Expat Chronicles » other countries

An American Prison Rape

Colin — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 19:11:41 +0000

Last May in St. Louis I saw my high school buddy Mike for the first time since he’d been locked up four years ago. We got in trouble back then. I went my separate way for university, but he continued in a life of crime. He was caught moving over 100 pounds of marijuana from Arizona to St. Louis. He did his time in a Southern prison.

At our friend’s wedding he told me some stories. I told him about this blog and that I’d like to publish them. Our plan was to publish each of the six fights he got in. On the day we met, he started with the stories and I took notes, asking questions along the way. After two stories he got bored and said fights aren’t the most interesting aspects of prison.

“What are?” I asked. How drugs are smuggled in. The gangs and politics. The sex – sex between inmates, sex between inmates and guards (female or gay), the rapes.

“Rapes?” I asked. He said he saw one guy get raped. When I heard the story I realized it was more compelling than his fights. It had implications in race, prison politics, and street smarts. So instead of Mike’s 6 fights (4-1-1 according to him), here’s the story of a peckerwood getting raped.

“Peckerwood” is a derogatory term black guys call white guys. Aryan race gangs have adopted the term as a rite of passage. Mike saw “PECKERWOOD” tattoos across the backs of different white guys, not just Aryans but bikers, Irish Mob, and other gangs. He never found out exactly what it meant, but he knew the tattoo had to be earned, most likely for some violent act against a black inmate.

Peckerwood showed up to prison with the PECKERWOOD tattoo across his back. However, he’d never even been to prison. That was his first mistake: getting an Aryan prison gang tattoo when you’ve never been to prison. This caused a scandal, especially with the Aryans who run the prison and award the tattoo.

Mike heard through the grapevine that the Aryans pulled Peckerwood aside for a talk about his tattoo. Mike is 100% positive they gave him a chance to earn it. He didn’t know what they asked him to do, but he’s sure they gave Peckerwood a chance to earn his PECKERWOOD tattoo.

A week went by and Peckerwood hadn’t done as he was told. That was his second mistake. The Aryans got a hold of him one night and burned the PECKERWOOD tattoo off his back with a blowtorch. I didn’t know tattoos could be burned off. Apparently they can.

The next day Peckerwood requested segregation housing. I’ve never been to prison but I’ve heard you do NOT request segregation housing. It’s the equivalent of going to the guards and saying, “I’m a bitch. I can’t protect myself.” They put you in solitary confinement where you don’t interact with other inmates. It’s almost exclusively reserved for snitches.

Peckerwood was locked up for a minor drug charge; he’d have been out in just eight months. However, that deal’s not available for segregation housing. If he wanted protection, he’d be locked up for two years. After a day or two in segregation he requested to be put back in general population. That was his third mistake.

In states like Texas and California, I’ve heard you have to join a race gang the day you go in. Even though I get along well with blacks and Mexicans, there’s no mixing. I’d have to stick to my color. This prison wasn’t that extreme. There are independent crews of 5 – 10 guys down to defend each other, not just race gangs. Peckerwood’s only options weren’t the Aryans, bikers, or Irish Mob. Small groups of normal guys stick together too. My friend Mike was the leader of such a crew. Around the time Peckerwood left segregation housing, an Aryan leader approached Mike and told him nobody was to take Peckerwood in. They put the word out with all the crews. The Aryans dictated that Peckerwood would finish his time alone.

Anybody going back into general population after segregation housing would be labeled a bitch. Every bully and tough guy in the place would fuck with him. Mike says Peckerwood still could’ve finished his time without the situation getting worse. He would’ve been slapped around, tripped, had his food stolen, etc.

But then Peckerwood made his fourth mistake. Despite being shunned by all the white crews, he thought he could salvage a decent time and make friends. He started hanging out with the Crips, the infamous black gang. He sat with them at meals. They shared cigarettes and snacks.

This went on for a few weeks until one day Mike was going into the bathrooms. Mike was a Crip himself as a teen, so he was friendly with some of them. One Crip he knew was watching the entrance to the bathroom and greeted him, “Wassup, cuzz?” Thinking nothing of it, Mike greeted him back. As he went further into the bathroom the guy at the door asked, “You see anything tonight?” At that moment Mike saw Peckerwood bent over a toilet grunting, while a Homo Crip was fucking him.

Mike says Homo Crip had another punk. After Homo Crip fucked Peckerwood, he had his other punk fuck him. Peckerwood got fucked by two black guys consecutively. Talk about hard time!

The Crips threw a party for Peckerwood afterwards. Everybody got together for cigarettes, snacks, and drugs. He was brought into the family. He didn’t get fucked by everybody in the gang, only Homo Crip. But Homo Crip fucked him his whole time in prison. Mike added Peckerwood’s the type of guy to complete his parole with flying colors.

I read this story to The Mick, a prison veteran of three different countries. He said Peckerwood probably began to like it. That’s what happens.

My War on Drugs Rant

Colin — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 04:04:26 +0000

Expat Chronicles

Narcoterrorism threatened the Colombian government in the 1990s. Now there’s increasing talk of Mexico becoming a failed state. These state enemies are so powerful because of profits from illegal drugs.

In America’s defense, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted the US bears some blame. I’d go further in saying US and European policies bear most blame for Colombian, Mexican, Central American, and increasingly Venezuelan governments falling victim to cocaine cartels. Cartels are so powerful because cocaine profits are astronomical, precisely because of US and European prohibition of drugs.

A gram of cocaine in St. Louis costs $60 IF you know people in the business. If you don’t know anyone you’ll pay $80. In Bogota, I pay $5. By these numbers we can assume the price increases by a factor of ten.

Most businesses, depending on the product, mark up 20%. Domestic drug dealers turn their money over twice or more. I’ve spoken with drug dealers about investing in my legal businesses. They laugh when I promise 10% in 6 months, which is a good return for legal endeavors. But if you’re used to illegal profits, 10% is nothing.

I’ve been offered to mule cocaine to Miami or Spain. Since I’m a bigger guy, I could carry over a kilo. I’ve been offered $8000 plus the flight. That only adds $10 to the price per gram, and international traffickers’ costs are much lower than the $5 charged in the Colombian streets. So what explains the $50 – 100 prices seen in the streets of St. Louis?

Once the mule gets the dope into the US, somebody needs to pick it up. They sell it to local wholesalers, who sell it to street-level drug dealers. Each of these workers at every step in the supply chain faces stiff prison sentences according to US law. Here’s a chart of mandatory minimum sentences:

28 g crack or 500 g powder cocaine – 5 years
280 g crack or 5,000 g powder cocaine – 10 years

These figures were recently adjusted after the Fair Sentencing Act, in which the disparity in quantity of crack vs. powder resulted in blacks receiving higher sentences because they’re more likely to deal in crack, was signed into law in 2010 by Barack Obama.

Still, 28 g of crack or 500 g of powder is not much. It’s a lot if you’re not in the industry. But if you do and you aspire to grow, a half a kilo is easily attainable. Getting caught with that means 5 years in prison. If you get to the point where you’re only selling 1/4, 1/2, or whole kilos, you’d easily have 5 kilos on hand, which would get you a 10 year mandatory minimum.

For this business to be worth the risk, sellers need to earn a lot of money.

According to Michael Reid‘s Forgotten Continent:

[A]n economist at the University of Maryland, has pointed out, prices at each stage in the long chain that turns a coca leaf on an Andean hillside into a gram of cocaine on the streets of the Bronx or the City of London are determined mainly by the need to reward risk-taking, rather than the cost of production. That is why the price of a kilo of pure cocaine (measured in relation to its equivalent in coca leaf) rises by a factor of roughly 200 times between the coca farm and the street. Most of the increase occurs once cocaine has entered the United States or Europe – because law enforcement is tighter and risk is thus higher. So even if repression in the producer countries succeeds in increasing leaf prices, this has little effect on cocaine prices.

The high profits are solely due to criminal risk faced in developed countries. If cartels can establish operations inside those countries (which they do), they get even more of those profits. That’s how they can acquire immense wealth to corrupt police and law enforcement officials, as well as challenge their national governments.

Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and increasingly Central America and Venezuela bear the brunt of America’s and Europe’s stiff drug policy.

Everybody Gets High

The vast majority of people get high. A tiny minority don’t drink or indulge in any conscious-altering substance like cigarettes or coffee. But most who don’t consider themselves “drug users” get high on legal drugs like alcohol, Percoset, Vicodin, Ambien, Oxycontin, Valium, Tramadol, Adderall, Xanax, codeine, and more. If you use any of those, don’t lie to yourself. You get high.

What’s the difference between those listed above and this list: cocaine, ecstasy, heroin, marijuana, meth? The first list is legal and backed by the big pharm lobby.

What’s the difference between Oxycontin and heroin? Oxycontin’s legal.

What’s the difference between Adderall and ecstasy? Adderall’s legal and actually preferred by rolling aficionados.

What’s one difference between Tylenol and Percoset or Vicodin? NFL players pop the latter two daily.

Altering consciousness is human nature. Why are some prohibited and others allowed?

Big Business Lobbying

Alcohol companies, including my former employer Anheuser-Busch, stand to lose sales if people could get high on other drugs than alcohol.

Pharmaceutical companies, along with alcohol, pose political opposition to legalization of medical marijuana. They’d sell less pills if people could smoke.

Prison guard unions wield immense power in California. If there are less people locked up, there will be less guards and thus a smaller union with less revenue. It’s in their interest to lock up as many as possible.

Victims of the War on Drugs

First and foremost, the real victims of the war on drugs are producer countries like Colombia. Without cocaine profits, the narco-guerrilla organization FARC would’ve been defeated long ago, as Sendero Luminoso in Peru was. Producers with operations in developed countries turn their money over 700% and higher. The limited resources of developed countries aren’t sufficient to combat that.

American organized crime was strongest during Prohibition. Regardless of legislation, people got drunk. It created huge profits and power for bootleggers. It’s the same with drugs. People are going to get high, regardless of the law. Its illegality creates powerful crime syndicates. The modern day bootleggers threaten the Andean and Central American countries.

Other victims of the War on Drugs are the huge number Americans being locked up:

The United States leads the world in the number of people incarcerated in federal and state correctional facilities. There are currently more than 2 million people in American prisons or jails. Approximately one-quarter of those people held in U.S. prisons or jails have been convicted of a drug offense. The United States incarcerates more people for drug offenses than any other country. With an estimated 6.8 million Americans struggling with drug abuse or dependence, the growth of the prison population continues to be driven largely by incarceration for drug offenses. source

“We have created an American gulag,” – said former drug czar Barry McCaffrey.

Most drug dealers I know aren’t hardened criminals. They’re simply risk takers. They have a higher propensity for risk given the reward. A great example is recently released Los Angeles-based cocaine kingpin Ricky Ross. If you hear Ricky Ross in interviews, especially The Last White Hope, you’ll hear an intelligent, well-spoken man who took advantage of a lucrative opportunity. If it weren’t for that opportunity, I don’t doubt he’d have excelled in any endeavor he chose.

The Last White Hope is a critical documentary on the American War on Drugs. I don’t buy its conspiracy theory that the drug Prohibition’s aim is to incarcerate African-Americans. But it’s inarguable that blacks are over-represented in prisons. Blacks aside, too many people of all colors are locked up. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Watch American Drug War: The Last White Hope in its entirety on YouTube.

No Easy Solution

Nothing I’ve said here is new. Fortunately American opinion toward marijuana has shifted sharply. Possession of high quantities of marijuana is a misdemeanor in many states.

However, cocaine is the insanely profitable drug that destabilizes Latin America. I applaud Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos for publicly suggesting the world open the debate on legalization (good debate in that link’s comments). I was proud to see the US ambassador concur.

Legalization may go too far. Nobody wants crack and heroin sold at 7-11. But the mandatory minimum sentences have to go. They drive the price and profits up, which destabilize producing and transporting countries. Some form of decriminalization is needed.

There’s no easy solution because the American people won’t tolerate the level of drug addiction seen in Bogota. I’m one of few decriminalization proponents who will argue the obvious: drug use WILL GO UP if decriminalized. Use will also rise if the price drops.

In broad daylight I’ve seen bazuceros smoke crack in Chapinero, a middle class Bogota neighborhood. Americans won’t accept that. Hence, there’s no easy solution or we would’ve found it. But there must be a compromise because too many Americans are getting locked up and dangerous Latin American instability will continue because of developed countries’ demand for cocaine.

My War on Drugs Rant

Narcoterrorism: The Other World Terror

Colin — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 02:33:12 +0000

Expat Chronicles

After September 11, 2001 George W. Bush declared a global War on Terror. His terminology generated controversy. It’s not narrow enough of a definition. Critics often put “War on Terror” in quotes, implying illegitimacy. The weak, vague terminology is a product of political correctness and Bush’s desire not to alienate Muslims by calling it the “War on Islamic Terror.” It’s not a War on Islam, just Islamofascism and people who blow up “infidels,” but that name would surely offend.

Some say it’s impossible to wage war against an undefined enemy. How do we fight a war on terror? When is it over? What exactly is terrorism? A dictionary-esque definition would go something like this (from the Wikipedia page):

Terrorism is the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion.

Would this include the Mafia and organized crime who extort businesses? What about my uncle, a union enforcer who uses violence (or the threat of) to intimidate those who go against the union or union members who go against the leadership? Is my uncle a terrorist? I hope not. The Wikipedia article goes on:

Common definitions of terrorism refer only to those violent acts which are intended to create fear (terror), are perpetrated for a religious, political or ideological goal; and deliberately target or disregard the safety of non-combatants (civilians).

Inspiring fear for “religious, political, or ideological goal[s]” leaves out for-profit terrorism. So the Mafia’s in the clear, but my uncle’s in the grey. Either way, discounting for-profit terrorism leaves out a form of world terrorism second only to Islamic: narcoterrorism.

In ~4 years in Latin America you read a lot of drug cartel news. I’ve learned a lot about the business. One core competency in being a large scale narco is “the systematic use of terror.” They systematically use terror to intimidate the government, police, journalists, and anyone who opposes their business.

From an earlier post on Colombian drug cartels:

Enrique Low Murtra wanted nothing more than to leave his job as Colombia’s justice minister to open a law office and return to his previous career as a university teacher. ‘I would like to imagine that vengeance is not eternal …’ he said … Two months earlier, on the instruction of Colombia’s president, Virgilio Barco, Low Murtra had signed warrants for the arrest and extradition to the United States on drugs charges of the five leading members of the Medellín Cartel … Faced with constant death threats, the minister sent his daughter out of the country. ‘Even going for a haircut has become a problem,’ he said. So intense did the threats become that, in July 1988, Barco sent him to Switzerland as ambassador … In 1991, he was back in Colombia, working as he had hoped as a law professor at the University of La Salle. No longer in government service, he had no bodyguards. He was gunned down at the entrance to the university.

Over three years had passed since the judge signed arrest warrants. The drug cartels never forget. They can’t let people get away. They need a high fear factor. Revenge and intimidation are key parts of the business.

In the story above a judge is assassinated. Maybe killing law enforcement officials isn’t the same as blowing up the World Trade Center. More from Wikipedia’s article on terrorism:

An abiding characteristic is the indiscriminate use of violence against noncombatants for the purpose of gaining publicity for a group, cause, or individual.

This is how I define terrorism:

Terrorism is the systematic and indiscriminate use of violence against noncombatants for religious, political, ideological, or economic goals.

I include for-profit motives. I also require indiscriminate violence against noncombatants to qualify as terrorism, clearing my uncle and most organized crime, both of which are discriminate.

Narcoterrorism is indiscriminate. Narcos don’t only target law enforcement. My Pablo Escobar article illustrates his tactics. He downed a commercial airliner. He bombed public buildings in Bogota, killing mostly civilians to intimidate the public into supporting a government peace deal. He kidnapped and killed Bogota’s elite families who had nothing to do with law enforcement, but were friends and family of policy makers. Escobar is often referred to as South America’s Hitler.

A disturbing example of narcoterrorism came from Rolling Stone’s American narco in Mexico story earlier this year. After infamous trafficker Arturo Beltran was killed by Mexican Marines, the Beltran Leyva cartel responded:

The night of the funeral for a commando who had been killed in the raid, assassins went to the home of the soldier’s family and machine-gunned his mother, sister, aunt and brother in their sleep, leaving behind nearly three dozen spent bullet casings. (from page 3 of the story)

A soldier’s entire family is killed after his funeral. That turned my stomach. Mexico is currently the heart of narcoterrorism; their cartels have begun to mimic Colombian tactics.

I’ve heard stories of murdered Colombians who had nothing to do with law enforcement. A lawyer helped some campesinos escape their FARC-dominated region. The FARC cell in Bogota killed the lawyer and his whole family. Civilians working noncombatant roles for the government in FARC red zones, if identified, are harassed and stalked even after returning to the city.

Islamic terror garners more global attention, and probably deserves it. It’s more of a threat because Islamofascists fault the US, Europe, and “the West” for their problems. Also, extreme interpretations of the Koran mandate that believers “slay the infidel.” Islamic terror overshadows narcoterrorism, illustrated in the difference between their respective Wikipedia articles. The Islamic Terror article is almost 10,000 words with over 180 sources. The narcoterrorism article is under 500 words, has bad punctuation, and cites only four sources. Mexico’s drug war has claimed 40,000 – 50,000 lives. That’s almost 20 times the casualties on 9/11, just in Mexico!

Will narcoterrorism ever garner the attention it deserves? The US government doesn’t ignore it given Plan Colombia and current efforts in Mexico. But in the hearts and minds of citizens of the developed world, narcoterrorism almost doesn’t exist. It only affects a few countries and doesn’t directly threaten America or Europe. It goes largely unnoticed. When Islamic terror has been subdued, will developed countries turn their attention to for-profit narcoterrorism?

Narcoterrorism: The Other World Terror

Monroe Doctrine: An Overview

Colin — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 05:37:27 +0000

Expat Chronicles

In 1823, 5th president of the United States James Monroe outlined the Monroe Doctrine, which “stated that further efforts by European countries to colonize land or interfere with states in the Americas would be viewed as acts of aggression requiring U.S. intervention … The doctrine put forward that the New World and the Old World were to remain distinctly separate spheres of influence, for they were composed of entirely separate and independent nations.”

In 1823 the US drew this line in the sand. Most countries didn’t care because the US was a young country with no power. But later the Monroe Doctrine would shape regional history.

