by Jim Rogers
Still, I invested in Costa Rica because the government had decided to develop a stock market. I went down to the stock market and saw the president of the exchange, a woman. She was getting ready to join the International Association of Stock Exchanges. Exchange officials had a mandate to develop a stock exchange and it wanted to see what other people in the world were doing, how it was done.
Once she told me she was joining IASE I could have walked out right then and said, “This is all I need to know. Buy. It’s this simple.” But I talked to her some more, found a solid broker, and opened an account. Tourism through here will be gigantic in the future. Costa Rica’s principal economic industries are in sugar, cocoa, coffee, and tourism. Cocoa, sugar, and coffee have been in long-term bear markets, but when and if these agricultural markets revive, the Costa Rican economy will go through the roof just because of them. Nothing like a bull market to make an investor look smart.
I bought what I always buy: the largest, soundest companies on the exchange—the largest newspaper, the biggest brewery, a bank, an agricultural company, pretty much everything it had to sell. I left word to let me know if more came on the market, and went back on the road.
As we were heading for the border of Costa Rica, we were stopped by a speed trap.
“You were doing eighty kilometers in a fifty-kilometer zone,” the sergeant said in Spanish.
“No,” I argued in Spanglish, “it says right here on your own government maps the speed limit is eighty unless posted otherwise.”
“No, it’s fifty here in the town,” said Sergeant Mendoza.
“What! This is all rain forest. There hasn’t been a town for thirty kilometers.”
“Back there is a sign saying fifty kilometers,” he insisted. “You have to pay a fine.”
“Let’s go back,” I said. “Show me.”
So, like a caravan, we went back twenty-five kilometers, fifteen miles. He proudly showed us a sign facing opposite to our direction saying the limit was fifty kilometers.
“This is going the other way,” I said in English. “Into the town we were coming out of, you stupid son of a bitch.”
Sergeant Mendoza knew one phrase in English, and “son of a bitch” was it.
“You have insulted an officer of the law, Señor,” he said, “and you were doing eighty-eight. Follow us.”
We all drove to headquarters, where a captain came out and each side gave his story. While we were talking Tabitha noticed one of the soldiers edging toward the bikes.
Immediately suspecting that he would plant drugs, I walked over and said, “Hey, what do you want? If you want to look at something we’ll show it to you.” We had been warned about this throughout Africa, South America, and Central America, a favorite cop trick to deal with people they wanted to gouge or put in jail, and we looked like prime targets.
I paid our fine, acting properly humble. I said I was sorry I’d called Sergeant Mendoza a son—if I called him a son of a bitch, I was sorry.
In fact, it was the only speeding ticket we got in going around the world.
After the border crossing into Nicaragua, we hit a checkpoint a few miles farther on. Then another several miles later, and then yet another.
Sometimes the soldiers were so occupied with backed-up cars, we’d sail by without their flagging us. More often, however, we were the event of a boring week for the soldiers. In addition to scrutinizing our papers, they wanted to flirt with Tabitha and ogle the bikes. If we were lucky, this took fifteen minutes; if unlucky, forty-five. Nearly always we persuaded them not to search everything.
After the tenth checkpoint, I was boiling over even though I knew it didn’t do any good to get angry. After so many tens of thousands of miles of delays, I kept trying to reconcile myself to these inevitable snags of travel, but two hundred forty miles across this country and what, twenty checkpoints? One every twelve miles? Rationally, I understood everything. The Sandinistas and the contras had been integrated into the armed forces, and the country had to do something with them.
I asked, “Why do you need to look at these passports? How do you think we got here if we haven’t been through one checkpoint after another? Here we are in the middle of this country—do you think we fell from the sky?”
We were moving through Central America in the rainy season. Fortunately when it rained, it didn’t last long in any one spot.
As we rode along, sometimes we saw a sheet of rain ahead that looked like a waterfall splashing from the sky. We would stop, put on our rain suits, and creep forward. Unlike the States, where rain sprinkles first, here we would enter a wall of water. After a few minutes we would exit the ministorm, which was like driving out from under a waterfall.
