time to talk Venezuela.

Everybody else is pretending to be an expert on the country, so I guess having been born there 35 years ago and having spent 5 weeks there in 2 trips over the last year makes me a Super Duper Senior Expert. 

Here's something that might surprise you. The problem with Venezuela is that it's too far to the right.

I know all you've seen over the past 15 years are images of this crazy commie Chavez and his comrade Castro posing together in red guayaberas.  (You see dropping a long spanish word enhances my credentials as an expert.) But out of the Mercosur countries I've visited (Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay), Venezuela is by far the least "Leftist." 

What Chavismo has done is take a country that was practically a US colony hemorrhaging its wealth into the pockets of a few capitalist extremists and build some sort of a structure to stop that.  This "socialist" structure took some of the money that was ending up in Private Banks in Miami (and to a smaller extent in abandoned Million dollar mansions in remote Lebanese villages) and spent it in areas that fall outside Caracas' business center. 

It's quite ironic that they're calling the protesters in Venezuela "Students," because Venezuelans of all ages are now "students" thanks to aggressive Chavismo investments in education for all. You see the CIA sponsored rulers of Venezuela in the and 1980's and 1990's saw that Venezuelan money is better spent in building skyscrapers in a US city to boost its economy than to build hospitals and provide the basic needs to a very impoverished native population. 

I wonder where else in the world the native wealth is being used to boost the colonizers' economies (and football rosters). Hmmm.

In order to break with the US, Hugo Chavez struck deals with many "enemies of socialism" (even absorbed some of them into his party) because frankly gaining political independence from the US required to have big business on his side. This truce with the Venezuelan capital and the fact that US buys a shit load of Venezuelan oil meant that Venezuela was not economically independent from the US, and that has been the ongoing battle over the past 15 years.

Over the years, Chavez was making gains on that front, and the US was trying everything to disrupt his progress including a failed coup attempt. 

Last year, Chavez died. 

Some of the capitalist old guard whom Chavez had domesticated smelled blood and saw an opportunity to pounce on a "raw" Maduro. The opposition naturally saw it as now or never, and of course Washington had an Oboner.

Over the past year, the Chavistas with Maduro at the helm came under attack from every front possible. I will skip boring details and jump to this week's events.  Before that, let me just point out one tactic that was used as it was used in Lebanon before and it might be used again in the future if anyone attempts to liberate the Lebanese economy. 

When Rafiq Hariri rollsed royced into Beirut as a savior in the early 1990's, bankers' speculation pushed the black market exchange rate for the Lebanese Lira to 3000LL for 1USD. Rafiq Hariri's solution, after street protests forced Omar Karami's cabinet to resign, was to peg the Lira to the USD.  To put it simply, the Lebanese Lira today is under foreign occupation. 

Black market speculation–along with high inflation rates–over the past year has pushed the exchange rate for the Venezuelan Bolivar  from around 8 Bolivars for 1USD to to over 80 today. Venezuela needs a Harvard-educated savior.

15 years of Chavismo failed at creating a self-sufficient economy that would be immune from US banks. It is still a heavily consumerist society that produces very little. It has also failed at combatting crime that has plagued Venezuela forever.  The Venezuelan government has also always been very corrupt. It's hard to tell if corruption increased or decreased over the Chavez years, because for some reason these numbers aren't tracked by government.  

But today's protests aren't about any of that. 

Ciudad Guayana in the east of Venezuela best illustrates what's going on. It is a city that's divided into 2 parts: The slums of San Felix, and the malls and gated communities of Puerto Ordaz. For a whole week, tens of protesters (at night the number goes down to a handful) blocked a main road in Puerto Ordaz that houses a Wendy's and a TGI Friday's. A few other protesters tweeted rebellious selfies with signs inside the Orinokia Mall which is two blocks away. They want the "Dictator" out. 

Yesterday, ruling party thugs cleared the street. The pictures filled the media. Venezuelans sitting on their computers in Miami retweeted them.

In San Felix, people go about their daily life. They patiently stand in breadlines…and butterlines…and cooking oil lines. No one protested. No roads were blocked by "students". No retweets. They know very well how 15 years ago they only dreamt of being "students" and having a main road reach them so they can one day block it. But it won't be today, because unlike on twitter: Life here is real.

Propaganda from the Beach: Rio Edition

Change of scenery, and language.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil!