The countries of Latin America were just gaining their independence, so revolutionary leaders including Simon Bolivar and Francisco de Paula Santander embraced Monroe Doctrine with open arms as a key endorsement of their legitimacy.

From Monroe’s speech:

We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintain it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.

In 1861 France, Spain, and England sent forces into Mexico because the country had suspended debt payments due to bankruptcy. Spain and England quickly left, but France stayed to bring down the government and instill a monarchy. The United States was in the heart of its civil war. But as soon as the Civil War ended, President Andrew Johnson sent 50,000 American troops to the Mexican border. “In 1866, the US demanded the French withdraw their forces from Mexico, moved soldiers to positions along the Rio Grande, and set up a naval blockade to prevent French reinforcements from landing” (American perspective). The Mexicans retook their capital and executed the French-appointed emperor. There’s a comment or two on My Ugly American Rant implying that Mexico’s independence from France is partly due to American help. I’m not going to argue either way.

Towards the end of the 19th century, American politicians cited the Monroe Doctrine in arguing for war against Spain to liberate Cuba and Puerto Rico. In the ensuing Spanish-American War, the Americans thumped the Spaniards and gained the respect of the world as a military power (plus Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines). In my American history classes, I remember the Spanish-American War for (1) the use of “yellow journalism” to incite public outrage and (2) Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders storming San Juan Hill.

Theodore Roosevelt, one of the most interesting US presidents in history, would later take the Monroe Doctrine in a new direction. In response to the Venezuela Crisis of 1902-1903, in which England, Germany, and Italy blockaded the South American country over its refusal to pay its debts, Roosevelt added to Monroe Doctrine the Roosevelt Corollary.

This cartoon is actually misleading as to what the Roosevelt Corollary meant. The cartoon depicts Spain (or any European power) trying to muscle in on the Dominican Republic to pay its debt, and Roosevelt not having it. But that’s what the Monroe Doctrine was about before the Roosevelt Corollary.

Roosevelt aimed to preempt having to deal with the Europeans. His amendment to the Monroe Doctrine allowed the US to intervene in mismanaged or incompetent Latin American countries to prevent Europe from coming over in the first place. So this was the first time public policy officially justified intervening in Latin American countries without a European presence being necessary.

This is an astonishingly insulting argument now. But even today many Latin American governments are still corrupt, inefficient, and incompetent. Back then they ran the risk of losing independence for it and Teddy didn’t want to see that.

A recent biography on Teddy Roosevelt discloses his idea for a Japanese Monroe Doctrine for Asia.

Just a few decades later the Roosevelt Corollary was effectively repealed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy. In FDR’s own words:

The American republics to the south of us have been ready always to cooperate with the United States on a basis of equality and mutual respect, but before we inaugurated the good-neighbor policy there was among them resentment and fear because certain administrations in Washington had slighted their national pride and their sovereign rights.

In pursuance of the good-neighbor policy, and because in my younger days I had learned many lessons in the hard school of experience, I stated that the United States was opposed definitely to armed intervention.

Read his whole speech.

FDR’s Good Neighbor policy of non-intervention ended with the Cold War. The US conducted covert and non-covert operations in attempts to defeat Soviet-backed or organic socialist movements. The ugliest of these were Iran-Contra and the Guatemala coup.

Recent analysis of Monroe Doctrine isn’t wholly negative. Some criticize the US for moving away from Monroe Doctrine, implying the US doesn’t care about Latin America since the War on Terror and economic emergence of China. Hence the title Forgotten Continent in Michael Reid’s book.

The future of US influence in the region is best summed up by selections from this 2009 The New Republic (the best liberal pub) article, Adios, Monroe Doctrine:

The ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya has provided Latin America with a revelatory moment. Beginning with the Monroe Doctrine–and extending through countless invasions, occupations, and covert operations–Washington has considered the region its backyard. So where was this superpower these past few months, as Honduras hung in the balance? More or less sitting on its hands … For the first time in centuries, the United States doesn’t seem to care much what happens in Latin America.

It has grown increasingly difficult for certain regimes to blame Washington for their failures. From Venezuela to Argentina to Bolivia, populist governments have pursued economic and social policies, as well as geopolitical alliances, that can scarcely help their people. When these policies inevitably fail, these governments won’t be able to replicate the rhetorical trickery of the Cubans or the Sandinistas. They cannot hold Washington responsible for their setbacks. At best, they can argue that the peasants in the Andes are still hungry because of the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, but that is not an easy sell.

This U.S. stance is also a positive development for symbolic reasons. Too much is made about the imperative for U.S. atonement or humility; they are both overrated. Nonetheless, the United States does carry baggage in the region, and the history of its engagement with Latin America is not a proud one. Breaking with that past, at least by not repeating it, is a good idea and wins points in most quarters of the hemisphere.

While the region has reason to cheer this turn in U.S. policy, it simply can’t afford for the United States to disappear. On matters such as immigration, free trade, and the battle against corruption, almost nothing can be done without U.S. cooperation or leadership.

Economic development in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America is hardly conceivable, let alone possible, without a significant U.S. contribution, both monetary and conceptual. Building up infrastructure, stabilizing currencies, and establishing effective and transparent antitrust institutions are tasks that countries cannot carry out alone, given their integration with the U.S. economy.

Many of the region’s traditionally anti-interventionist nations–Mexico, Brazil, Argentina–are coming to understand the need to anchor Latin America’s democracy in a strong, intrusive, and detailed legal framework, the same way that free-trade agreements, as well as World Bank and IMF programs, have solidified economic policies that are finally yielding results. The United States must be part of this framework, to coax these countries along and to bestow credibility upon whatever is built.

The end of the era of intervention should be hailed by the region. Washington’s less intrusive presence will broaden the leeway certain governments have and force others to assume their responsibilities. But world events do not seem likely to permit an indefinite U.S. disengagement from the region, nor would that be desirable.

Monroe Doctrine: An Overview

My Ugly American Rant

Colin — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 00:08:56 +0000

Expat Chronicles

Alternate Title: Monroe Doctrine was Good for Latin America

Alternate Title: The Case for American Influence

I’m an ugly American, maybe the ugliest you know. I meet all the stereotypes international snobs complain about. And I don’t care.

One complaint about me that keeps coming up is how I’m ruining the image of Americans or foreigners here in Colombia. I couldn’t give a fuck less. I’ve lost exactly zero minutes of sleep thinking about what my landlord or neighbors or clients or any other Colombian thinks of Americans. I’m serving them a compliment by being here (ugly American!). I visited Europe and China with that same attitude. I’ll be as loud and opinionated as I want. If someone has a dim view of Americans then they’re ill-informed, uneducated, hypocrites, posers, phony, and/or full of shit.

One thing anti-American types take offense to is American foreign policy. Yes we’ve fucked up here and there (Guatemala coup or William Walker), but generally their gripes are cliche and inconsistent. That’s why their ideas get eaten for breakfast on the world stage among people that matter.

The most intense criticism of American policy concerns Iraq. I’m not going to argue Iraq here. But still, where are the “anti-imperialists” and their condemnation of American intervention in Libya. Gaddafi didn’t kill anywhere near the number of people Saddam Hussein did. Where’s the backlash? Even with the “international coalition” his regime lasted seven months. Without gringo intervention Gaddafi would’ve put the resistance down ten times over. He had a steel grip on that country. Anti-Americans’ silence on Libya is deafening. Look at the Wikipedia article on protests against Libya intervention. The picture from Minneapolis has like 20 protesters. I threw bigger parties at my apartment in Arequipa!

So somebody will point out it’s an international coalition. Do you know what “international coalition” means? It means the other developed countries of the world support an American intervention. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to help. Last June exiting Defense Secretary Robert Gates blasted European nations for not carrying their weight. Select quotes from his speech:

There will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. … to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling … to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.

On Libya:

The mightiest military alliance in history is only 11 weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime in a sparsely populated country, yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, requiring the U.S., once more, to make up the difference.

Gates worked alongside European leaders for a long time before dropping this. I’ll translate his politically shrewd language to ugly American English:

You people can’t defend yourselves. So as The Rock says, “IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT YOU THINK!” If you can’t back it up your opinion’s worth as much as Venezuela’s. That’s why your opinion didn’t matter in Iraq.

And to the non-American extranjeros in Colombia, let’s talk about the improved security situation in Colombia. Do you think you’d be here if it weren’t for American funding via Plan Colombia? While ex-president Alvaro Uribe (one of George W. Bush’s top 3 allies along with Tony Blair and John Howard) will go down as the man who restored security, his predecessor Andres Pastrana deserves some of the credit for creating a strategic alliance with the US.

Andres Pastrana gave the FARC a “demilitarized zone”, a safe haven the size of Switzerland. The FARC regrouped and launched bigger offensives. That move is universally seen as a huge fuck up and Pastrana the weakest on security for generations. People say he was lobbying to win a Nobel Peace prize. HOWEVER, at the same time he was playing nice with the guerrillas Pastrana laid the groundwork with the United States for Plan Colombia.

It’s hard to zero in on an exact number, but Plan Colombia has, to date, amounted to the neighborhood of $7 billion over ten years. So while Uribe was definitely the right guy to manage that money, he couldn’t have implemented his mano firme, corazon grande policy without ‘Plan Colombia’ (read ‘US dollars’). Uribe built up the military to hold all the towns and force the guerrillas into the jungle. Building the military took money so Pastrana deserves some credit for jumping into bed with the gringos.

There are lots of nationalist, anti-American Colombians in Bogota. Read the writing on the walls. It’s ironic because they know how it was 10 – 20 years ago. If you had money you didn’t leave the city. No Villa de Leyva, no Girardot, no nothing. The country roads were getting blockaded by guerrillas or for-profit kidnappers. Contrast that with the last few years, in which “the only risk is wanting to stay.”

So to the Colombians and extranjeros in Colombia, on behalf of the United States of America, you’re welcome!

The anti-Americanism in Colombia is palpable. I think it’s resentment that they couldn’t get things under control without us. But that resentment’s not only in Colombia. Anti-Americanism in the region brought to power leaders like Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, and Rafael Correa, plus Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega before them. What really pisses off proud South Americans is the Monroe Doctrine, in which America officially declared it’d be the primary influence in this hemisphere.

Being such an ugly American, I proudly argue my country’s positive impact across the region. Let’s look at the two most extreme cases of Latin American countries rejecting vs. accepting American influence (excluding US territory Puerto Rico or the complex relationship with Mexico). These countries are Panama and Chile as those accepting US influence and Cuba and Venezuela as those rejecting.

Panama

The Panama Canal, an engineering wonder of the world, has a fascinating history. America’s proposal to build the canal forced the issue of Panama separating from Colombia (which Panamanians had wanted for years). In exchange for building it, America got control. The US gave control back in 1999, but for almost 100 years the Panama Canal was controlled by the US. That’s 100 years of gringos in country, a HUGE diplomatic operation, and gringos teaching efficiency in Panama. After the handover, the Panamanians improved many performance indicators of the canal. Think they’d have done that if the gringos had never been there?

Today, Panama’s official currency is the US dollar (along with the Balboa which seems a sovereign afterthought). It’s a financial mecca for international companies, and known as a safe and sophisticated place among Latin Americans. Panama enjoys a coveted image in Latin America: safe, stable, and relatively prosperous.

Chile

Argentina was the economic darling of the early 20th century. I’ve read that per capita GDP exceeded that of America’s for a time in the 1920′s. Since then Argentina has consistently elected economically incompetent leaders, starting with Peron and unfortunately continuing today.

Eager to take their place as the continent’s shining light was Chile under right-wing dictator Pinochet. Human rights violator and freedom oppressor? Probably. But did he do anything right? Definitely. Pinochet brought in the Chicago Boys to form his economic ministry.

The Chicago Boys were a group of Chilean students handpicked and sent to the University of Chicago, America’s most prestigious econ school, to study under Milton Friedman, America’s top economist of the century. So these Chileans studied American-style, free-market economics and then returned to Chile to implement capitalist reforms.

What’s happened in just three decades? The Miracle of Chile. Chile’s image is what Argentina’s was. Santiago, the capital, is a technology and big business hub. Crime rates are similar to Panama and Costa Rica. In 2010 Chile suffered the strongest earthquake on record to hit a major city. Yet due to strong infrastructure and efficiency it’s largely recovered while Haiti will be devastated for decades from a weaker earthquake. But it wasn’t until the 2010 mining disaster that Chile truly gained the respect of the world by rescuing all 33 miners trapped in a copper mine cave-in, changing global perceptions about Latin American inefficiency and incompetence.

Cuba

What to say about Cuba? They survived most of their existence on USSR financial aid, and now Venezuelan petrodollars. They’re good at some things like making cigars, educating doctors, and training boxers. On the other hand, Cuban citizenry regularly tear their houses down to build rafts and face shark-infested waters in hopes of reaching US soil for political asylum (remember Elian?). Not so many Cuban-Americans do the same to go back. And on Cuba’s strong sports of boxing and baseball, most of those athletes defect when given the chance.

A gringo who visited Cuba said it’s the closest thing he’d seen of humanity devolved 100 years. Carts pulled by oxen was an image that stuck. Another Spanish speaking gringo who visited complained it was expensive. I asked what he was talking about because it’s supposedly poor as shit. He said most of it is, so poor in fact that you’d be an asshole if you drink with the common people. It’s just too poor. A gringo wouldn’t feel comfortable drinking outside the overpriced tourist districts.

Would you move to Cuba permanently? Or would you prefer Panama or Chile?

Venezuela

I don’t even know where to start here. I’ve religiously followed America’s top regional nemesis Hugo Chavez for over four years now. I haven’t been able to pull the trigger on “My Hugo Chavez Rant” because I only want to write about him once. And I can’t do a definitive piece because the news keeps getting more shocking and head-shaking every year.

From the worthlessness of the currency (you can’t sell Venezuelan Bolivares anywhere in the region so it’s literally worthless), the crime rate, the absence of foreign investment, their incompetence and uncompetitiveness in their only industry (oil), the shortages and rotting food, the “robolución” and government gangsters, there’s just too much work to write up. Following Hugo Chavez news is almost sadistic. I feel bad, like the people of Detroit want you to feel for looking at ruin porn.

Hugo Chavez went public with prostate cancer a few months ago. Shaved head for chemotherapy, he’s spending a lot of time with top Cuban doctors. He’s got a tough election next year, which he’ll probably win if he can stay healthy. Then again, a tough election can take its toll on a man’s health. What will be next for Venezuela? I have no idea. But with all that oil it’d take a long time for them to fall as low as Cuba.

Note: Both Cuba and Venezuela were producing and bringing money in before their respective socialist takeovers (Havana was a party town and Venezuela has oil). But the uneven distribution of income and gross inequality (the Spanish legacy) swept these leaders to power. So don’t blame America, blame the Spanish!

Despite this brief experiment, someone with less than a basic education in economics is going to leave a dependency theory comment about America robbing, raping, and bullying these countries and that’s why they’re poor. So I’ll preempt that by explaining that NO SERIOUS ECONOMISTS are dependency theorists anymore. This is 2011. The dependency theory leaders include Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, and look how well they’ve done by reversing and keeping at bay gringo influence.

Moving past Latin America, look at all regions of the world. The countries allied with America are consistently better off in their region, especially compared with the enemies and “rogue nations.”

Educated and intellectually honest Colombians don’t disagree. I’ve had Colombians say in so many words, “We need the US.” It’s the peasant mentality that resents our influence. Ill-informed, uneducated peasants can look at the world without history or context and think, “No fair, gringos go home!” The enlightened leaders who will turn Colombia into a developed country reject the peasant mentality. As in your own life, when somebody has achieved what you hope to achieve, how do you treat him or her? I try to get on their team, to pick their brain, to get some of what they got. That’s why the intelligent, productive Latin Americans vote to team up with America while uninformed peasants elect Hugo Chavez.

I’m done. I’ve never dug the traditional patriotic songs, but this one always gets my pride stoked. Released just in the wake of 9/11 (OSAMA YOU’RE DEAD BITCH!), this is dedicated to American military around the world – US military in Colombia, get at me, I want to hear from you! – Petey Pablo’s “Raise Up (USA Remix)”:

My Ugly American Rant

Peruvian Naturals Maca on Taobao in China

Colin — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 01:46:08 +0000

Expat Chronicles

I import the Peruvian Naturals herbal supplement line from Peru into the United States. I sell Maca, Cat’s Claw, Camu Camu, Dragon’s Blood, Yacon, and Concha de Nacar con Baba de Caracol on Amazon.com.

My good friend Charles in China has just introduced Peruvian Naturals Maca, the best seller, in the Chinese market. He’s selling it on Taobao (Chinese Amazon).

I studied international business. The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman opened my eyes about the new globalized world. I moved to South America to do international business in an emerging market. So gaining product distribution in the world’s second largest economy is an achievement I’m proud of.

So, men interested in increasing your sex drive? Take Maca. Maca’s effect on hormones actually helps menopausal women as well, it eliminates their hot flashes and boosts energy.

Buy Maca from Peru in China on Taobao.

在中国，淘宝上买玛卡.

Peruvian Naturals Maca on Taobao in China

The Michelin Man Goes to Jail

Colin — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 22:56:41 +0000

Expat Chronicles

The Mick was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland. He endeavored in criminal activities early and became a Dublin underworld figure.

On the day of Halloween 1983 The Mick ran into his second cousin Eamon, who was also among the Dublin underworld. The Mick said he had to find a costume (or “fancy dress” as he calls it). Eamon told him it was his lucky day. He had a brand new costume – a Michelin Man outfit. It had a comfortable nylon mask that wouldn’t make it hard for The Mick to drink.

The Mick would be the Michelin Man. Instead of having to find a costume and pay the store, he could just stand a few pints at the pub for his second cousin, Eamon. That’s exactly what they did.

Later The Mick wore his costume to the Halloween ball at the Lansdowne Road rugby stadium. The Mick got “steamin’ drunk” and a good time was being had by all.

Then all of a sudden the lights were turned off and the music stopped. The police stormed the party looking for the Michelin Man. They immediately cuffed The Mick, in costume, and escorted him out.

The Michelin Man costume had been stolen from the Dublin Docks, where it had arrived from France for a promotional tour of Ireland. The Mick and Eamon grew up in the Dublin Docklands area. The Mick told the police he’d bought the costume on the street from a guy he’d never met. He didn’t name Eamon.