Managua, Nicaragua’s capital, was a beaten-up city with seedy buildings and bullet holes. No glitz here, no glamour, nothing. The war had worn out everybody and everything—people, buildings, environment.
Here was a country with 3.9 million people that had been superpowered to death, and for no decent reason. One machine gunner’s pillbox around a curve had written on it, “All will be better,” somebody’s pathetic hope.
After Roosevelt withdrew the marines from Nicaragua back in the thirties, we left the Somozas in power. Various family members ruled until President Carter withdrew his support, enabling the Sandinistas, the Communist-socialist-left-wing crowd, to take over.
There was an election and the Sandinistas won. The CIA and the State Department realized what had happened here—Oh, my God, the Communists! The first domino had fallen.
Around the world the socialists were shouting, “Praise, socialism triumphant!” The Swedes sent money and volunteers. The Nation magazine sent its readers on special tours. The Russians sent rubles. Daniel Ortega, leader of the Sandinistas, sent himself to Moscow. Here was another foothold for the benighted peoples of the world in the western hemisphere. Naturally, the Sandinistas were great friends with Castro. Naturally, we started financing the contras, which eventually led to Colonel North and Irangate.
The world went berserk over this tiny country, ruining what wealth it had, because its government might have been Commies in disguise, and another domino was falling.
Then the contras won the next election. To the contras’ consternation, before turning over the reins of power, the Sandinistas had handed over land, jobs, and payoffs to their supporters, just as politicians do everywhere.
The whole thing would have been comic if so many people’s lives hadn’t been destroyed by these passing ideological wars.
In Costa Rica we decided to drive through El Salvador rather than try to go around it. It worried me that we were getting blasé about war zones, particularly when we still had three through which to drive.
We couldn’t find high-octane gas here, nor was I optimistic about getting any when we reached El Salvador.
It took time even to leave these countries, an hour to clear Costa Rica, an hour and a half for Nicaragua.
Entering Honduras was rough. At its border we were more thoroughly searched than we had been for months, and we had to pay little bribes at every step of the absurd process.
We found a decent hotel, and at night we went to the American International Circus, which was in town. Sitting in the front row, Tabitha was referred to as the “gringa.”
Showers didn’t work at the hotel so we again used the bucket method. I couldn’t find postcards here since not many travelers come this way—too many wars in neighboring countries.
From the border of El Salvador to its capital, San Salvador, we constantly encountered soldiers. Here was the first bridge I’d seen destroyed by war, a majestic span sprawled in the river and replaced by a pontoon bridge, over which we drove. It was painful to see. God knew how many years it had taken these people to build this bridge, how important it had been to them, how much it had cost, and some self-proclaimed savior had blown it up.
…
San Salvador, even in the middle of an awful civil war, was vibrant and d
ynamic. We drove in on a Sunday, right into a traffic jam, cars everywhere. On every side was street life—outdoor cafés, stalls, and people strolling about. We tried iguana, which tasted like fish, and roast armadillo, which had the flavor of a hefty steak carved out of a thick, gamy slab of chicken.
In stark contrast to Managua, San Salvador looked like Los Angeles. For the same reason that New York was more exciting and vibrant than Salt Lake City—the population was denser—San Salvador was exciting because it contained so many people.
In El Salvador the government had set up a special project to establish a stock market, which might open in a year.
Much to my own surprise, I decided to invest here, figuring the worst was over. The country’s most important industry was textiles, but it also produced shoes, furniture, chemicals, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics—the list went on and on. Exports of manufactured goods, mostly to other Central American countries, accounted for 24 percent of its foreign-exchange earnings. And all this even though a war had raged here over the past twelve years between the right and the left, the capitalists and the socialists, a typical conflict of the late twentieth century that will make our great-grandchildren shake their heads in wonder as we shake our heads today over religious wars of the Middle Ages.