I did have a stop along the way between Buenos Aires and Rio. But for some reason, the little country that is wedged between the 2 biggest South American Countries is often overlooked. Who am I to change that? I shall overlook Uruguay too. 

But I have my reasons for doing so.

The Uruguayan capital Montevideo is just too eerily similar to Beirut. 

The City's waterfront has a "Corniche" that looks like this on one end….

...and has a public beach on another (sort of… technically it isn't the end of the Corniche but the end of a  section of it.)

People hangout there around sunset and can pretty much be divided into 2 categories: the runners (and boy do they take the running seriously) and let's call the other group the Arguileh puffers.  

Ok, they aren't puffing on their Arguilehs but this is what half the population of Montevideo looks like (Half might sound like one of these exaggerations that are often used and I hate, but I did some random sampling at different points in the city and at different times of day and and it's pretty damn close to half):

They have legs. Two of them. They have a left arm and all of its regular attachments. Pretty much standard human physiology so far. However, the right side of their torso is where they differ from other human beings. Where most people have their right arm, half of Montevideoans possess a cyborg limb whose function is to generate fuel to run the rest of the body. 

Clutched in the armpit area is a massive thermos-like reservoir of hot water. Judging by their sizes they could fit anywhere between 2 and 10 Liters of boiling water. The bicep area of the arm is used to secure that tank in place with an unescapable professional wrestling headlock. The hand part clamps a dried-squash at mouth height.  Out of that squash, which is filled with Yerba Mate, comes a metal straw/spoon/sifter thingie into what I presume is a human mouth, but I can't confirm that as it's always hiding behind the squash. This cyborg limb/production line is an engineering marvel as the whole transfer of boiling water into the the mug to brew the waiting Mate buds takes place swiftly while people walk on busy streets, tend to kids or pets, and make out with lovers. 

So basically what I'm trying to say is that the Mate kit reminded me of the stupid Arguileh kit.

Some sidewalks along Montevideo's hilly roads could also resemble Beirut's irregular sidewalks. 

It also has ugly buildings like this one.

It's a lot more expensive than its bigger neighbor Argentina.

Every part of the world has this joke:

Do you know what the easiest way to make money is? Buy a (insert nationality) for what they're worth and sell them for what they think they are worth? 

In the Arab world the joke is on the Lebanese. In this part of the world it's always been the Argentinians, and I must say the Argentinian Peso isn't helping to dispel the stereotype.

By the way, I lied. Montevideo is nothing like Beirut. 

The political scene is dominated by left vs left battles. The right is quite marginalized. They probably sit in cafes like this one and pretend they matter. 

The president in Uruguay was a revolutionary fighter who donates 90% of his official salary to charity.

The idiot of Lebanon destroyed a refugee camp to become president, and makes 90% of his income from bribes and corrupt dealings.  

Uruguay will be a major player in the upcoming World Cup. Lebanon sold their World Cup chance for an iPhone.

Uruguay has cows. Lebanon has rotten meat scandals.

Uruguay is Green. Lebanon is only green in songs and with envy.

I guess Rio will have to wait. 

This fare is just for you...

A couple of weeks ago Airbus released an updated price list. The cheapest of their toys is $72 million. The A380 is slightly out of my price range at over $400 million. Now if you want a smaller Embraer, you’d be looking at price tag of $16 to $40 million.

The point is that airlines spend serious cash on their business. They also tend to lose money and be subsidized or bailed out by public funds.  The newer and larger models have touch screens for every seat where you have the choice of watching a random episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, a week-old news update, play a video game with a joystick that can be pulled from your armrest, or fall asleep to a looping 90-second Tango track as happened with me the last time I was on a plane. I don’t think they call them joysticks anymore. Personally, I think the joystick industry peaked with red-buttoned vertical model whose base was equipped with suction cups. It’s been downhill since then as they eliminated the stick and added buttons. Don't get me started on the Wii thingie.

There is point to this rant, I think. Oh yeah, airlines…

So 1400h on Friday I show up at the offices of a major European airline to change a ticket reservation. When I book a flight on a computer born in the internet era, I use a mouse to click about 10 clicks max on a user friendly interface and voila I’m booked. The mouse at the airline office is just desk decoration. The customer service agent plays a one-thousand keystroke symphony on their keyboard before you even tell them what you’re there for. At the point every word you say is translated into an untwitterable code and inputted into the DOS interface with a blinking cursor speeding left to right on the screen before jumping one line down and doing the same routine over and over for about two hours. At 1600h, and what seemed like a million keystrokes later, I was informed that there are no available seats for my fare all year. She actually manually looked into every flight for every remaining day of the year and my 2 letter fare code did not appear. There were hundreds of other 2 letter fare codes, but apparently they all belong to some fare code collector who doesn’t believe in sharing.