Given his reputation and criminal record, the police didn’t believe him. They charged him with Receiving Stolen Property. The judge didn’t believe or like The Mick, so he threw the book at him. The Mick was sentenced to six months in Mountjoy (‘The Joy’).

The Mick had served a few weeks when he was moved to Loughan House, which was being transformed from a juvenile detention center to a lower security prison for adults. This new facility was like heaven compared to Mountjoy. The food was better. There was fresh air and large fields. There were only a few other prisoners, no concrete prison yard, etc.

Despite being in heaven, The Mick found something to complain about – the amount of butter that came with the bread. He didn’t convince them to give him more butter, but they did send him right back to Mountjoy for being “unsuitable.”

The Mick passed a couple days back at The Joy, sad to be back. Just a day or two after his return a prison riot broke out. He’d just closed the door of his cell and he heard the first loud noises. “Riot noise” would be the sounds of violence, men yelling, things breaking. It raged for hours before the guards put it down.

After things were quelled, there was a period of lockdown where everybody sat in their cells almost the whole day. They left their cells three times a day for food, fetching their food and returning to the cell, and once to walk in the yard for an hour. The few times they came out they had to walk a guantlet of prison guards giving them tough looks, tightly gripping their batons.

Like this? See The Mick’s Prison Murder, or all The Mick’s stories.

Years ago, The Mick sobered up enough to write all his stories down in Word documents. Just for fun, here’s the unreadable drivel he pecked out on an ancient computer. He hit enter at the end of every line, as if he were working on a typewriter.

So , there I am zoomin` along down the road, mindin` me own business,
headin`up to St. Stephen`s Greeen, wasn`t I, Halloween it was, midday.
I was thinkin` to myself, what am i gonna wear to the fancy dress
party tonight? I had a relatively new girl friend, a few months, ye
know yourself. We had decided to surprise each other with what we
would wear to the fancy dress ball tonight in The Landsdown Road Rugby
Club`s anual fling. According to what I had heard `n` with my vast
experience of prievious years, all the cream of Dublin society would
be there. The year before I attended as a pimple. I wore a long black
robe `n` painted my face jet black. I brought with me on that occasion
little plastic containers filled with custard, easilly hidable `n`
suckable. At the do I would then suck the custard into my mouth,
inflating my cheeks with the most precious liquid `n` when the people

Jesus have you been? Around the place was the answer. Great to see ye,
I hope ye haven`t changed or anything like that. Ye haven`t joined a
monestary or anything like that, have ye? Not at all, come on `n`
let`s go `n` have a little gargle for ourselves. Come on, let`s go,
you cunt. Two pints `n` two small ones if ye wouldn`t be mindin` he
says to the barman. Yourè an awful man I says to him. We`ll be all
right once we get these chaps into our uncle Neds. Fancy a smoke? he
says, that`ll be grand I says. The 20 packet of Major is pulled out,
smokin` `n` drinkin` of a Halloween mornin` with the long lost cousin,
couldn`t be better, could it? Jet black stout with a snow white head.
Listen I says to him, I`m off to a fancy dress party tonight, he says,
shut up I have the solution to that, do ye know what I have? I have a
Mister Mitchelin Man`s suit, ye know the ones I`m on about, big rubber
bouncy one, I have. It`s a fuckin` beaut, exactly the same as the one
ye see on the TV. Hold on a sec, he says `n` darts out `n` like a
light he`s back with a big yellow canvas carry-all `n` there ye go, a
brand spankin` new Mr. Mitchelin Man`s tin a` fruit inside. Give us a
look at that I says `n` it`s perfect. Oh man. I couldn`t believe it.
Ye see because the mask of the suit didn`t have to be lifted to get
the gargle down ye `n` that`s a major advantage when ye drink the way
I drink. The face of the costume was made out of an elastic white
cotton afair, Ha Ha. Away with the biscuit, so to speak, liftin`up the
mask to get the gargle into ye at a Halloween party is a terrible pain
in the boollocks, I can tell ye. What a relief? It`s all yours, you
cunt, he says `n` yourè a horror thick man, I says as I ordered a
couple more pints `n` small ones to go along with the cigarette we had
just lit up. We had a few more gargles `n` then headed off in our opposite
directions, me with my prize `n` him with the proud feelin` that he
had just helped his favorite cousin for Halloween.I was well chuffed
with myself, it was the nicest rubber I had ever felt, all smooth `n` soft
`n` bouncy, it was like something off of the television or outta` the movies
`n` inside it had these rubber tentacles like an octopus, it was lovely. I put
it on in the house but I couldn`t get out the door so I had to take it off again,
which I didn`t mind in the least, the sensual feel, the floppyness,
differant world,. Anyway if I had been able to get out the door I
wouldn`t have been able to get into a taxi. So I went to the ball with
my Mr. Mitchelin Man stuffed into the boot. The relatively new
girlfriend was dressed-up as a rubber plant from somewhere along the
Amazon river, Brazil or some other exotic place like that. I remember
mentioning the rubber plantation fights or rather wars when there was
no such thing as syntetic rubber `n` when the rubber was exttracted by
cutting spiral groves in the rubber trees `n` waiting for days `n`
days for the rubber to wind it`s way down into the expectant
containers. There I was dressed in the very latest of syntetic rubber
technology.How ironic? The dancing, the lights, the drinks, the drugs,
I had some wonderful Charles, yet again, from somewhere near the
Amazon river. The only draw-back was that it was utterly impossible to
have sex with the Mr, Mitchelin Man on, what a shame? However, with
all these thoughts in my head `n` the party heatin`-up `n` me
heatin`-up even more inside the Mr. Mitchelin Man, sweatin` me
bollocks off, I was. But I didn`t mind `cos everybody was in awe of my
uniform, I knew I had woken the envy of the multidutes (there`s a
saying in Spanish that says, it`s better to wake envy than to feel it)
that`s the way it was, Ha, Ha. Just after 2 O`clock in the morning, ye
must remember, this little ball was sceduled to go on until 6O`clock,
all the way through till dawn, not so common in good Catholic Ireland,
usually 2 was the latest but in this case, private club `n` all that
stuff, everybody`s partying along to their hearts content when all off
a sudden, the music stops `n` the lights go on `n` in marches like 4
uniformed police men, lookin` all serious, bump, straight over to me.
Can you accompany us outside, please? `n` take off that mask, I knew
who they were by name but they didn`t know me yet, until they forced
me to take off the mask. Would you just take a look at who it is. The
bould Christy ………. Of course me being a little enibriated
decided to put up a bit of a battle, it was gas, me rollin` around in
the muck in me Mr. Mitchelin Man` suit, like a big rollypolly `n` them
hittin` me with their battons with absolutly no effect, between the
suit `n` the gargle, sure they couldn`t do a thing to me. Next
morning, me with a blanket around me, in front of justice O`
Huighaigh, me favorite judge `n` me being his favorite convict, having
being convicting me since the children`s court. The Cunt. What did the
article do this time? he sprouted. Fuck you, ye fuckin` bollocks.He
used to refer to me as the article, he had absolutly no right to call
me that, but he did, The Double Cunt. Will the arresting officer
please take the stand? I swear by almightty God that the evidenceI I
shall give to the court shall be the truth, the whole truth and
nothing but the truth, so help me God. The dirty liar of a cop
proceeded to give his version of the previous nights fiasco, the usual
carry-on, receiving stolen property,drunk `n`disorderly `n` refusin`
to fight, resisting arrest, all the same stuff that they always came
out with, water off of a duck`s back to me. I didn`t know what they
were talkin` about, I hadn`t a clue. Then it dawned on me, the Mr
Mitchelin man`s tin a` fruit, the suit. The long lost cousin, oh shit.
The suit. I couldn`t believe my ears. Will the defendant take the
stand. How do you plead? Not guilty, your hohour. What can one say in
a case like this with a mad hang-over? not guily. The bail is set at 5
thousand pounds and the defendant will appear here on the twenty
second of this month at 10 A M , mind the steps as you go down into
the bowels of the Bridewell. I signed the bail bond and was duely
released. On the 22nd of the same month I was sentenced to 6 months in
the Joy, well I could hardly pin-point the cousin, could I? Anyway
with my previous convictions there was very very little could be done,
except of course the time on the 2nd floor of B wing where the oul`
triangle goes jingle jangle along the banks of the where?

The Michelin Man Goes to Jail

Contributed Story: Bus Blow Job in Venezuela

Colin — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 05:37:46 +0000

Expat Chronicles

An American buddy living in Medellin inked this piece about an adventure during his trip to Venezuela to get his Colombian work visa. Enjoy!

I went to Venezuela to file my bullshit visa papers. I was on my way back in a bus from Maracaibo to San Cristobal. I was waiting in line to throw my shit under the bus and I saw this super dark venezolana with long, straight black hair in line a few people ahead of me and I’m pretty sure I had a long, straight boner.

That’s life in South America.

I threw my shit to dude packing up the bottom of the bus and I’m ready to depart at midnight on an eight hour bus ride. Ever seen the inside of a Greyhound Bus? Me neither, but they have to be Air Force One compared to the buses you’ll ride if you’re poor and unfortunate like me and couldn’t afford airfare. The bucket seats hardly recline, and how people sleep in them with the fucking bus shaking and slowing down and stopping all the goddamn time is beyond me. I discovered the only way to sleep is to get piss drunk; sleeping pills won’t work.

Board the bus, and there on each side are two seats scrunched together going back maybe twenty rows. Convenience over comfort – a ubiquitous theme in South America. I reach my row about midway through and sitting in the window seat next to my aisle seat is none other than exotic dark princess I was leering at like a sex offender waiting to check my bag.

I instantly realized how lucky I was when I sat down and she tilted her head over and said hi and asked how I was doing. It developed into mild get-to-know-you conversation. You’re a distributor for a manufacturer? They must like you a lot to ship you around in this fine mode of transportation. You’re single? Me too! After a little of this bullshit we’re alerted they have to change a light on the bus and everybody gets off and goes back in the terminal to wait out the time consuming process of headlight replacement.

It was great because me and exotic dark princess waited together, looking through each other’s pictures and exchanging Facebook addresses. When it was time to board, she reached in her bag and offered me her extra fleece blanket which I accepted. We got back in our seats and kept talking, lights had been turned down and I at one point turned sideways facing the window and she turned sideways towards me and we kept talking.

After awhile I just went for it; leaning in for the kiss with her accepting it graciously. We made out slow at first, then it got a little deeper. Hands started moving, and there this hot thing is, unbuckling my pants and seeing what she can find on a bus packed with people who haven’t even had time to fall asleep yet.

I’m thinking ok, sweet, a hand job on a bus packed with people in Venezuela, this should make a good story. Then as I took my hand from one of her tits up to her neck, she takes my fingers into her mouth and just starts sucking on them like she wanted to go under my blanket. I raised up a little, opened the side of my blanket towards her and sure enough, she did want to go under my blanket! FIRE HEAD.

Could anybody paying any attention in the bus see and know what was going on? Of course. Did I care? Hell no, I was in get-my-nut-off mode and oblivious to everyone else. After about 5 minutes of bliss I blew a top 5 nut of my life, which she swallowed down like daddy’s little angel and stayed down for another minute for good measure, making me practically have seizures. Fighting my urge to tell her thanks and roll over towards the aisle and try to go to sleep, we keep running our hands over each other and acting like two fuck demons possessed by the unholy to anyone witnessing I’m sure.

Before long she strokes up boner numero dos and before long I’m opening my blanket like a kind gringo for her to come in from the Venezuelan heat to my under blanket penis oven. How could she resist? Damn she was good. Close to ten minutes later I mercifully nut again, because it had to be like fear factor under that blanket in the already ridiculous heat. I really had her going.

We’re both tired at this point, and she turns into me and we spoon for quite some time. I’m slowly playing with her pussy, which was nice and shaved and didn’t feel like it had been too beat to hell. Not that I cared, really. She’s earned high marks with me. After awhile, she starts grinding her ass into me, and I start telling her I want to fuck her just like this, and like I used the force I felt her jeans start falling all the way down and felt her warm, firm, bubble ass start into my crotch, which had nothing covering it either after I took out a condom and pulled my pants to my ankles.

I kept her grinding into me for a minute more because goddamn, I’m 28, third boners aren’t as easy as they were when I was 18. I hadn’t gotten the condom wrapper open yet when all of a sudden during one of the frequent inexplicable stops all the lights come on and I’m suddenly aware of everyone else on the bus. I figured ok, driver had enough, he’s kicking me off and I’ll gladly walk for two or three days the rest of the way on the satisfaction I received on his fine bus.

We’re both struggling getting our pants up under our blankets which are entangled at this point, belts jingling. I notice it’s not the driver coming back towards us, but a Venezuelan soldier checking IDs. This pretty much killed it, as me and chick dozed off more or less the rest of the trip. We hugged at the San Cristobal terminal and being the smart girl she is she knew there wasn’t going to be any goodbye kiss. I picked up my bag from under the bus, doubled back to go find a cab when I noticed the driver of the bus looking at me. When he caught my eye he gave me a grin that said it all, and I just grinned back.

Contributed Story: Bus Blow Job in Venezuela

Final Thoughts on China

Colin — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 23:23:58 +0000

Expat Chronicles

Increase your sex drive with organic maca from Peru. Buy Peruvian Naturals Maca in China on Taobao.

Driving and Walking in China

Living in SoCal for a year I was surprised at local attitudes toward Asian drivers, the stereotype being that they suck. Imagine what it’s like in China! I’d watch somebody doing something stupid and hope for an accident. I wanted closure. A car slowing down to a stop at a green light with traffic whizzing past, changing lanes without looking, pedestrians crossing the street in the face of oncoming traffic with a green light, etc. Please wreck, please! I drove Margaret’s car in Beijing a couple times – my first time driving outside the States. I had no problems except the ridiculous traffic.

Driving aside, a lot of them don’t know how to walk. I was walking in a busy subway station when a Chinese fella came toward me. He was hauling ass past other people with HIS HEAD TURNED COMPLETELY OVER HIS SHOULDER. I would’ve had to move to avoid him. In a split second I decided I wasn’t moving. This dude needs to learn how to walk. So this 140 pound local’s walking fast with his attention at his 5 o’clock and I’m walking fast as I always do and of course nobody changes paths and I didn’t even lower my shoulder and I plowed his ass over. He dropped his books and caught the ground with his hand. A few steps later I casually looked over my shoulder and saw him staring after me shocked and dumbfounded. I raised my hand as if to say, “Excuse me.”

Chinese Sheep Mentality

Chinese are proud of their 5,000 year history. What struck me weird is their strange, obsessive worship of Mao. His image is everywhere, watching over Tiananmen at the entrance to Forbidden City and on all the RMB notes. I’m American and we barely have 200 years of history, yet we have several historic figures on different dollar bills. You could field a football team with them all playing both ways and including Sacajawea. The Chinese are so damn proud of their 5000 years of history yet they only have one guy on all their damn bills?

Then you ask the average Chinese person what Mao did that was so great and THEY HAVE NO IDEA! I asked many Chinese and nobody mentioned The Great Leap Forward (a misnomer given its being a colossal failure, maybe Great Leap Nowhere would be a better name), the Cultural Revolution (another disaster no intelligent being would be proud of, better name would be Cultural Devolution), or any specific legacy at all. One guy noted he held the country together after the war with the Japs. Is that worth idol deity status? Most Chinese simply said, “Because he’s Mao!” Don’t you get it?

Reader Bart writes:

I would imagine that the reason for their ignorance is the fact that they are not allowed to think for themselves. That country is so tightly controlled, it’s not funny. But it is the reason for their success …

Here are excerpts of an email from a friend who got his Master’s in Economics at a top Chinese university:

Group projects with mainlanders have been driving me crazy. They constantly want to have meetings and nit-pick over trivial mathematical details. They have to arrive at a consensus before proceeding with anything, and they present their ideas with a level of depth one could expect of a Congressional investigation. It’s not the language barrier either.

The current investments group project involves creating a financial plan for someone given various scenarios and investment opportunities. In one scenario the hypothetical client takes a year off for school which increases income by 20%. The instructions explicitly state that when she comes back to work her income increases “twenty percent to what it otherwise would have been”. A group member wanted to multiply the last annualized paycheck by 20%. It took me an hour to explain that, although that makes sense, that is not what is in our instructions. “Well, this other group did it like this.” “The other group is wrong.” They’d rather be wrong with the others than take a chance alone.

For last semester’s econometrics paper I was in a shit group with members that didn’t know anything. They copied all their homework assignments and on the final (and received higher final grades in the course than I did). After a meeting one group member looked at me and asked, “So, for the paper you want us to write all new words?” “Yes, all new words.” I put this same person in charge of writing the literature review portion. What was produced was what seemed like a children’s guide to GDP. There wasn’t a single reference to any previous papers. I guess I had to explain that a literature review is a fucking review of literature.

The other group member complained that the model I produced only produced a correlation of about 0.4. “I think we should have a correlation of 0.8 or 0.9.” “If you can come up with something that can determine GDP growth fluctuations with that kind of accuracy you should hand your paper in to a publisher, not Dr. Wing.” It turns out that ours was pretty good compared to the class. More: “We should forecast. What is the point of our model if we don’t use it to forecast?” “The point is that we are fulfilling the requirements of the paper.” It would have taken at least another day to program for a forecast. I sat down with her and started the forecasting process. “Do you still want to forecast?” “No.” “Good. Me neither.”

I think some of these mainlanders live in a world of math equations detached from practical application. Maybe I am just in the wrong groups.

There is a palpable sheep mentality in China. I’m often critical of Americans for being insular, close-minded, and generally having a sheep mentality. But the gringos got nothing on the Chinese. It’s a very Western idea to question authority. Don’t believe everything you hear. Have a skeptical press. These values don’t exist in China.

Cultural Disconnect in China

A career mentor who represented Anheuser-Busch all over the world told me Asia was the most difficult place to do business. He cited that Europe, North America, and South America share a Judeo-Christian background and, whether you’re religious or not, that background has a huge influence on our culture and psyche. He noted that, in our society, lying to your wife, a friend, a customer, a stranger, or anybody is a lie. A lie is a lie is a lie. In China, everything’s relative. How they think stems from a completely different philosophy. Not only do I not understand it, I don’t even know what that philosophy it is.

In Peru a part of my job was sourcing raw materials in China. I once emailed a friend with a lot of work experience in China about my problems dealing with one Chinese supplier in particular. Excerpts from his reply:

Colin,

In dealing with the Chinese, a few things to remember:

English is not their native tongue so avoid abbreviations (use kilos, not kg)

List things out (like I’m doing here). Putting things in paragraph form makes it hard for them to pull out the important information. I know you put it in bold, and that was smart, but listing is better.

Write in excessive detail. Reiterate things. When I write instructions, I take pictures of everything and then describe what is in the picture. I would have written “1000 kg (kilograms ) of …”

They do not make decisions. If there is any hesitation at all, they will not do it. They do not have the drive to be a leader or even get noticed. Their entire goal is to have no responsibility. They want you to spell it out. It is almost like a drug transaction in the movies. You have to say the right words before they do anything.

Good luck in dealing with the Chinese. It is a pain-staking process.

I don’t understand China. I’ll never fit in.

I do understand Latin America, and I get along just fine. Saturday night I went out drinking. I made friends with a couple Colombian chicks and a gay guy. Then another gringo came in hard on one of them. She wasn’t rejecting his advances per se, but she wasn’t making out with him either. The three of them invited us back to one girl’s apartment. The gringo maintained his pressure while drinking rum at the apartment. We weren’t there ten minutes when he got fed up and stormed out, taking the rum with him. I technically have more in common with him culturally, but I caught myself thinking, “God, don’t be such a cold gringo.” Just because the girl’s not opening her legs for you doesn’t mean she doesn’t like you. You’re in Latin America. Chill out. Take your time. Mañana. I felt he didn’t fit in with us – us meaning the Colombians and me.

In China, I’m that gringo alien.

Final Thoughts on China

Women and Sex in Beijing, China

Colin — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 01:15:26 +0000

Expat Chronicles

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Alternate Title: They Do Not Have Slanted Pussies

Many Chinese women love foreigners. Still, the country has 123 men to every 100 women, and it’s expected the man pay for everything. So I’d say China’s just OK for sex.

White Chicks in China

My first two weeks I didn’t talk to any Chinese girls, only white girls working or studying in Beijing. I didn’t plan it that way, it just happened. After two weeks I had to consciously start going after Asians.

Every white girl I met, without exception, was not attracted to Chinese men. I used a qualifier with them; I said the best way to learn Mandarin is to get a Chinese boyfriend who doesn’t speak English. The idea is to find out if they have a boyfriend at all. Every answer I got, again without exception, was that they’re not attracted to Chinese guys. One even said, “It’ll never happen!”

Most white girls aren’t attracted to the local men but the white men are attracted to the local women. So the potential pool of partners for foreign men is huge while the foreign women’s is tiny. They have to compete with petite Asian chicks and Asian fetishes, so they make it easier for you. One Russian chick pointed at me outside a club and said, “I like you.”

If I had to live in China, I’d troll around for white girls and then only the drunkest, sleaziest, sluttiest Chinese girls.

Chinese Whore

My first two weeks I stayed in a hostel near Beijing Railway Station. One night an Australian guy in his 50s moved in. We got to talking. He’s been bumming around Asia – mostly China – for almost thirty years. He’s an Australian-in-China version of The Mick. The only difference is The Mick doesn’t bang whores while The Australian is a bona fide whoremonger.

The Australian Mick told me about the brothels (or “knocker shops” as he called them) from China to India and everywhere in between. He called different cities and eras “scenes.” The best scene was Bangkok just after the Vietnam War ended. There were tons of Thai chicks into foreigners plus Thai whores making a living off GIs when all of a sudden thousands of Americans left. It was easy pickings for white guys after that.

The Australian Mick’s least favorite “knocker shops” are in India. He had a funny story. He was visiting an Indian friend in a small town who brought him to the local red-light district. They passed a long line of Indian men into a dark house. He saw a young naked Indian girl sitting in a La-Z-Boy style armchair with her legs spread and tied to the arms of the chair. The madam was charging 20 rupees for two minutes with the young girl in the armchair. The line of Indian men went out the door and around the corner, well over fifty deep. $0.40 for two minutes and the whole goddam neighborhood’s been in there! The worst part that put me in tears: none wore condoms. The Australian Mick noted that young girl was earning a damn good hourly wage for India.

I told The Australian Mick about the whorehouse in the contributed story, Chasing Women in China. I wanted to go to that kind of brothel, where the girls give boobs-and-ass massages, and drink hot and cold water before licking you up and down, and lick your feet. He told me the hot and cold is called ‘fire and ice’. He said that’s expensive, at least 600 RMB ($90). Probably more in Beijing.

All this talk put me in the mood for a professional. He told me how to find brothels in Beijing. You have to go into the hutongs and look for hair salons open late at night. If you see one where there are a few chicks hanging out but nobody’s getting their hair cut, it’s probably a “knocker shop.” They’re rarely on the more travelled alleys, but the ones where cars don’t fit. And there won’t be just one, but a couple next to each other.

The Australian Mick, a German in our room, and I went out to get drunk and bang whores. We went to a hutong he knew and started drinking beer. We walked around for over an hour without finding one. The Australian Mick said things changed a lot because police cracked down before the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, and he hadn’t been in Beijing since.

At one point The Australian Mick spoke in Chinese to a girl standing around near the exit of the hutong. He told us she was a whore, but one that doesn’t take white guys. He said there’s an entire class of whores whose pimps reserve them for Chinese men. No foreigners allowed.

We decided to ask a cab driver. Not a driver of a car, but a motorcycle cab. It’s a motorcycle with a small bench and tent built on the back. The driver said he’d take us to one for free. He gets a cut from the pimp for every whore banged. There were three of us in this little contraption and we were traveling about 20 mph. The driver called a friend who pulled up alongside for The Australian Mick, who was hesitant to get out because he thought they’d take us to different places.

Sure enough they split us up. The German and I were taken to a hutong just down the street from our hostel. The driver dropped us off at a corner store that looked like a laundry service. Inside were a big Chinese guy, a small Chinese guy, two hot young Chinese girls, and an older madam. They told us 400 RMB, which the German talked down to 300 ($45). I wanted The Australian Mick with us because he said it should never cost more than 150 – maybe 200 if it’s a nice place which this wasn’t.

I was stumbling drunk holding two big beers. The German picked one and headed into a room. I was wasted and not knowing what to do. The Chinese guys pointed at the other and said, “Very beautiful.” I agreed, but maybe wanted to have a drink with her and warm things up. She was slim, about 21 years old, with short hair, cute face, and eyes I won’t forget but can’t describe.

I paid the madam and the hot Chinese Whore led me outside and across the alley to an apartment. There was a twin bed with no sheets next to a bunk bed. She sat down on the twin and got undressed. When I got undressed she gasped. Maybe she gasped because I’m big and strong or maybe because of the chest hair I’d been growing out for a couple months. In the old James Bond flick, You Only Live Twice, Sean Connery’s in Japan and he’s getting bathed in the hot tub by a couple Asian chicks and they can’t get enough of him. Bond’s English-speaking guide says they’re fascinated with his chest hair. So I grew mine out till it was bushy. Chinese Whore rubbed her hand in it, as did the other Chinese chicks I bedded.

She was slim and soft. She had pubic hair. Not much because it didn’t grow in a large area, but the hair that was there was so long it’d certainly never been cut. There was no blow job. According to The Australian Mick, the Chinese don’t give oral. The men tell the women it’s dirty. The only Chinese girls who suck dick are the ones who’ve had foreign boyfriends.

We petted for a while until I wrapped it up and got on top. She closed her eyes tight and made the weirdest noises I’ve ever heard. It sounded like a loud baby, not a crying baby, but a baby making loud noises. Each of her Asian eyes shut tight made one little slit surrounded by soft yellow skin.

She spoke no English so getting dressed afterward was sign language and facial expressions. She was gorgeous. One thing about this young Chinese whore was that she seemed innocent. Latin whores – they’re all sleazy. I watched this one put on her white Chuck Taylors and thought she was a cute little innocent nerd.

When we stumbled out of the apartment the small pimp was standing in the street. The whore went back into their building and this pimp pointed down the alley yelling something in Chinese which I took to mean, “Your friend went that way.” I found my way back to the hostel and shared stories with the German.

Mildred

Last I heard 1/8 American marriages met on the internet. Meeting online is even more common in Asia. So I started trolling WeLiveInBeijing and Beijing craigslist hunting chicks. Mildred was the first. I met her the first night I moved into an apartment. Actually I delayed meeting her until I was out of the hostel so I’d have a place to fuck her.

I was already near broke so I showed up to the date in Sanlitun holding two big beers, one for her, and invited her to drink with me on a bench somewhere (setting a proper precedent on how much I’d be spending). One look at her and I remembered why I don’t do online dating. She wasn’t horrible, but nowhere near my standards. I decided to drink myself to the point where I found her attractive.

We talked and I tried to lower her defenses. She was uncomfortable drinking on the bench. I drank most of her beer. The only thing I remember her saying is she only likes guys taller than her. She was 173cm, or about 5’8. She likes Chinese guys just fine, but they have to be taller than her. A clear buying signal.

After the beers I suggested we go to Smugglers. Second to the perch at the Sanlitun alley entrance with 3 RMB big beers and 4 RMB half pints of that horrible Chinese rice liquor, Smugglers is my next favorite for cheap drinks – 10 RMB for Red Bull vodka ($1.40). Plus it’s actually a bar as opposed to an outdoor liquor store with tables.

I ordered us Red Bull vodkas. This place puts one ice cube – two max – in its cocktails. The ice melts before the drinks arrive. No worry, it’s easier to chug. Unfortunately, Mildred wasn’t drinking hers very fast. She said it was too cold. I leaned over the table and kissed her.

Now that that was out of the way, time to get her drunk and close the deal. I ordered two cranberry vodkas (they make your breath smell good), one with no ice. The server asked me for 40 RMB. HOLD THE PHONE! 40 RMB? I snatched the menu back from him and, sure enough, cranberry vodkas were 20 RMB ($3) each. I switched the order to two 10 RMB screwdrivers, one with no ice.

Mildred and I were holding hands when they arrived. I slammed her Red Bull vodka. She tried her screwdriver and said the temperature was much better. Good. She took another sip and said it didn’t have any alcohol in it. I took a sip and concluded it was actually quite strong. I couldn’t taste the orange juice. I told her to take another sip. She still couldn’t taste it. I put my finger at the halfway point on the glass and told her to drink it down to that level and then see if she could taste it. She could.

I’ve seen Asians with a silly low tolerance for alcohol. Mildred included. I could see the drunkenness come into her eyes. She kept sipping her drink, and with each sip her eyes slowed down and her expression grew duller and duller. This was turning out a cheap date.

I told her we should get some fresh air. I took her to a deserted street and kissed her. I had to force my tongue into her mouth. I was fondling her boobs and butt as well. She was obviously overcome by the pleasure, but her face looked like she was going to cry. As if it hurt. I remember the few times I try to watch Japanese porn, the actresses look like that too. Like it’s torture.

I got a big beer for myself and we sat down on a bench. We made out more. She said she was uncomfortable because Chinese people were staring at us. We should go to my brand new apartment, I suggested. It’s private and we can just chill out. She protested that she didn’t want to sleep with me. No problem, we’ll just have a beer and relax in the warmth.

After getting out of the taxi near my place, I bought another beer. On the walk to my apartment, I peed on a bush. I asked her if she wanted to watch. She didn’t.

When I say I got an apartment, I mean I got a room in a shared apartment. There were three other rooms plus a tiny “sitting room” with one small couch. We sat down on the couch with my beer. We had about two sips when I suggested seeing my room. I left the beer behind and locked the bedroom door.

Every single step toward sex was a major battle. Turning off the lights. No, of course we don’t have to have sex. Taking off her shoes and jacket. No, we won’t have sex. Taking off my shirt. No, we won’t have sex. On and on and on until I had her down to her underwear and me naked. Don’t you want to touch it? We don’t have to have sex.

I got her underwear off, still assuring her we won’t have sex, and put my finger inside. I had my index finger down to the main joint and she was flopping all around the bed, going crazy. Not even one whole finger and she’s going nuts.

I grew tired of the battles and gave up hope of sex. That’s when she started stroking my penis and said, “I want it.” I wrapped it up and started. This 5’8 Asian didn’t want it any way except missionary, with her legs flat and me lying flat on top of her. I put her legs up for a couple pumps and she said, “Pain. Pain.” I didn’t attempt doggystyle.

After I finished she was all over me, caressing my chest. She said we could do it every day I was in town. She said she didn’t want me to do it with any other girls.

In avoiding self-indulgence, I’ve refrained from writing about penis size on this blog but it’s an important part of the story of sex in Asia. If you’re larger than average on American standards, you’ll be quite a commodity in Latin America where the average is a little smaller. And in Asia, forget about it. This 5’8 Asian’s vagina was crazy tight. Less than my index finger to start things off, and then only missionary sex. I have a theory that most white guys in Asia are there because they want to feel like black guys sexually.

Shirley

I was out with a group of French at the popular dance club, Suzy Wong’s. There were four or five guys and one girl in our group. There was a Chinese girl at the bar wearing a leopard pattern top, and I decided to make a joke on the French girl by getting this Chinese girl’s attention and telling her that the French girl was wearing underwear with the exact same pattern as that top. The French girl laughed and that was all.

The French and I got a bottle of whiskey. After finishing it, they all went home. I was left alone. I was talking to some people here, some there, when a Chinese girl at the bar got my attention. She said the Chinese girl in the leopard pattern top wanted to dance. OK, I introduced myself. Her name was Shirley. We danced right there at the bar for about one minute when Shirley pulled me close and bit my chest through my shirt. We made out. I put her hands on my ass. She squeezed. She squeezed my shoulders and chest and ass again.

Shirley was too drunk to stand still. I had to keep her balanced. Her friend decided it was time to go. I got Shirley’s number. I planned on calling because she was hot, drunk, slutty, and into white guys. This is the exact type I was referring to in the sentence: “If I had to live in China, I’d troll around for white girls and then only the drunkest, sleaziest, sluttiest Chinese girls.”

We played text tag for a week. When it was time to hang out she suggested Suzy Wong’s, where I was paying 40 RMB for a Manhattan (30 for Heineken) and I never found a way to suggest a date drinking big beers in the street. We never hung out, which I regret. She would’ve been perfect for a Chinese girl – not prude, not against drinking, speaks English, and surely has lots of sexual experience with foreigners.

Margaret

I met Margaret at Tun bar. She sat down next to me and my friend and bought us a round of shots. She was cute enough and dressed slutty. She seemed interested. We drank and talked and I held her hand. Despite holding hands for who knows how long, she denied a kiss at the bar. The three of us went for food after closing the bar. After eating and holding hands and her playing with my arm hair the whole meal, she denied another kiss attempt when saying goodbye.

Margaret texted me the next day. I replied that I’m not interested in conservative Chinese girls. I forgot about it until the next time I went out drinking with the French guys. The story came up and I told them about her. She said she owned several houses around Beijing and a condo in Los Angeles, she had a car, and she bought all the shots. They were incredulous I let her go. What? What are you thinking? Etc.

The French had invited me to a big dinner at a Japanese steakhouse. I already agreed to go, but now I decided to bring Margaret to introduce to them. She wanted to go and offered to pick me up at my apartment. My American buddy told me if you invite a girl to dinner, it’s assumed you’ll pay. This was an all-included meal for 170 RMB, so there was no way in hell I was paying for her. When she picked me up I said something like, “Oh, I think I forgot to tell you this is an expensive dinner. It’s 170 RMB. Is that OK?” She didn’t flinch.

Before dinner she had to stop by her apartment, which overlooked a posh square in downtown Beijing. She wanted to drop off her wallet, but how much money would “we” need? She had a stack of pink 100 RMB notes, looking to me for an answer. 500? 1000? 2000? She decided on 1000 and asked me to hold it. The dinner included beer and sake so everybody was too trashed to party afterward. I gave Mildred back her 1000 less 170 and everybody went home.

I hung out with Mildred the whole week. On a typical day she’d pick me up at my apartment and treat me to an all-you-can-eat barbecue buffet. Some of them included prime rib, shrimp, beer, and wine. We’d bum around Beijing until time for dinner, when she’d again treat me to a nice restaurant with drinks. Then we’d go out drinking in Sanlitun bars – not my perch with the dope-peddling Nigerians nor Smugglers with the 10 RMB Red Bull Vodkas. I never ordered beer with her – only Campari with sodas and Jamesons neat. The weather in Beijing turned freezing cold and I had no jacket. She took me to the Beijing Zoo to buy me a jacket and ski cap.

My Oct 23 Tweet (twitter.com/ColinPost):

Something The Mick taught me: If someone regularly pays your way and you want to keep it that way, never say ‘thank you’.

Despite the daily free ride, I got bored. We held hands and nothing more. She was almost asexual. She had an Asian-American boyfriend in Los Angeles who she wanted to marry, but her parents didn’t approve. Her money comes from her dad’s business, and the boyfriend was a doctor. Dad wants her to marry a guy who will take over the business, not a doctor. So Margaret obeyed. I don’t know why she liked me. Maybe she thought I’d be that guy, maybe she just wanted to be seen with a white guy and practice English. Who knows? But I wasn’t going to pull any more Chinese chicks if I kept hanging out with her.

Marilyn

I met Marilyn on Beijing craigslist. Her add read something like: ‘I constantly think about sex and need it all the time. I can’t get enough. I like all kinds of things and can meet anywhere.” I sent her this picture of me a little flabby, but the biggest I’ve ever been at 225 lbs:

She replied. She was interested. One email said “Hope to fuck u soon!” This seemed like a good fit. Good God was I wrong.

I actually left a night of free drinks with Margaret because Marilyn wanted to meet. I raced home and barely arrived at the 711 in time. She looked enough like her picture, attractive. She wouldn’t kiss me in the elevator. I was wondering how to get sex started after an email exchange like that. Surely she’d have to warm up a little?

She seemed scared until I laid back on my bed. She rubbed my belly and started asking me questions. “Have you ever paid for sex?” I lied. “Do you have a big cock?” I asked her if she wanted to see it. She pulled it out and we kissed. She got horny and asked to take a shower. Take a shower now? She took a shower and I got naked. She walked from the bathroom to my room butt naked despite knowing I had plenty of roommates and said, “OK, fuck me!”

I did. After finishing it was still early and we talked in bed. This is when it got weird.

She got a dildo out of her purse, which she wanted to fuck me with. Her exact words: “I want to penetrate your asshole.” That wasn’t happening. She wanted to see it anyway. She wanted to SEE MY BUTTHOLE, which is hairy. I showed it to her and she said it was “a work of art.”