From what I understood, the different airport taxes have 3 letter codes. These happen to be available for everyone.

By the way, it's been over a week and my lost bag has still to be converted into traceable code. But that's a different airline. Conviasa of Venezuela doesn't even believe in timetables. If a flight lifts off on the same day it's scheduled to fly on, they chalk it up as a success. 

I would say the airline reservation system needs to be simplified and modernized. I know it’s part of the scam airlines run in order to make money, but I can’t imagine how paying someone for 2 hours to type code into the system where in the end we end up just where we started is a good way to spend public funds.

If they really want to preserve endangered species of electronics, they can keep their dot-matrix printers. Now that is music I can listen to on loop for hours.

Ok, here's a minute from last night's performance by the Orquesta Tipica Fernandez Fierro.

The Best Propaganda in Buenos Aires

It’s been a week in Buenos Aires, and I would say at this point over 95% of conversational exchanges I’ve had with people end with: “Ok, so how much do I owe you?”

It might be normal for a tourist. But apparently porteños too use that line a lot. I’ve been told Buenos Aires is the city with the largest shrink population in the world. I believed it because why would anyone use a superlative unless it’s true. I must say I have seen evidence in this week that makes it plausible that the statement is true. I wrote before about people avoiding eye contact with other people, but these eyes don’t seem to have a problem making contact with books. There is a bookshop of some size on every street block. As a holder of an MBA degree from the prestigious University of Miami (back in the good-old-days we used to brag about its Football dominance, now we have to resort to boring outstanding academic standards), I can deduce that there is a market for books. So if ignorance is bliss, then reading equals an expensive psychotherapy bill.

There is also a lot of drying dogshit on the sidewalks, a lot of people scooping fresh dogshit, and professional dogwalkers who text on the job (pictured above). Also, within a few storefronts of that bookshop on every block there is a pet care shop. My intuition says there is a bit of a pet culture here. I don’t want to say that pets and shrinks are related in any way, but for some reason I am saying just that.

There is also a Carrefour Express and the Best Parrilla in Buenos Aires on every city block. If it’s not the Best Parrilla, it’s the Best Empanada or the Best Pizza in Buenos Aires. I also happen to be staying in the Best apartment in BA. The guy listing the apartment had 3 other listings and they were all the Best Apartment in BA.

So what happens when someone isn’t the Best? Clearly, they would go to the Best shrink in town who makes them believe they’re the Best again.

I am so tempted to try one of the Best American fast food burger franchises in town. Can they possibly get away with replacing meat with shit and marketing slogans in a country where people claim to know their meat? They do. There are McMierdas all over the place.

Music of the day? I didn't record any, but this seems appropriate.

More Street Propaganda from Buenos Aires

After walking for 12 hours you can eat anything and not feel guilty... Or so I keep telling myself.

After all walking is a good fat burning exercise. But like with any sport – walking is a sport I keep telling myself – the risk of injury exists. Last night I discovered that I suffered from a couple of walking related injuries. I had a bleeding toe, which has happened to me before. But it's the second injury that has me more concerned as I've never had it before. I had burns on the inner part of my thighs. My right and left thighs shouldn't be rubbing against each other as I walk. Does anyone know what the official medical term for ‘inner thigh fat burns' is?

But Porteños – the proper name for Buenos Airesans – warn you about walking certain streets.

I mentioned in my previous post the purse clutch of streetwalkers. The defensive walking style of people goes beyond that to avoiding eye-contact at all costs and having headsets on which is the universal do not disturb sign. Of course, this never works on a plane as the person next to you will always poke you and ask you something even if you have your headset on and your eyeset off. Then again spending over ten hours conjoined to a person on a transatlantic flight is more intimacy than the average married couple has. So poking rights are full earned…I guess.

One would expect from this walking behavior–particularly among women– that there is a culture of piropos, which is common in other parts of the continent and the world. But that isn’t the case from what I’ve seen. A piropo is basically poeticized sexual harassment, or a street pick-up line that has a solid success rate of Zero percent. That’s not to be confused with your average pick-up line, which has a success rate that hovers around Zero.