She does role-playing. After a couple hours I was ready to go again. We did a teacher-student scene. I was new to this but I tried. “You wanna learn English? First you have to learn to suck dick.” Stuff like that. Then I started fucking her.

Marilyn: “Teacher, I go home now?”

Me: “Uhh … Not till I’m done.”

Marilyn: “Teacher, you don’t tell my parents?”

Me: “ … ?”

Marilyn: “Teacher, I only 14.”

Me: “Will you fucking stop?”

I didn’t say that last one. But I was weirded out although she’s clearly in her twenties. For real though, just shut up and enjoy it.

Another role playing fantasy she has is a vampire and a priest. She’d be the vampire eating a human in a church when the priest (me) catches her. And to punish her, the priest decides to fuck her. I don’t think she knows priests are celibate.

Even weirder is her fantasy of a hunter and a bear. A hunter (me) would come upon a bear (her) bathing in a river (the shower). Instead of killing her, I fuck her. Fucking weird! I asked how we would play roles. She’d be a bear that can talk. She said she sometimes watches bestiality porn; the last one was two Chinese women with a pig. A PIG! I’ll not describe how they did it, which she did describe to me.

I asked if she wanted me to cum on her face in the morning. She said I could ONLY if I lick it off and share it with her via kissing. So that didn’t happen. She was disappointed that I only like “normal sex.” I didn’t consider myself to be only into “normal sex,” but I guess so compared to you, you weird bitch.

Still, it must’ve turned me on because we did it twice that night and again in the morning. I put her legs up, and later got some doggystyle in, but by the end of it all we could only do it with her legs flat and me lying flat on top. She said guys always say they have big dicks online, but when she sees it she usually doesn’t think so. She never believes the emails. I’d wondered about this because if you read men’s sex ads online, you’d think there’s a shitload of 8-inchers (20cm) out there. I’m short of 8 and if they were that common then chicks wouldn’t respond to me the way they do. But I learned something from Marilyn anyway: dudes be lyin’!

Marilyn had a French boyfriend who she considers her best lover ever. He was into all the same stuff. She fucked him in his ass with the dildo, role-played, he ate his own cum, everything. He married and moved in with a Chinese girl in some other city, but would drive 8+ hours to Beijing to be with Marilyn for a night. Good for him. Should’ve married her, dumb ass.

Reflections

Marilyn told me she had “white fever.” A handful of white guys I met in China asked if I had “yellow fever.” My reply: “No, and I’m not going to get it.”

Asians are attractive enough, but I’m just not into them. I thought German was the least sexy language until I heard Chinese. Holding a conversation with Chinese girls is torture unless they have zero accent. Watching them dance is almost as bad. They’re uncoordinated. They’re mostly conservative, but even those that aren’t surely wouldn’t be the lovers that Latinas are. Even if you don’t speak Spanish, Latinas’ accent in English is sexy. And they can dance.

A drinking buddy from Nigeria told me China gets better with time. Probably true. In my last days I got phone numbers from more beautiful, cleaner, and seemingly more intelligent Chinese girls. Maybe my buddy’s right and things would get better. Then again, they ain’t Latinas! My final thought on women and sex in Beijing, China: If I had to live in China, I’d troll around for white girls and then only the drunkest, sleaziest, sluttiest Chinese girls.

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Women and Sex in Beijing, China

Tweets from Beijing, China

Colin — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 23:14:59 +0000

Expat Chronicles

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I didn’t do much writing in Beijing. I did regularly update my Twitter profile, http://twitter.com/ColinPost. Those tweets with elaborations sum up what I did in China.

in beijing, I paid two ****ing dollars for a liter of milk!
Sep 22

When contemplating Chinese global dominance, keep in mind these people eat with sticks and shit standing up.
Sep 22

Actually, this is inaccurate. They do eat with sticks, but I assumed they shit standing up because most public toilets are just holes in the floor. No toilet, no bowl, no seat. But they don’t stand, they squat.

Don’t know what’s worse in China, the food or music. You can try to tune out or ignore the music. But you can’t ignore your food.
Sep 22

Traditional Chinese music, as with any culture’s traditional music, is great. But people get into trouble when they try making another culture’s music, which is difficult to pull off. White people doing reggae, Latin rock, British rappers – all of it sucks. Poxy fuckin’ music. Still, Chinese rock and pop is less tolerable than all that. Horrible.

Most Chinese food is fried, steamed, or boiled. They believe eating raw vegetables isn’t healthy, so all vegetables are boiled or fried. Walking around hutongs you’ll see all kinds of unindentifiable foodstuffs meant for human consumption. In grocery stores you walk through aisles and aisles of unrecognizable items. It’s discouraging. I resorted to eating duck and fruit for most meals.

On a positive note, I’ve had more duck in the last 2 weeks than in my previous 31 years. Duck kicks ass, and there’s a lot of them in China.
Sep 26

Duck kicks ass. Peking duck is the proper way to eat it. They roast an entire duck and serve it with wheat tortillas, cucumbers, and Chinese barbecue sauce for Chinese duck tacos. I’d also buy legs and wings pre-cooked on the street and microwave them as needed.

The goddamn heathens I hung out with last night ate dog at a North Korean restaurant for dinner. Dogs are pets, not food!
Sep 26

Here’s a page in the menu of a Korean restaurant I ate at:

I told my American friends about that and one sent me this article about Chinese cooking and selling rats as chicken.

In Bogota, I ate at the local McDonald’s twice in over a year. In Beijing, I’ve eaten McDonald’s four times in less than two weeks.
Sep 26

That rate increased to about four times per week and my last week I was going there every day. Sometimes you just don’t want Chinese food. That sometimes was often for me.

A Mongolian prostitute offered herself to me in a high-end Beijing nightclub for 1000 RMB. I told her SHE had to pay ME. That gets rid of em
Sep 26

This was at Xiu where I paid 50 RMB ($7) for a Heineken. Prostitutes are in all the Beijing bars since most Chinese women don’t party. So if you go in a bar and it looks like the men to women ratio is about 2:1, it’s probably 3:1 if you exclude whores.

I was talking to one in Suzie Wong’s who I suspected to be a pro. At one point she asked me to get the bartender’s attention. She wanted water. I ordered it, but when it came I didn’t pay. She had conveniently turned around when it arrived. She didn’t come back after realizing I didn’t pay. She was a whore. That’s actually a good way of qualifying the buyer if you’re a whore.

I ate a whole duck last night – granted it was probably just a baby – for 21 RMB, or three dollars. What I lose in milk value I gain in duck
Sep 28

Duck is greasier than chicken, so eating the whole duck is messier than putting down a Cornish hen. I eventually switched to legs and wings.

maybe canceling the India trip in favor of a week in Vietnam and a few days in Thailand.
Sep 28

Everything was cancelled except Beijing.

finished The New Asian Hemisphere, White Tiger, and Art of War – 3 books by Asian authors – to supplement my Asian adventure.
Oct 01

White Tiger was an amazing look at contemporary India and a compelling story. Skip Art of War.

Highly recommend The New Asian Hemisphere for those interested in world politics, economics for insight to the non-Anglo-American viewpoint.
Oct 01

If you like my posts from Michael Reid’s Forgotten Continent, you’ll love The New Asian Hemisphere for opening your eyes to a non-Western point of view. Can’t recommend this one enough.

In China, Kazakhs have the reputation of fighters in bars and clubs. Bouncers try to keep them out. They don’t look like Borat.
Oct 02

I saw a fight start outside Vics one night between a couple groups. Only a few on each side would be active, but it’d get broken up and move to another side of the parking lot. The skirmishes went on and on around the parking lot until I lost sight and quit watching. Some twenty minutes later I saw it was still going on, moving its way around the parking lot.

To a lesser extent, Mongolians and Russians share the reputation. I had to yell at a Russian guy one night at the perch I drank at. Nothing happened.

Smoking culture in China is crazy. Chinese men usually smoke while eating, and also while sitting on the toilet! (if they sit)
Oct 02

At a restaurant you’ll see four guys with hot food in front of them, and three of them are smoking. You see cigarette burns on the toilet seats and butts on the ground. When I was in a hostel, I once had a Chinese roommate who woke up around 9am and chain-smoked four cigarettes before breakfast! If I hadn’t have opened the window and door, he wouldn’t have. There is absolutely no shame about smoking in China.

Beijing is built like Los Angeles: long, wide streets. Impossible to get around on foot. But subway’s excellent and only costs 2RMB, $0.30.
Oct 01

Beijing’s not as flat as LA, but it’s definitely sprawled. Evening rush hour lasts from 4 – 9pm. One city block is about a quarter mile. The subway is excellent and efficient. Train frequency increases at peak times so you never wait long. Driving a car every day is a silly option.

Another positive for Chinese taste: the beer is amazingly drinkable. I must’ve had 12 big bottles last night, paying for it today.
Oct 01

Lithuanian food is the only cuisine as bad as Chinese, and Lithuanian beer sucks too. In China Budweiser’s everywhere and not too expensive, but unnecessary because Chinese beer’s great.

Chinese nationals caught dealing drugs face the death penalty. So wholesale traffickers sponsor and import Nigerians to sell in the streets.
Oct 06

I actually met more South Africans than Nigerians. I assume they’re picked for English fluency. Africans patrol the streets of Sanlitun hard-selling weed and coke to guys who look like me. The prices are higher than in America since the risk is much higher. Chinese nationals face the death penalty, but Africans caught selling drugs are just deported.

I got to know a couple of these guys from the perch I drank at, located on the main corner entrance to the Sanlitun bars. It’s an outdoor liquor store with tables and chairs. Big beers are only 3 RMB ($0.40). It’s mostly Africans drinking there. A couple Russians and randoms here and there. And me almost every night I was in town.

secured a furnished apt near Jinsong for my last few weeks in Beijing. 1st night wasn’t spent alone, 1st morning found the local duck joint.
Oct 07

I grew sick of the hostel and got a furnished room in an apartment. The first night I had sex with Mildred (Women and Sex in Beijing, China coming soon).

Here’s the view from my apartment:

Bought 3 duck legs for 9.60 RMB, or about $1.30. That’ll be an everyday thang.
Oct 07

Do Asians believe they’re more evolved than whites? I’ve heard two Chinese girls say so.
Oct 08

I first caught this in an offhand comment from an American’s Chinese girlfriend. She said something about his arm hair, but the quickness with which she said it is what got me. I asked Lucy, Margaret, and some other Chinese girls. They all think white people are “closer to the monkey” than Asians. Aside from our body hair, one of these girls said our food is primitive, very “simple.” Steaks cooked rare especially make them think we’re animals. I guess dogs, snakes, and monkey brains make good nourishment for higher beings.

Played flag football Sunday. The presence of a flag football league shows difference between the expat experience in Asia vs. Latin America.
Oct 14

Not soccer, football. American football. The only people who play football are Americans plus a few Canadians. And still there are enough Americans and Canadians to have a Beijing flag football league with ten 5-man teams. They’re sponsored by Vitamin Water (free cases during game days), Bank of America, Blue Frog (uniforms), and Elite Nutrition Center. They played on three turf fields. They have a website, a draft, playoffs, a super bowl, the works.

This illustrates how many foreigners there are in China. It’s completely different from Latin America. In one year in Arequipa, I met two foreigners living there. In Bogota, excluding La Candelaria and Zona Rosa, you can go weeks without seeing a gringo. Maybe even a month. In China, you can’t go a day. You can’t go an hour without seeing a white person if you take the subway. They’re everywhere. In Bogota, I’d be hard-pressed to get one game of touch football together.

Hung out with all French people last night, which there are a ton of in China. The French are damn good people in my book.
Oct 14

There’s a group of five or six French I went out with often. There are a shitload of French in China. I may have heard French spoken more than English. I hear there are even more of them in Shanghai.

I saw a scuffle / shoving match at the Apple Store in Sanlitun. NERDS!
Oct 16

This was the day iPhone 4 was released in China. My meathead friends in St. Louis call me a nerd for having a blog, but they’re rednecks. The technophiles and especially Apple addicts are the real nerds, not to mention unashamedly materialistic. To get upset while waiting for a goddamn phone – no, to even wait in line for a goddamn phone, NERDS!!!

spent last night the freakiest girl I’ve ever met, and I found her in China. Definitely an exception to the rule.
Oct 18

This was Marilyn. See Women and Sex in Beijing, China (coming soon).

Something The Mick taught me: If someone regularly pays your way and you want to keep it that way, never say ‘thank you’.
Oct 23

This was inspired by Margaret. See Women and Sex in Beijing, China (coming soon).

After 4 weeks of eating it once or twice a day, I’m getting a little sick of duck.
Oct 23

This is when I started eating McDonald’s every day.

Price Haggling – Latinos got nothing on the Chinese. Despite being in China, I don’t want to shop anymore. I’ll wait till Colombia.
Oct 23

In Silk Street and Yashow markets Chinese sell fake brand clothes and accessories. All prices are negotiated. They start with ridiculous rapist prices. I once asked about a “I ♥ BJ” T-shirt – this is merely a white T-shirt with four characters printed on it – and was quoted 380 RMB, or $54. For $54 I could get an American Apparel T-shirt custom printed in Los Angeles and shipped to Beijing. I walked away and she seemed pissed I wasn’t continuing the negotiation.

What turned me off about the haggling was how most Chinese would rather lose the sale than give a foreigner a fair price. I saw it again and again – I’d walk away when they wouldn’t come down from a rapist price and they often let me go. The Zoo market was the worst in this respect.

I got used to the silliness my last week and got a Swiss Gear backpack and extra large suitcase for good prices.

I’m in Beijing where Twitter is censored by the Great Firewall of China. This is a test to see if I can tweet from my LinkedIn feed.
Oct 23

The Chinese government’s official name for the firewall is the Golden Shield Project. Chinese buy VPNs to bypass the firewall. Also censored are Facebook, YouTube, and .blogspot.com URLs. I could only access these sites when at a friend’s who had a VPN. Here’s the complete list of blocked sites.

Asian chicks shed a lot. Good thing is if you get accused of cheating, you can tell her it’s hers because it’s all the same color.
Oct 25

After I had Lucy spend the night, I was picking long black hairs out of the sheets and floor for more than a week. Just as I’d gotten them all, I had Marilyn over. Again, the long black hairs were everywhere. More so than I’ve noticed with other kinds of girls.

I flew out of Beijing Sunday Oct 31 at 7:55am and landed in Chicago Sunday Oct 31 at 7:25am.
Oct 31

The flight is about thirteen hours. China is thirteen hours ahead of Chicago, so I landed at an earlier hour than when I left.

@rossjamesparker Summer Palace and Forbidden City are mandatory. Eat Peking Duck. Check out the 798 art district and eat lots of Peking duck
Oct 31

Chinese tourist stuff gets redundant after a while. The architecture’s all the same. So if you hit Summer Palace and Forbidden City, you can skip all the temples and lesser attractions. I didn’t make it to the Great Wall. 798 is the off-the-beaten path attraction, a neighborhood of galleries and crazy art. See my pictures of Beijing tourist stuff.

Tweets from Beijing, China

Beijing Tourist Stuff in Pictures

Colin — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 13:56:30 +0000

Expat Chronicles

Tourist sites, in order, include Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, Confucian Temple, Lama Temple, Summer Palace, Sanlitun, and Beijing University. Add me on Facebook for easier image viewing.

Increase your sex drive with organic maca from Peru. Buy Peruvian Naturals Maca in China on Taobao.

Beijing Tourist Stuff in Pictures

Business Scam in Guilin, China

Colin — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 13:46:36 +0000

Expat Chronicles

Increase your sex drive with organic maca from Peru. Buy Peruvian Naturals Maca in China on Taobao.

This story was published almost two years ago on my other blog as ‘Chinese Business Scam‘. I thought it’d be a nice primer for the next few posts on China. You can also check out the old contributed stories Chasing Women in China and Revolution in China?, the second of which was written by my good friend Charles who is the main reason I’m in Beijing. Now on to the scam.

I listed a Peruvian company’s products on Alibaba – a B2B website meant to match suppliers with buyers. I received an email one day from a distributor in Guilin, China. As always, I replied to “Kylie” with product info and pricing. She requested samples a few days later. I Googled the company. No website but a dozen or so hits on market-research sites, so I sent the samples. Weeks went by. I sent an email to confirm they received them. Kylie replied saying she did and that they needed to administer a “product test”, which can take up to a month.

More than a month went by and I asked her if everything was OK. She said they were still waiting on the test results. She told me she would have more information in 2 – 4 days. Some two weeks went by and I forgot about her. One day, out of the blue, she emailed me a purchase contract with an order for $250K. In the email, she asked for somebody from the company to come to Guilin, China to meet face-to-face and sign the contract.

The company GM looked over the contract and said everything seemed OK. I started looking into Chinese visas while emailing Kylie about certain issues – primarily Mandarin translations for the packaging. We didn’t want to discuss or change packaging after the contract was signed because it would be hard enough to fill the large order in the stated lead time. We wanted to know exactly what languages would be on the packages before we went to China. Kylie danced around the issue and said we can discuss it face-to-face.

Somewhere in all this mess, I decided to Google-search the company again. Same results (not much). I don’t know why I did what I did next but I thank God I did. I Google-searched “Guilin China scam.” Dozens of results came up with titles like “Chinese Internet Scam – Buying Center & Trip to China” and “Guilin China Fraud.”

I clicked and read. The links were forums (many on alibaba) describing the following scenario. Apparently, the scam is to lure small and medium-sized businesses to China under false pretenses of signing a purchase contract for a large order.

They pick up the victim at the airport and take him to the 4 – 5 star hotel they had reserved for him. They take him around town to breakfasts, lunches, and dinners while talking business. The decision-making manager has a young female to translate for him the whole time. He negotiates hard and the deal slowly develops. Meanwhile, the Chinese are earning percentages from the hotel and all the high-end restaurants they take the victim to. (I assume the victim pays the bills because he is trying to win the customer’s business. Maybe the restaurants give them different menus with higher pricing because they know in advance who is coming).

At the end of the victim’s trip, the decision-maker signs the worthless contract. The victim is happy. The decision-maker says it still needs approval from the finance manager. Would the victim like to buy the finance manager a gift to win his approval? Sometimes the victim refuses. Sometimes the victim is thrilled about the deal and agrees. The victim is taken to an art gallery full of pieces that cost $10K – $30K. After buying one, he is told he can give it to the finance manager the next morning (the victim’s last day). The next morning, he is told that an emergency came up and the finance manager had to fly to Beijing. But the victim can give it to him when the finance manager visits the victim’s factory next month. The victim never hears from anybody again. The art is worth a couple hundred dollars.

As with anything, there is fraud on alibaba. I wasn’t born yesterday and I read newspapers. If I see a message from Nigeria or Togo, I don’t even read it. I’m accustomed to what the scams look and read like. But this didn’t feel like one. I dealt with this woman for almost three months before she placed an order. She asked skeptical questions and made me work for the deal. They wait so patiently, and at all the right times. They never asked for red-flag concessions like paying for a distribution license or granting credit for the first order.

There are a lot of people who made the trip and described the scam in the forums. One particularly angry victim is gathering evidence in an attempt to bring them to justice.

On the bright side, I didn’t immediately halt communication with the Chinese. I thought of ways to get something out of them – revenge, if you will, for trying to take advantage of me. I knew they wouldn’t ever pay any money for anything. This kind of business only receives.

I decided to press harder for Mandarin translations. I told them we applied for our visas but the GM decided he absolutely will NOT get on a plane until we have Mandarin text for the packages. They finally sent translations to me this week. I had a Mandarin-reading friend look them over and they are accurate! At least I wasted some of their time and got their hopes up too.

I wasn’t done yet. I decided to take it a little further. I picked a flight from LAX into Guilin and told Kylie that we”d be on it. I finished the email with something like, “Look forward to meeting you and starting a successful business relationship!!!”

Kylie emailed me after we didn’t show. I replied with only the link to my new blog post. Her reply to me:

Dear Colin,
I do not know your meaning. why do not you come here ?
Last night we wait for you at the airport for a long time, but do not saw you. Anything is ready,would you tell the reasons, is ok?
You know we book the rooms for you and prepared the gifts.
My boss have reproach me, I hope you will give me a reasonable explanation.
Thanks and best regards,kylie

HAHA!

Here and here are two of the better comment threads with stories from victims, would-be victims, and even former employees of the fraudulent companies.

Images of Guilin, China:

Business Scam in Guilin, China

RIP Budweiser Backpack

Colin — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 11:41:26 +0000

Expat Chronicles

My Budweiser backpack won’t be returning from China. Death is at hand.

We first met in Houston, TX. I was working as a Contemporary Marketing Representative at Anheuser-Busch – the perfect gig for a frat boy alcoholic. My job was to go to bars and make friends, creating a positive impression for the Bud and Bud Light brands. I worked in Southern California but the company pulled me out for the month of January to prepare for the 2004 Super Bowl in Houston. Budweiser backpacks and windbreakers were given to all on the team so we’d look the same.

The job wasn’t only partying at night; we also had to visit bars during the day, schedule promos, and install point-of-sale (POS) advertising. POS includes coasters, banners, pennant flags, mirrors, neons, and everything else that has the brand on it. Tools of the trade include staple guns, thumb-tacks, scissors, duct and packing tape, power drills, screws, anchors, and more. Hence the need for a backpack.

After a year as a marketing rep, I moved to Denver to work as an off-premise merchandiser, the absolute lowest position in the beer business. In addition to physically moving beer at high volume stores that can’t / won’t stock the beer themselves, I also had the POS responsibilities. So the Budweiser backpack was still used on a daily basis.

I quickly grew bored and gave up hope of climbing the corporate ladder. I left 3 years before the infamous InBev buyout of Anheuser-Busch. My girl and I went back to St. Louis in 2005. I got a job at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, where I didn’t use my backpack. Renting cars wasn’t for me. Our relationship broke down. She moved out around the same time I decided to leave Corporate America. My next move was to get my MBA while working at the same restaurant I worked at as an undergrad.

I moved into a studio apartment near the restaurant in 2006. I was newly single with a fervent anti-mainstream attitude – a backlash against years of a cookie-cutter American life: social fraternity, Corporate America, and date nights on my best behavior. I started smoking weed, shaving mohawks into my head, and shopping at thrift stores.

The Budweiser backpack became a part of me at this point. We were inseparable. I used it to carry my uniform, which (smart) service industry workers don’t wear on the street. This advertises to thieves that they have cash. I used to load the backpack with books for weighted running and stadium steps in Forest Park. Of course I took it to class and the gym on campus. Budweiser backpack and I became a regular scene on Delmar.

Summer 2006, one of my best friends was unemployed and selling drugs to make ends meet. He offered to front me weed. After all, I was working at a restaurant with servers and bartenders – everybody knows they do drugs. Plus I was living and working in the Delmar Loop, one of St. Louis’ hangouts for hippies, gays, blacks, and other counterculture types that smoke weed. So in theory, I should’ve been able to make some easy money.

The Budweiser Backpack carried a small inventory of $20-sacs. As soon as I started, the restaurant promoted me to bartender. Then I was super-careful not to let the managers find out I was selling weed. I decided I wouldn’t tell any of the girls on the staff, because they gossiped too much. I marked off other people I didn’t trust. In the end, I told maybe three people at the restaurant. Nobody knew. You don’t have to have selling skills to sell drugs. They sell themselves. But people have to know you have them.

Nothing illustrates how bad at selling weed I was as what happened on a field trip with UMSL’s International Business Club to Chicago. At the end of the first night out drinking, one guy badly wanted to get some weed. I agreed with him it would be nice to get high, not realizing I had some for sale at that very moment in my Budweiser backpack. I only realized after the trip, after the sale was lost. In over two months, I only sold about two ounces so I quit.

That same year, 2006, I took my first international trip with two friends and my Budweiser backpack to London and Amsterdam. The day we were supposed to fly back to London from Amsterdam, British authorities foiled a major terrorist plot. This was the plan to use liquid explosives to blow up airplanes, and from that day on liquids haven’t been allowed on planes. Heathrow canceled all flights so we were stranded in Amsterdam. Our flight from London back to America was the next day, so we couldn’t stay in Holland.

We bought bus tickets from Amsterdam to London. The bus had to pass through the Channel Tunnel, which is operated by France. So although I’ve never really been to France, I have passed through French customs and I have the French stamp in my passport. Of the bus passengers, I was last in line to pass through customs. As you would assume on a bus from Amsterdam to London, there were plenty of Arabs, Turks, and miscellaneous European Muslims. Women wore burkas. And on this day, the day of a major terrorist attack causing me to be on a fucking bus and not a plane, not one of these people were singled out by the customs agent.

Who did he single out? Me. He went through every nook and cranny of the Budweiser backpack. He opened and rummaged through my shaving kit. What the fuck? I was dumbfounded. All these people that fit the description on a day of terrorist attacks, and he’s fucking with the big dumb American? When he was done, he asked if I had LSD or mushrooms. I told him no. He asked about the book I was reading, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest. Then it all clicked. Ken Kesey spearheaded the psychedelic LSD scene in 1960s California. This agent saw I was reading him and singled me out to look for drugs. After he was done, he said, “Next you read Jack Kerouac ‘On the Road’.” Along with Kesey, Jack Kerouac was a fellow beatnik writer. Also a French-American. The French are OK.

In 2007, the Budweiser backpack continued with me on Delmar, the Metrolink, and at UMSL. It also accompanied me to San Francisco, Washington DC, Brazil, Amsterdam (again), and Lithuania. In 2008 we moved to Peru, where I didn’t need it much since I had an office job.

In Peru we saw Cusco and Colca Canyon together. The Budweiser backpack was a handy partner in crime during my debauchery episodes (I and II) in Camaná – one of those nights we slept together in the street. More memorable though was when the backpack and I climbed Mount Misti. That was when its first failings began to show. A strap broke and I had to tie it from then on. A clip busted off. But the bag still worked. In my Cusco Incident, the Budweiser backpack weighed me down in fleeing from the scene of the crime. But we stayed together and I brought it with me to Machu Picchu. Later Chile and Argentina.

In 2009 I moved to Bogota, Colombia. I was launching an independent career. No more working for companies. To live in Colombia, however, I needed a work visa. I’d also need steady money so I got a job teaching English. My first class was at Bavaria, the national brewer in Colombia. It’s a subsidiary of SABMiller, a major competitor of AB InBev / Budweiser. Did that stop me from taking my Budweiser backpack to their offices?

It was my only backpack! I used it as a conversational piece to introduce myself to the class. I’d show them the Budweiser logo and explain that I’d worked in the American beer business for two years. I told them it was my only backpack. But if they gave me an Aguila backpack, I’d be happy to switch. My first few classes were all engineers, so they didn’t care. They don’t have the competitiveness of the sales and marketing workers. However, even when I had sales and marketing workers, they didn’t care either. I never got a new backpack from these cheap bastards – Aguila, Club Colombia, Poker, Costeña, nothing. They don’t care because Bavaria has an unregulated monopoly in Colombia. Their market share is over 99%. They have all the domestic brands plus Peroni, and they had plans to introduce MGD before I left last May. The only competition is Budweiser and Heineken, which are tiny, expensive niches only available in affluent areas of big cities. So despite all the classes I taught at various campuses – Tocancipá, Zipaquira, Boyacá, and Calle 94 – nobody gave a shit that I brought a Budweiser backpack every day. In the American beer business, you’d be crucified.

The Budweiser backpack carried my groceries when I started shopping at 7 de agosto, a cheap food market a mile from my apartment. I’d stock up on pounds and pounds of vegetables, fruit, beef, chicken, and fish before riding it back to my place. Carrying such poundages of food probably put the strain on the zipper that presents the irreparable damage it now has.

This last summer, I went back to work for the same restaurant on Delmar in St. Louis. I rode a bike from Vinita Park to U City every day with that backpack, never a problem. The backpack has served me here in China, but it won’t be coming back. I’m burying the Budweiser backpack here. I wouldn’t like the same for me, but what’s the point in getting sentimental about a backpack?

RIP Budweiser Backpack

A Mexican-American Experience

Colin — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 09:56:45 +0000

Expat Chronicles

I learned Mexican Spanish in America before ever moving to South America. I’ve lived in Orange County, Tucson, and Denver – all have huge Mexican populations. Ironically, however, most of my contact with Mexicans came in St. Louis, which has one of the tiniest Latino populations in America.

I’ve known one particular family for almost ten years, when they first came to America. They first landed in Houston after crossing the border, but chose St. Louis precisely because there weren’t many Mexicans, so there’s a higher demand for labor and hence higher wages. The father (Papa) got a job at my restaurant as a cook. In short time, his wife and daughter (Mama and Hijamayor) were working there, and as years passed his two sons (Hijomayor and Hijomenor) and even extended family members got jobs.

Sidenote: If you’ve been a reader for a while, you know I’m very pro-immigration not only because I’m a product of 20^th century immigrants, but also because immigrants are hard workers. What Americans would proudly work entire careers at a restaurant? None, and that’s why the Mexicans come.

Aside from four years in high school, Mexicans taught me Spanish. Because I spoke Spanish and mingled freely with them, I was seen as a friend of the cause. A couple times I went with them to Club Onda or Dante’s, the Mexican clubs in St. Louis. One guy scored me a fake social security card and Mexican residence ID, which I sold to a Russian chick I knew from school who wanted to work off-campus.

Because I’m a “friend of the cause,” they’ve asked for help sometimes. One guy offered me $1000 to pick up his friend in Sacramento. One time I found Mama and her sister-in-law talking on the verge of tears, obviously worried about something. Their relatives were deported from Phoenix back to Mexico. They were worried because the two kids, 7 and 9 or something like that, had been left behind and were staying with the neighbors. Two kids stranded in Phoenix alone. They offered me a lot of money to go get them. In both cases, I refused (which they understood). That’s very illegal coyote shit.

This summer, Mama and Hijamayor approached me with a different favor. They had been in a car accident and the responding police officer reported them. They had a court date in Kansas City and asked if I’d go with them. I don’t know exactly why, but I can guess any number of reasons. They were worried they wouldn’t understand something in English, they were afraid they’d get lost, they were afraid they’d get deported immediately and need someone to drive their car back to St. Louis, or they were just afraid. Who knows why? But I’m a nice guy and I’ve known them forever so I agreed.

We left at 7am and got into KC around 11am, two hours before the hearing. They treated lunch at Gates, a deservedly famous KC BBQ spot. Then we went to court and waited for the hearing to start. The room was almost all Latinos, with a few Africans. Hearings started around 1:15pm.

The St. Louis office was being renovated, so all the Eastern Missouri and Southern Illinois cases were being referred to Kansas City. This proved annoying as it seemed every case I heard was from St. Louis.

The judge first heard cases from people with lawyers. All of them asked for continuances, which they received. One was a Honduran woman who’d already gotten a continuance, but now the lawyer requested a stay as he was appealing on a request for asylum based on a convention to avoid torture. The US won’t deport people likely to be tortured. This lawyer’s giving that argument a shot with Honduras, and in the process buying her another six months in the States. (see the State Department’s human rights report on Honduras)

After the lawyers’ cases were finished, a Kenyan woman was pushed to the front of the line because they had a Swahili English (as opposed to Swahili French) translator on the phone from Washington, DC. The translator’s voice boomed into the courtroom via intercom. He was from Nairobi, as was the woman in garb and headdress facing the court. She had come to America legally, but didn’t show up to an interview regarding her request for asylum. The letter was sent to her St. Louis address, but she had moved to Seattle. The judge asked if she’d like to continue this in a court near Seattle. The Kenyan woman agreed, and another continuance was granted.

After the one Kenyan came the rest of the Latinos. One Dominican guy had married an American woman ten years ago. She was there with him in court. Unfortunately he’d allowed too much time (like 10 years!) to pass before finalizing his citizenship, causing a deportation order. He got a continuance too.

Mama and Hijamayor didn’t get a lawyer because they didn’t want to waste the money. They didn’t think they had much of an argument anyway. However, the judge recommended to everybody without a lawyer that they request continuances to be properly represented. They distributed flyers with contact info for immigration lawyers who work for free in the St. Louis and Kansas City areas. I noted most were Catholic charities.

So Mama and Hijamayor were granted continuances and we were on our way. I wasn’t really needed, but I guess I provided moral support.

A few weeks later, Mama had Hijomayor invite me over for Sunday lunch. I agreed. He picked me up and we arrived at their house around 1pm. Everybody was there, plus Hijamayor’s boyfriend and Hijomayor’s girlfriend. We ate chicken and pork barbacoa mexicana with tortillas, rice, refried beans, and homemade salsa. Damn good food. That Sunday was the weekend of the Mexican bicentennial. They invited me to come with them to the festival on Cherokee Street, the Hispanic center of St. Louis. I agreed.

We took two cars and arrived around 2pm. We drank micheladas and listened to the bands. The bicentennial festival experience served as a reminder of how different Mexican culture is from the rest of Latin America. Many Americans, including myself before moving to South America, assume a lot about all Latinos based on what we know about Mexicans. In Peru I was surprised they don’t eat beans or tortillas, and they don’t say ‘guey’ at the end of every sentence.

Another difference is the cowboy culture among Mexicans. You see cowboy hats, cowboy boots, big-ass belt buckles on tight jeans, etc. The paisas in Colombia are considered cowboys, and they wear hats and ride horses, but their style’s distinct from the cowboys of Mexico and the American southwest.

Another distinction among Mexicans is obesity. I’d forgotten how fat a lot of Mexican chicks are. I haven’t seen obesity as common anywhere I’ve been in South America: Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, or Colombia. I think it’s a combination of abundance and diet (obviously). Coming from Mexico, they’re not used to the wealth of food in America. Plus, Mexican food is insanely carbohydrate-heavy – more so than other poor countries. Too much rice, corn tortillas, flour tortillas, refried beans (the “refried” cancels all the healthy goodness of eating beans), corn, potatoes, tamales, regular soda. They eat corn on the cob smeared with like 4 tablespoons of mayonnaise, then cover it with cheese and chili powder. The Mexicans in America need to tweak their habits to reflect the abundance of the American economy because some of those girls are too damn big.

Cholos are another uniquely Mexican phenomenon – not cholos by the South American definition, but the Mexican definition. Mexican gangsters. The typical uniform these days is a shaved head, a baggy T-shirt with rosary beads hanging outside, baggy khakis, and Chuck Taylors. I saw a couple teardrop tattoos.

As stated earlier, St. Louis has a tiny Mexican population. There are nowhere near as many of these guys as you’d see at the bicentennial celebrations in Chicago, Texas, Arizona, or California, which probably draw tens of thousands. But there were a couple groups that caught my eye.

Everyone in this family simply works, pays taxes, and lives their lives free of trouble (besides being illegal immigrants of course) – everybody except Hijomenor. He’s not a cholo, but he’s a little wild. He worked at the restaurant for only a year before being fired for his attitude. Hijomayor told me he the family was concerned about him for a while, but then he became a father and calmed down.

However, Hijomenor still hasn’t figured out how to completely avoid trouble. He’d been off doing his own thing while the family and I were watching the bands. Then he ran back to us and said some guy punched him in the eye. He pointed the guy out in the crowd, about 20 yards closer to the stage. The fat-ass was in his 40s. I couldn’t tell how many people he had with him. Hijomenor wanted revenge.

One of the cholo groups I just described were with us now – three of them. Hijomenor wasn’t in their crew, but they were friends. I got yoked out all summer, packing on 30 pounds. Some in the family were looking at the 6’3 235lb gringo to see if I was in. Hijomenor asked in English, “You wanna do this?” I told him I was with them.

In reality, I had no idea what the hell they wanted to do. And were the parents cool with this? What were we going to do in the middle of this crowd of 500? Cops were everywhere. I just stood there and waited. One of the cholos, seemingly drunk off his ass, smiled and gave me a pound.

Just as I was thinking we wouldn’t do anything around all these people, the ringleader of the cholos marched through the crowd toward Fatass40yearold. Toe to toe with Fatass40yearold, with the other cholos behind him, Ringleader pointed at him as if to say “You hit my friend, bitch?” then pointed back at us with his thumb. Surprised and scared, Fatass40yearold shook his head no as Ringleader socked him in his eye.

All hell broke loose. We were along the right side of the stage, against a metal fence separating the crowd from a VIP section of tables. That metal fence came down and the rumble moved into the tables. I got hemmed in by two old women with baby strollers trying to escape the violence. As I got around them, Fatass40yearold had been hit a few times and was swinging a chair to defend himself. I ran in to get a hit on Fatass40yearold, but hesitated when I saw the chair. I also realized I didn’t know what the hell was going on, and had to look around to see if he had anybody else on his team. Only one of his friends was helping, so it was eight (4 men of the family, Hijamayor’s boyfriend, and the 3 cholos) against two. Nine against two if you count me, but I didn’t do anything. The fight moved further down the VIP section, clearing everybody out. The cops broke it up. Fatass40yearold’s face was a little marked up with blood, but no real damage. But he was definitely scared.