Naturally, I strayed from the ‘safe’ zone on my walk. Paranoia by definition exaggerates the dangers. Before arriving in Buenos Aires I was in Venezuela. In most cities there people auto-sentence themselves to life-in-prison. They allow themselves daily yard time, where distrusting interaction with others takes place before they rush back behind their electrified bars.

With weather being largely constant, the substitute filler in daily conversations is the police blotter. But when asked if anyone had personally been assaulted, out of tens of people I met only one was directly robbed. He was flaunting 2 iPhones at the time, because while the two models were numerically equal, one model was superior to the other alphabetically as it had an extra letter. If you ask me, the robber let him off easy by just robbing him. 

“Nobody rides motorcycles because they would shoot you off of it and ride away,” is a line often repeated by the paranoid. I cannot verify whether that incident actually happened or if it’s just chupacabric lore, but I can attest that I saw many somebodies riding motorcycles.

Back in Buenos Aires–where the weather is anything but constant, and the only “Buenos” Aires today are coming out of wall units as the temperature and humidity level play a game of reverse limbo–; streets are full of walkers and commuters waiting in lines for buses or disappearing into sidewalk holes that lead to the subte. People are moving with a purpose without making eye contact with each other.

There’s also a high number of cafes, bars, restaurants and ice cream shops lining up the same streets. There, people are always sitting not making eye contact with other sitters and of course not with walkers. Millions of sitters and walkers coexist without looking at each other. Do they know of each other’s existence? Do walkers ever sit, and sitters ever walk? I’m not sure. What I do know is that there is a third group, which goes naturally unnoticed by both sitters and walkers.

They are called “gente en situacion de calle,” literally people in a street situation. They seem to be mostly adult males, but I saw some sidewalks that were housing entire families. I don’t know the numbers, but this wall on the intersection of Scalabrini and Santa Fe tells the story of Pechito.

Que genialidad! #Pechito pic.twitter.com/quCmVcI8tn
— Milena (@milebiasoli) January 23, 2014

I will take this opportunity to vent.

Who the fuck painted over the mural of Ali Abdallah in Hamra? Was it a local militiaman that was afraid a portrait of a dead homeless guy might make the nearby portraits of his smirking militia lord look bad? Was it a mercenary for million-dollar apartments’ owners whose homes hover above Ras Beirut but want nothing to do with its streets? Was it the Lebanese state burying its crime under a coat of its only UN-approved weapon?

Anyway… Where were we? Streets…

Life happens at street level. You can take a giant electric saw and pass it just above the tallest tree of any city and it wouldn’t lose its essence. Above that height, all you have are fat layers.

Street vending can be a bit aggressive here, but give me a street vendor over a telemarketer any time. At least, when he shoves a notepad and a pen in my face as I sit in a café, he knows I might need his product. I cannot imagine that under any circumstances I would entertain the idea of buying the Michel Aoun encyclopedia, much less when the telemarketer doesn’t understand the concept of the ludicrous roaming fees Lebanese mobile operators charge.

Also, how can you blame a street vendor for his/her over excitement when the street is full of carriers of the virus called map?

Street maps are tools of oppression. What are guided city tours if not brain washing exercises? What’s the point of visiting a city if you are going to take the same picture and have the same memory everybody else had?

When the immigration officer at the airport asked me if I was a tourist I said “Noooo” before begrudgingly accepting that label. I wish I had access to the photo he snapped of me, because that would be the only chance for me to see what I look like when I’m begrudging. Anyway, it’s been a couple of days, and I’m still reaching for that “Kick Me!” sign on my back that I’m convinced the dude stuck on me as he stamped my passport.

I maybe a tourist but I will not carry a map. I just walk and I seem to always walk in a straight line towards the water. Animals are built in to gravitate towards water. They in turn build settlements around the water.

Music also happens on the street level. So, again I leave you with some street music.

Seriously though, here’s clip that combines street music and street vending.

As I mentioned earlier, Buenos Aires is invaded by Brazilian tourists. So naturally, opportunistic porteño beatniks provide the background music for Brazilian tourists – who are hated by locals for being “too happy” – to dance in the streets of Buenos Aires. This scene is completed by the priceless "what kind of street music is this!?” look on haughty Argentinian passers-by.

But hey, whether they like it or not, and just like in football… economically Argentina is Brazil’s little bitch or as diplomats call it “a strategic ally.”