The four cholos expertly disappeared. The guy most involved in the tussle was … Papa! Awesome! A couple people in the crowd pointed Hijomenor out to the cops. They held him and Fatass40yearold to sort things out. They separated them and walked them away from the crowd. They needed to determine if Fatass40yearold wanted to press charges. He didn’t.

Hijomayor and I followed Hijomenor to where the cops were talking to him. They said they’d have to escort him out of the area and if he returned, he’d go to jail. One cop walked with us all the way to Hijomayor’s car to watch us leave.

On the ride home, Hijomenor told me that was the third time he’s fought Fatass40yearold. Fatass40yearold started it the first time at a baptism and it’s been a war ever since. At the festival, Hijomenor had been looking at shoes for his daughter when he got sucker-punched. And the rest was told. Hijomenor’s wrist was swollen and bent from taking a hit with the chair. Hijomayor drove to my place, where I invited Hijomenor in for a bag of ice and a shot of whiskey. Then we said goodbye.

Another difference between Mexican culture and what I’ve seen in Peru and Colombia is in fighting. Peru and Colombia have violent, bloody histories. They’re quick to use a knife, their militaries often answer to no one, and they have limpiezas, but hand-to-hand combat is nil. But the fights in the street are weak. All talk and posturing. The few street fights I’ve seen in South America were worse than watching white guys in the suburbs.

That is NOT the case with Mexicans. These cholos were pitbulls. They live for this. You can get 1,000 Colombians or Peruvians together without any problems, but 1,000 Mexicans and you’ll probably have a few tussles breaking out. It wasn’t even dark yet that day. Maybe it’s something in America that changes them? I’ve heard street gangs in Mexico are nowhere near as bad as the Mexican gangs in Los Angeles or other American cities (current cartel violence aside).

I know many of you readers are Mexican-Americans. What do you think? Feel free to disagree in the comments.

A Mexican-American Experience

An American Affair

Colin — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 05:47:36 +0000

Expat Chronicles

I wasn’t happy to spend the summer in America, but I needed money. I was less happy about working at a restaurant as a 31 year-old MBA, but life sucks sometimes. I planned to spend as little time (and money) as possible in bars or chasing women. I hoped to save every dollar possible, which go a lot further in Colombia.

I’d been in Latin America for two years, so maybe I thought I’d become spoiled with attention from women. Had it been too easy for too long? How would American women be? Regardless, I was happy to resign myself to earning dollars, getting swole at the gym, and waiting to finish my sentence in St. Louis. I wasn’t going to chase one tail in that whole goddamn city.

In the liberal, progressive societies of Europe and North America, traditional gender roles are losing relevance. It’s seen as positive to be an “independent” woman. Physically I’m attracted to just about anything that walks. But Latinas are my favorite precisely because they’re not liberalized. They worship their man. They’ve done my laundry, cleaned my room, washed the dishes. They give regular back rubs and I swear they like to give oral more than I like to receive. After getting that kind of treatment, you can’t go back to a gringa woman.

However, I was surprised at the benefits of liberalized women. Irrelevant gender roles mean the man doesn’t have to be the aggressor. You see, for all the Latinas who make eyes, whistle in the street, or send signals in other ways, they’ll almost never make the first move. The man must do all that.

In St. Louis this summer, one girl put took my phone to put her number in it, another wrote it down for me unsolicited, and still another asked me for my number. They made blatant comments about handsomeness, muscles, or whatever. They initiate the flirting and even the deal-closing. Forget what you heard, America is a woman’s world.

Flirting is easier. I never gave much thought to how I’d been flirting in Spanish all this time. I knew I came off different than other guys, not just for the accent but for how I carry myself and talk to them. I don’t come from the same background as Latin men or the women I’d talk to. But I do with American women. I can go right for the throat in poking fun and joking on them. I know where they’re coming from. It’s also safer to make sexual references which may be inappropriate with most Latinas.

Aside from a whale who stuck her tongue down my throat in a bar (her friends thankfully cock-blocked later that night), I only had one affair this summer. Tara sat at the bar where I worked. I usually flirt with young females to get a good tip, but I turn it up for black girls. (They’re not used to it from white guys, and their tip typically has the most room for improvement.)

However, I was too busy to talk to Tara and her two friends. In the times I’d be working near her, she asked me questions. I don’t remember any of them until “Are you religious?” No, not at all. “Good,” she said, and invited me to a strip club that weekend. Her favorite female porn star would be performing. I gave her my number, trying to play it cool.

I’d never been invited to a strip club by a girl, so I was thrilled. Plus, Tara was beautiful and thick. Most white guys don’t like them this voluptuous, but I do. At about 5’3, she probably weighed 150. All in her boobs, ass, and legs. Super-thick. I masturbated thinking about her that night and every morning and night for the next few days.

She called a couple days later and left a message. I called her back and she cancelled the strip club trip, but we talked for ten minutes or so. We made plans to hang out the same night anyway, which later fell through. A little more phone tag and we made a date at a dive bar downtown. I grabbed her hand in the first five minutes of meeting, and we were kissing within an hour. She not subtly mentioned she doesn’t have sex on the first date. No problem, we hung out for a couple hours and said goodbye.

Phone tag with no dates ensued for a couple weeks, to the point where I gave up. I was content to only earning US dollars, hitting weights, and of course masturbating. However, Tara did not stop calling me. Her persistence saved the deal. Again filling in the male role where I wasn’t going to do it.

I didn’t have a car all summer, so I asked her to come where I was staying and I’d cook dinner or something. I didn’t cook though. We started making out and then went into my room for sex. Tara’s ass was so huge I’ll remember it till the day I die. I’m writing this from Beijing, and I just had my first Chinese girl last night. This little Asian’s entire ass TIMES TWO would equal only ONE of Tara’s cheeks. It was amazing. I’ve had some large asses bent over, but none made my waist look so small. Her ass was a gift from God.

Talking afterwards, I realized she’s one of the most intelligent girls I’ve ever dated. We had a lot in common. She’s an avid reader and loves jazz, so out came Billie Holiday and Miles Davis on my iTunes. We talked and talked and talked. She complained a lot about black people, despite all her friends being black. St. Louis is very segregated between white and black; there’s not much of a mixed scene. If you want to be around the other kind, you almost have to dress / talk like them and hang out with them exclusively. There’s crossover, but not much. She was fed up with how many of the men were involved with crime, had mad kids, or wore diamonds in their teeth and spoke bad English. And her female friends all had kids and no money. Once they organized a big girl’s night out and at the starting happy hour point, half the girls brought babies. I laughed at her stories. Once she said, “I’m sorry but you don’t need to have a baby with every guy that takes you to Applebee’s.”

Aside from the skewed gender roles, the other side of the American experience was the mutual respect in pillow talk. We didn’t talk like lovers infatuated with each other. We talked like equals. We were just like good friends as long as my penis wasn’t in her. The super-dependent, lovey-dubby Latina treatment was absent. No “mi amor”, “mi vida”, “mi tesoro”, or “mi corazón.” I got a back rub once, but no incessant pampering and worshipping of me and my penis. Tara is strong and independent. Most Latinas don’t even aspire to become that.

Tara lived in her own apartment, had paid off her new car, completed her Bachelor’s degree and was contemplating a Master’s, and had a full-time corporate job – score that all double given her mom was 15 when she was born.

We had another date at her apartment. It went the same way, sex and talking as equals. After that date, my American sentence had almost concluded. I got super busy in preparing everything for China and then Colombia. We didn’t see each other again, but I’ll never forget that lovely affair and the biggest ass I’ve ever tasted.

Big takeaways:

Skewed gender roles make for aggressive women, which resulted in a pretty bad-ass ROI (return on investment) for me given I invested absolutely nothing in chasing them.
Progressive attitudes wipe out most affection and romanticism. No news there.

An American Affair

Guatemala and United Fruit: US Policy Blunder

Colin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 21:35:14 +0000

Expat Chronicles

I’m going back to Economist writer Michael Reid‘s Forgotten Continent (excellent book on democracy and capitalism in Latin America, required reading for any gringos living in Latin America). Below is his overview on one of the biggest US foreign policy blunders in Guatemala. In other news, I’ll have a little more content from Colombia in the next weeks as I finish my summer in the States. In two weeks however, I’m taking a six-week vacation in China. So tales of Asia coming soon… Here’s Reid’s writing on Guatemala:

Guatemala is the saddest country in Latin America. The beauty of its verdant highlands dotted with whitewashed colonial towns, its shimmering lakes overlooked by soaring volcanoes and its Mayan ruins half buried in rainforest cannot conceal the ancestral oppression of its indigenous majority. It has had an elected civilian government since 1986. But a guerrilla war lasting almost three decades was settled only in 1996. It cost some 200,000 lives; most of the victims were Mayan Indians killed by the army. The war continues to cast a dark shadow. Guatemala’s democrats must struggle against what some have called poderes fácticos – shadowy networks linking corrupt former army officers and organized criminal gangs of drug traffickers and money launderers. In many ways, these networks are the real power in the country. They appeared to flourish under Alfonso Portillo, the country’s president from 2000 to 2005, who fled to Mexico on leaving office and faced charges of stealing $16 million of public money. Under Oscar Berger, a reforming liberal elected in 2004, a new effort began to cut Guatemala’s army down to size and to liberate democracy from military tutelage.

The CIA snuffs out the Guatemalan spring

And yet Guatemala might have developed into a far more robust democracy much earlier. That it did not do so is in large part the fault of the United States: more than anywhere else in Latin America, Guatemala is a victim of American intervention. In 1954, the Eisenhower administration organized a coup to topple the democratic, reformist government of Jacobo Arbenz, which the American president alleged to be a possible ‘communist outpost on this continent’. Though the enterprise was initially hailed as a success y its authors, in the words of one historian sympathetic to them ‘in light of subsequent events it might reasonably be considered little short of a disaster’. Not only did Guatemala itself pay a high price for the American intervention: the lessons drawn by the United States and by Latin Americans of both left and right had tragic consequences in other countries, handicapping democracy in the region for a generation or more. How was it that Guatemala came to be the first battle in the Cold War in Latin America?

Central America was an underdeveloped backwater throughout the nineteenth century. After independence in 1824, the United Provinces of Central America soon fragmented into five separate countries of which Guatemala, the seat of the colonial captain-generalcy, was the largest. Except in Costa Rica, an unenlightened despotism was the norm in the isthmus. In Guatemala, a long line of brutal dictators went through the motions of legitimating their rule through elections, but these were farcical affairs in which opposition was rarely registered. An oligarchy of coffee planters dominated the republic; they assured themselves of a seasonal Indian workforce through debt peonage.

When the Second World War drew to a close, democratic eddies washed across Latin America. Several dictatorships in the region fell, to be replaced by governments elected on a reasonably broad franchise. Labour unions expanded, and flexed their muscles in a strike wave. Communist parties grew rapidly, from a total membership of less than 100,000 in 1939 to 500,000 by 1947. In Latin America, as elsewhere in the world, there were expectations that a new era of democracy was beginning. According to one account, this opened up an opportunity for Latin American countries to move towards social democracy – as much of Western Europe would do in the aftermath of war – through an alliance between industrialists and the emerging middle and organised working classes. But the opportunity proved tantalisingly brief. In Latin America, the rural landlords had not been hurt by war, and they still exercised a powerful political grip, while the trade unions were still weak. By 1948, in most countries, the progress towards democracy had been rolled back, and Communist parties had been banned. By then, the Cold War had begun. It did not create anti-communism in Latin America. This had been espoused by conservatives and the Catholic Church since the formation by Lenin in 1919 of the Third Communist International (Comintern) with its brief of world revolution. So most Latin American governments were happy to line up with the United States in the Cold War. For Washington, it began to matter more that those governments should be reliably anti-communist rather than democratic.

In Guatemala the post-war democratic spring lasted longer. In 1944, protests by students, teachers and other members of an incipient middle class prompted Jorge Ubico, a dictator even more repressive than his predecessors, to step down. Three months later, junior army officers rebelled against his chosen successor. This ‘October revolution’ was carried out not in the name of Bolshevism but of ‘constitution and democracy’. Both were quickly achieved. Juan José Arévalo, a mild-mannered teacher of philosophy who had returned from years of exile in Argentina, was elected president in the freest vote Guatemala had seen. Arévalo claimed inspiration from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and from the Four Freedoms – of speech, religion, and from want and fear – for which the president had fought the war. A new constitution extended the franchise to all except illiterate women, created elected local authorities, made racial discrimination a crime and banned military men from standing for office. Arévalo’s government gave rights to trade unions, established a social security system, central bank and statistical office, and built hundreds of new schools. It brooked no restrictions on political or press freedom, despite suffering frequent plots from conservatives.

In 1950, Jacobo Arbenz, a leader of the ‘October revolution’, was elected to succeed Arévalo, with 65 per cent of the vote. While Arévalo had established democratic freedoms, Arbenz promised ‘to convert Guatemala from a backward country with a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state’. His plans to do this centred on agrarian reform and public infrastructure projects, several of which had been proposed by the president of the World Bank. On both counts, that meant a confrontation with the United Fruit Company, an American firm based in Boston. Known to Central Americans as el pulpo (‘the octopus’) because of its all-encompassing tentacles, in 1899 United Fruit had obtained a 99-year concession over a vast tract of jungle from Guatemala’s then dictator and with it, the right to finish and operate a railway to the Caribbean coast. The company thus obtained a monopoly over much of Guatemala’s trade: its port at Puerto Barrios was the country’s only Atlantic port, and its railway the only means of transport to and from the port. In return it paid only a small tax on banana exports. Arbenz proposed to build a public port next to Puerto Barrios and a highway to it; United Fruit, which had already seen a rise in trade union organizing, became the main target of this land reform.

Even by Latin American standards, land distribution in Guatemala was highly unequal: 2 per cent of landowners held three-quarters of all cultivatable land, while more than half of all farmland was made up of large plantations (above 1,100 acres). Much of this land was left fallow. Arbenz’s reform affected farms larger than 670 acres whose land was not fully worked, or those above 223 acres where a third of the land was uncultivated. Compensation was paid in interest-bearing bonds according to the land’s declared taxable value. In two years a million acres – a third of this from German-owned farms nationalised at American insistence during the war – were distributed to 100,000 families. Arbenz ordered the expropriation of 380,000 acres of United Fruit land – a substantial chunk of its holdings, of which 85 per cent were left fallow, supposedly in case of banana diseases. The government offered compensation of $1.1 million; the company claimed the land was worth $16 million, thus revealing the scale of its tax evasion. Its claim was backed by the US Department of State.

By then, the Eisenhower administration was bent on overthrowing Arbenz, whom it accused of presiding over a communist takeover. With support from Nicaragua’s notorious dictator, Anastasio Somoza, and his counterpart in Honduras, the CIA trained and armed a force of 170 men, and assembled a dozen planes. Their ‘invasion’ was a halting affair. But bombing and strafing from the air, combined with disinformation broadcasts suggesting a force of thousands, caused the army high command to oblige Arbenz to resign. Through a mixture of threats and manipulation, the Americans quickly secured the appointment as president of Carlos Castillo Armas, the undistinguished retired colonel they had chosen to lead the ‘invasion’. Guatemala’s ten-year democratic spring was over.

Ever since, controversy has raged over the American action. Was the coup an enterprise of crude economic imperialism, in which the Eisenhower administration was acting as enforcer for United Fruit? Since the days of Arévalo, the company had conducted an effective propaganda campaign in the United States, painting Guatemala as being in the grip of communists. The family of John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state, and his brother Allen, the CIA director, were shareholders in the banana company; both brothers had worked for Sullivan & Cromwell, a New York law firm which had represented United Fruit’s rail subsidiary. Several of the company’s officials had close contacts with the administration. But J F Dulles insisted: ‘If the United Fruit matter were settled, if they gave a gold piece for every banana, the problem would remain as it is today as far as the presence of communist infiltration in Guatemala is concerned.’ Just five days after Arbenz was toppled, the US Justice Department began an anti-monopoly action against United Fruit; as a result, the company eventually agreed to hand over some of its land in Guatemala to local firms and sold the railway. In 1972, it sold its remaining interests in Guatemala to Del Monte. (United Fruit changed its name to Chiquita in 1989; the company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001).

In recent years, as official archives have been opened, historians have come to accept Dulles’ contention. But many question his verdict on Arbenz. Not for the last time in Latin America, the critics argue, the United States failed to distinguish between a nationalist reformer and a communist. The Guatemalan Labor Party, as the communist party was called, was tiny; it never had more than 2,000 activists. Though an enthusiastic backer of Arbenz and the land reform, it was the smallest of the four parties in the governing coalition. It won only four of the 56 seats in Congress in an election in 1953, had no Cabinet members, and fewer than ten senior government jobs. Guatemala had no diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc. Until the late 1950s, the Soviet Union had only three embassies in the whole of Latin America, a region Stalin had dismissed as ‘the obedient army of the United States’. Dulles made great play of an arms shipment from Czechoslovakia received a month before the coup. But the United States had imposed an arms embargo on Guatemala since 1948, and the Czech arms were of limited use. Arbenz’s coalition was fractious, the army restless and the middle class became disillusioned as tensions with the United States rose. The president did come to depend on the communists, who alone could mobilise popular support for the government. His wife is alleged to have been a communist sympathiser. The CIA feared that land reform would create a base for the communists in the countryside. Even so, it is hard to see the army or the civilian politicians acquiescing in a communist takeover.

In the event, the US crushed democracy not communism in Guatemala. Castillo Armas quickly reversed the agrarian reform, reached agreement with United Fruit, and restored the old order of corrupt dictatorship. In 1960, junior army officers would rebel in the name of nationalism, angry that Guatemala was being used by the CIA to train anti-Castro Cuban exiles. The rebellion failed, but two of its founders went on to found Guatemala’s first guerrilla group. This was crushed after right-wing death squads murdered thousands of civilians, many of whom had no connection to the guerrillas. In the mid-1970s, new Marxist guerrilla groups established a presence among the Mayan Indian communities of Guatemala’s western highlands. That prompted the army to undertake a scorched-earth campaign that saw scores of Indian villages wiped out, their inhabitants butchered and the survivors forcibly relocated and conscripted into army-backed auxiliary forces called ‘civil patrols’. Of all the counter-insurgency campaigns in Latin America during the Cold War, only that in Guatemala merits the much-abused term of genocide. Repression by dictatorships in Chile and Argentina, where most of the victims were middle class, attracted far more outside attention. But in the deliberate infliction of mass terror, the massacres of the Mayan Indians in the western highlands in the late 1970s and early 1980s had no parallel in the region. Those excesses caused Jimmy Carter to cancel the United States’ previous aid to the army. Another Democratic president, Bill Clinton, made a formal apology for that aid on a visit to Guatemala in 1999. But by then the Cold War was long over.

The ease with which Arbenz was overthrown would lead policy-makers in Washington to adopt ‘regime change’ as their standard process to perceived communist threats in Latin America. A few years later, another such attempt on a much larger scale would end in disaster in the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. Thwarted, President John F Kennedy would launch the Alliance for Progress in an attempt to stall the spread of communism in Latin America by encouraging democratic reform. ‘Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable,’ Kennedy declared. Indeed, had Arbenz’s agrarian reform taken place a decade later – or a decade earlier when FDR was preaching freedom from want – it might well have drawn applause from Washington.

The Latin American left, too, drew lessons from Guatemala. A young Argentine doctor, Ernesto Guevara, had arrived there on New Year’s Eve 1953 and witnessed the fall of Arbenz. By the time he was given safe conduct from the Argentine embassy to Mexico, he had acquired the nickname Che, bestowed by leftist exiled Cubans he met in Guatemala. According to one of his most perceptive biographers, Guatemala was Che Guevara’s ‘political rite of passage’. Guevara thought the coup showed that the United States ‘was a priori ruthlessly opposed to any attempt at social and economic reform in Latin America’. So he inferred that the left should be prepared to fight US interference rather than try to avoid or neutralise it. He also thought that Arbenz had allowed his enemies too much freedom, especially in the press, and had erred in not purging the army. This is confirmed by Hilda Gadea, Guevara’s first wife, who wrote: ‘it was Guatemala which convinced him of the necessity for armed struggle and for taking the initiative against imperialism’.

See the other sections of Reid’s book I’ve published here: Cocaine Cartels and Economics in Colombia or FARC, Guerrillas, and Paramilitaries in Colombia. Or for more on the sordid past of United Fruit Company / Chiquita, see the separate Wikipedia articles on United Fruit and Chiquita.

June 2011 UPDATE: The New York Times has an even more scathing review of the incident in Ghosts of Guatemala’s Past, asserting that US involvement here stunted the growth of democracy in the greater Central American region.

Guatemala and United Fruit: US Policy Blunder

Contributed Story: Revolution in China?

Colin — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 21:53:40 +0000

Expat Chronicles

Western media will have you believe China’s government is immoral and oppressive, and that at any minute people will revolt to produce a modern democracy. I’m no expert but I’ve lived in China for almost two years now. This is my American perspective on the prospect of revolution.

Revolution is a long shot. In Hong Kong I studied for a Master’s degree in economics. None of my classmates had strong political views. Most took up economics because their parents told them to, or because they thought it would lead to a well paying job, or just for the prestige conferred by higher education.

I once attended a seminar on China’s one-child policy, where the guest speaker was a Hong Kong-born Ivy League professor. He explained its effects and stated that he thought the policy should be repealed. Chinese students rarely speak up in class, and never to contradict someone so distinguished. Surprisingly, classmates vehemently defended the one-child policy – because the buses and trains are so crowded.

A different professor who attended the seminar asked this ridiculous question: “Could there possibly be multiple equilibrium points in regard to population?” Multiple equilibrium points? Westerners may find the policy abhorrent but Chinese do not.

I’ve seen little of the political fanaticism necessary for government upheaval. Debates common in the West don’t exist here. Yes, everyone in China knows about the Tiananmen Square incident and may even refer to it as a “massacre.” But I’ve also heard separatists in Tibet and Xinjiang described as “troublemakers.”

Once a group of Hong Kong students were complaining about how they couldn’t change their government by way of vote. There is universal suffrage in Hong Kong, but only 1/3 of the legislature is elected; the rest are appointed by Beijing. I asked if they thought things were unfair, or if they thought the government was not active enough, or what exactly they wanted changed. After all, it doesn’t get much better than Hong Kong. “We just want to vote like other countries.”

In Beijing I once thought revolution possible. Just next to my first apartment was a small shop selling instant noodles and beer. This place was inside a hutong. In the hutongs people burn charcoal for heat and you can find cages with live chickens. The most traffic my local instant noodle/beer store would see was a group of middle-aged men playing checkers outside in the evenings.

Once as I was opening the fridge I turned my head to see a string of chain-linked bullets lying on the ground next to the shopkeeper. Holy shit! “Ni shi jun dui ma?” I asked, which is undoubtedly incorrect Chinese for “Are you in the army?” He made a nervous laugh and pushed the bullets behind the counter with his foot. He then responded with something I didn’t understand, not just because my Chinese sucks, but because he spoke in thick Beijinghua. I put five kuai on the counter for the beer and didn’t inquire further.

Although my experience with weapons is limited to what I used in the army, chain-linked rounds are indicative of automatic rifles – the kind you have to periodically lay off the trigger to keep the barrel from melting. And those bullets were big, not quite 50-cal but larger than the 5.56 mm used by the M-16 – very illegal. As violent crime is rare in China, I don’t think the shopkeeper would need to deter robbers with something that could be mounted on a tripod. This was the most compelling thing to make me think revolution could happen.

Despite the display of some desire to vote and the strapped shopkeeper, a revolution is less likely than Western media leads you to believe. A Chinese friend once told me that Chinese culture is centered more on the family than on any transcendent ideology. Just as the Inuit language has more words for seal and snow due to its importance in their culture, the Chinese have 35 words for family members which do not readily translate into English – paternal grandfather, maternal grandfather, older female cousin on the mother’s side, father’s older brother, on and on. What this means is that most Chinese people probably don’t care about “freedom” or political issues so much as a train ticket home for Chinese New Year. True, there have been two revolutions here in the last century. But from what I’m seeing, I can’t imagine a third.

Contributed Story: Revolution in China?

Sin Nombre: Relevant, Intense, Heart-Wrenching

Colin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 08:30:47 +0000

Expat Chronicles

Sin Nombre is the best film I’ve seen in a long time. It’s also the first Spanish-language movie I watched without subtitles.

SPOILERS DISCLAIMER – mad spoilers follow.

If you don’t need a plot summary, jump to the analysis below.

The film starts by introducing us to Casper, a member of the Mara Salvatrucha gang (MS-13), in Tapachula, Mexico. Then we meet Casper’s young friend, Smiley, who couldn’t be older than 12. Casper takes Smiley to his MS-13 initiation, a 13-second beat-down from the gang. We also meet gang leader Lil’ Mago, who it’s worthy of mention is covered with tattoos, a prominent MS drawn from above both temples all the way down to his jaw-line and chin.

Then we flash to Tegucigalpa, Honduras, to meet the beautiful Sayra. Sayra meets her father for the first time. She’s to join him and his brother in the United States, from where the father had just been deported. He wants Sayra to join his new family.

Next we see Casper visit his girlfriend, Martha Marlene, for a textbook example of a Latin love session. After the session, Casper takes Smiley to the gang hideout where, under Lil’ Mago’s direction, Smiley execute a rival gang member to complete his initiation. Then they feed the body to dogs.

The plot develops two storylines: the first being Sayra’s resentment toward the father she never knew, who she believes never would’ve returned for her if he weren’t deported; the second being Casper’s neglecting his responsibilities to the gang because he’s spending more and more time with Martha Marlene. She’s increasingly angry because she feels he’s hiding something, which he is in trying to keep her separated from his gang life.

The latter conflict culminates when Martha Marlene crashes a gang meeting in a cemetery in which Casper (Willy) is about to be disciplined for neglecting his duties. Willy tries to escort her out of there, but Lil’ Mago overrules. He insists on showing her out while Willy gets his 13-second stomping. Away from the gang, Lil’ Mago tries to have sex with Martha Marlene, citing ‘generosity’ as a crucial element of the gang. She refuses. He tries to rape her. In the struggle, he accidentally kills her. Casper has to accept it because Lil’ Mago is the boss and devotion to Mara Salvatrucha trumps all else.

This particular MS-13 “clique” earns its income from the Bombilla, the train station in Tapachula on the border with Guatemala. Central Americans migrating to the US pass through the Bombilla to jump on trains headed north to the Texas border. The MS-13 gang robs the migrants on their way north.

Lil’ Mago had Casper and Smiley accompany him for one of these robberies. The three are on top of the train, robbing each and every passenger for everything they have when Lil’ Mago comes across the beautiful Honduran, Sayra. He gropes her and forces her down. Casper, still not over the loss of Martha Marlene at the hands of Lil’ Mago and watching him unleash on another innocent girl, whacks him with his machete, cutting through half his neck.

Lil’ Mago falls from the train dead. Casper orders Smiley off the train. Here the main plot has developed. Sayra befriends Willy (he’s not ‘Casper’ anymore). Smiley goes back to the gang and tells them what happened. They order Willy killed and spread the word to all the other cliques along the train rout, through Mexico to the US.

Willy’s been marked for death by the largest gang in the Western Hemisphere. Noting Sayra’s growing attachment, Willy jumps from the train as everyone’s sleeping but she awakes and jumps after him, leaving her father and uncle behind. Willy then resolves to help Sayra safely cross the border into the States. There’s action, there’s hope, there’s sadness, there’s beautiful (and ugly) Mexican culture and countryside, and there’s stimulating footage of MS-13 culture.

Just as Willy sends Sayra swimming across the Rio Grande, waiting his own turn, the gang appears and guns him down on the riverbank. Smiley scores the first shots. The final scene shows Sayra at a Sam’s Club calling her dead father’s family in New Jersey (her dad died on the train), her uncle starting a new attempt to cross the border from Guatemala into Mexico, and Smiley getting “MS” tattooed inside his lower lip.

Clichés

I’m burnt out on the accidental death via head-hitting-the-rock, which is how Martha Marlene died after Lil’ Mago kicked her in the ass. I attribute that to laziness or lack of nerve on the part of the writer. If you can’t create a motivation to kill her intentionally, don’t go to the tired-ass playbook. Maybe he could’ve successfully raped her, admonished Casper (Willy) for not sharing, and then she commits suicide. Anything but the head-accidentally-hitting-the-rock bit.

Aside from the scene where he helps Smiley execute a ‘chavala’ begging for mercy, Casper’s never seen as the vicious gangster he must’ve been to have a career with MS-13. He didn’t pistol-whip, rape, or rob anybody for the whole film. Granted, his transformation may have started while falling in love with Martha Marlene, but it was still too sympathetic in the marked contrast between his innocent white face and the viciousness of the other MS-13 gangsters.

One kudos I give contrasts American films (Hollywood) being biased toward happy endings. The tragic ending made a better film.

Mara Salvatrucha

MS-13 is the largest gang in the United States. It started in a Central American section of Los Angeles to protect Salvadorans from Mexican and black gangs. It’s since grown to include Mexicans with chapters in the United States, Mexico, Central America, and Canada. They’re known for their tattoos. There are a dozen or so MS-13 videos on YouTube.

Immigration & human rights

The reality facing migrant workers in this film reinforce my my support of immigration. The human rights issues and violence along the US-Mexico border is horrific. Girls are forced into prostitution; gangsterism thrives.

All these people want to do is work in America, the land of opportunity. Their own countries were flawed in their design so the same opportunity doesn’t exist. Their only mistake in life was being born on the wrong side of the border. I’ve known many illegal immigrants and I admire their work ethic. And I’ve known lazy and incompetent Americans who live luxurious lives in comparison simply because they were born on the other side.

Last year I read Ben Casnocha argue immigration is a solution to poverty. In that post, he mentions the idea of “free movement of people” among countries. I’m pro-immigration, but I wasn’t eager to jump on board when I first read that. Now I’m more receptive. There’s rarely reform without an extreme position underneath. If free movement of people among nations seems extreme to you, it doesn’t to me. Why should I have free reign to move wherever I want in Latin America to reap the fruits of these countries while Latinos can’t do the same in my country?

Michael Clemens is the foremost advocate and dedicated researcher for open immigration.

Love in Latin America

The film captured Love in Latin America perfectly.

The film beautifully depicted Willy’s and Martha Marlene’s relationship. She slapped him. They made love. She accused him of cheating and threatened to cut his penis off. They cuddled and professed eternal love. Despite her getting angry with him for ‘disowning’ her, the chemistry and time spent together made me long to be in love again.

Foreshadowing and magic realism

Magic realism is prevalent in Latin film and literature. Sayra alludes to an old witch in her neighborhood who predicted she wouldn’t arrive in the States in the arms of God, but The Devil. Willy consistently warns Sayra that he’s a dead man, which proves correct. In a chilling foreshadowing scene, Willy and Sayra come across MS-13 graffiti that reads, “Lil’ Mago – don’t worry, El Casper won’t pass…”

Notes:

Machetes – Willy killed Lil’ Mago with a machete, bad-ass. Latin American use of the machete is under-represented in film.
Mexican / Central American gangsters and face tattoos – The older I get, the more I err on the side of genetics over upbringing, nature over nurture. In looking at the images of MS-13 gangsters, I couldn’t help thinking they look like the Indians from Apocalypto. Is it in their genetic DNA dating back to the Mayans and Aztecs to paint their faces up and kill?
The film was produced by Gael Garcia Bernal (Motorcycle Diaries) and Diego Luna (Milk), who co-starred as best friends in Y Tu Mama Tambien, another kick-ass film set in Mexico.
Sin Nombre won Sundance Film Festival awards for directing and cinematography (Director Cary Joji Fukunaga and Cinematographer Adriano Goldman). The film wasn’t nominated for any Academy Awards because the Oscars suck shit.
The Sin Nombre soundtrack is great. Check these out:

Dick el Demasiado – Flaca de las Coloradas

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoT7AXJbx7c&feature=player_embedded

Vakero – Ya No Hay Gente

Amandititita – Mecánico

Obtenga visa americana para los EEUU.

Alcohol and Sensitivity in Latin America

Sin Nombre: Relevant, Intense, Heart-Wrenching

Recession: An American Experience

Colin — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 06:15:36 +0000

Expat Chronicles

The subprime mortgage meltdown started around 2007, the last year I lived in the States. Economists believed the risk was contained to only subprime or the domestic house market. Since then we’ve seen big banks fail, investments plummet, and trillions of public dollars injected into banks around the world. We’ve learned about collaterized debt obligations (CDO), credit-default swaps (CDS), and a slew of other culprits in what amounts to the steepest recession since the Great Depression.

My only impression of the Great Depression came from American textbooks. I thought of it as a depression, a miserable time spanning a generation. Similarly, my feel for the current American recession was limited to what I’d read in newspapers. This was my first time in America during the biggest recession of my lifetime.

My goal for 6 weeks was to earn as many US dollars as possible. Before leaving Colombia, I secured a full time job serving and bartending. I also lined up retail promotional work for about 15 hours / week. Finally, I presented the same company a proposal for an e-marketing campaign (a four-figure deal), which was accepted.

I found so much work I gave up all my shifts my last week because I felt I hadn’t spent enough time with family and friends.

I worked 3 long weekends doing promotions inside Costco stores, one of the more innovative retail giants in big-box capitalism. I saw other deals at similar stores: Target, Walmart, etc.

The VitaMix Solution for $394.99 – This product was promoted in Costco stores. The Solution included a power blender, a disc, and recipe book to make your own juices. VitaMix demonstrated the product and handed out samples of the juice they made. The one I tried had pineapple, carrot, spinach, strawberries, and more. I couldn’t help thinking they’re selling a $400 blender during the worst recession since the Great Depression.

¼ pound hot dog + free refill fountain drink for $1.50 – Everyday in the Costco food court: ¼ all-beef hot dog with a refillable drink for $1.50. You couldn’t get that in Colombia or Peru.

Levi’s jeans for $19.99 at Target –The Levi’s brand suffered overexposure in America during the 90s, but it’s a top quality brand internationally and especially in Latin America. I’ve seen Levi’s and Wrangler jeans retail for $60 – $100. The ones I got at Target didn’t have that red tab on the butt, but they’re classic dark Levi’s nonetheless for $20.

City Museum’s best year to date was 2009 – Friends who work at the City Museum told me their best year was the last one. Something had changed though. They said they’d often heard some tourists from Missouri or Southern Illinois explain they usually go down to Florida. But with the economy, they decided on a road trip to St. Louis.

I noted St. Louis is an inferior good to Florida. When a product sells better in a down economy, it’s defined an inferior good. Busch beer, Wal-Mart, and vacations to St. Louis are examples of inferior goods.

PBR: $2 pints at Fitz’s, $1 16 oz cans at Delmar Lounge – Pabst Blue Ribbon was never at these two places. One carries it on tap and the other in a 16 oz can. The increased distribution isn’t due to branding ground gained; Delmar’s PBR natural habitat for a long time. These places chose not to serve it before, but PBR is also an inferior good.

High-end marijuana and vaporizers – My smoker friends have abandoned cheap marijuana. Everybody pays $50 for 1/8 ounce of super-potent marijuana. Things apparently aren’t so bad to sacrifice in this category. One health-conscious friend ordered a vaporizer so he could vaporize his marijuana instead of smoking it. They’ve become popular in California in a new legal industry sprung from the state’s legalization of medical use. This gadget provides for a smoke-free THC high.

Restaurant food costs & revenue – The restaurant where I worked had changed the burgers from an 8 oz patty to 7 oz, while standard price increases on burgers kept with inflation.

Labor costs – The same restaurant runs a leaner operation than before. Former management subscribed to the TGIFriday’s school of using lots of staff. However, when sales are significantly down, cuts must be made to stay profitable. The floor managers won bonuses by achieving their goals in cutting labor costs.

When the economy returns to growth, the restaurant will have gotten stronger during the down-time. I now look at recessions as belt-tightening seasons and opportunities to cut fat, rather than misery and depression.

Unemployment – A couple family members are out of work. Recessions and their impact on quality of life aren’t so bad so long as you don’t lose your job. But they’re still doing fine.

My Big Gringo Christmas

Recession: An American Experience