Everybody here was sick of the war. Billboards pictured a mutilated kid with the caption WHY ARE WE DOING THIS? The impression I had was of a people saying, “Enough is enough. Let’s get this damn thing over with.” The Communists didn’t have more money to pour in here, and we Americans were fed up with the entire thing because every time we opened up a newspaper our allies had killed six nuns or blown up something or done something else that made us sick. Posters from both sides proclaimed, “We don’t want to do this anymore.”
Looking for a means to invest, I finally wound up with the guy whose job it was to develop the stock market. In his thirties, he’d been to Northeastern University. I was a year or so early, here before the market had officially opened, so I’d have to do something unorthodox if I wanted to buy now, right at what I thought was the bottom.
So, I did something I almost never do: I bought shares in a large private project, the newly developing free-trade industrial park. I saw the end of the war staring me in the face, and I figured coffee and sugar prices were certain to rise someday. I was certain El Salvador had to be a winner. The U.S. had spent billions blowing the place up, so I knew we would pour billions in after the war ended. We couldn’t very well let El Salvador fail after all that.
Investing a bit in El Salvador and Costa Rica wasn’t quite as promising as investing in Japan or Germany in 1945, but no one could deny these countries had hit bottom.
We stopped in on Tikal in northern Guatemala to see what we’d been told were the best Mayan ruins.
Tikal had been an extensive city of 50,000 at its peak, from 500 A.D. to 1000 A.D. When they arrived in Yucatan in the sixteenth century, the Spaniards found only primitive descendants of the Mayans, poor indígenas who had but legends of the race of giants who had spawned them.
Vast buildings rose over several square miles, primitive skyscrapers thrusting up through the lush jungle. This civilization had endured for thirty-four centuries, rivaling those of the Egyptians and Chinese for longevity and complexity. The Mayan civilization had spread over an area the size of France, encompassing present-day Guatemala, Belize, parts of Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador. Tikal alone had three thousand buildings, temples, palaces, shrines, ceremonial platforms, ordinary residences, ball courts, terraces, causeways, and burial vaults, the result of eleven hundred years of ceaseless construction. None of this might ever have been discovered if some ambitious entrepreneur in the nineteenth century hadn’t been beating his way through the jungle looking for chicle, the resin needed for chewing gum, and stumbled on these gigantic stone structures. When he spotted Tikal, only the tops of its tallest buildings stuck out, a couple of feet above the earthen mounds encompassing them. In some mysterious fashion the omnivorous jungle had raised earth to cover over these giant buildings. Ten years later and this entrepreneur might well have missed this discovery, and the glory of Tikal would have been lost for all time. This story, that of Easter Island, and those of many other sites we’d seen made me wonder how many civilizations, lasting how many hundreds if not thousands of years, had never been discovered by modern man.
Stories of the sacred Mayan ball games, after which the winning team’s captain was sacrificed to honor his victory, bewildered us. Human sacrifice, like war, was an aspect of man I couldn’t understand any more than I could understand or condone capital punishment, in which we trust the state to decide who is to live or die. In eighteenth-century France starving men were put to death for stealing bread. Think of the millions throughout history who have been executed for “crimes” we now do not even punish—being a Christian, trading in currencies, not wearing a veil, not joining a collective, not supporting an evil dictator—whatever. Today in our country drug “criminals” are executed on the word of a single snitch, himself subject to immense pressure by heavy-handed threats from the state. Prosecutors gunning for governor aren’t too particular who they convict; a death-penalty case adds another trophy for their campaign. Today among the “civilized” nations, only Russia, China, the United States, and South Africa still execute criminals. Are we in the company we want to keep?
Throughout history thousands of innocent men have been executed. How many stories have we read in which murderers were hanged and yet later the murder victim was found alive and well? I shudder at what it must be like to go to your own execution knowing it is all a mistake—that you are in fact innocent.
In the ruins of Tikal, archaeologists had found more than one hundred thousand tools and implements, as well as more than a million potsherds, useful in carbon dating. They estimated that what they had uncovered was only the tip of the iceberg, that they needed another century of digging and evaluation to understand these ancient people fully. The North Acropolis took one thousand years to build, and it had within it layers of older buildings, giving archaeologists a means of unraveling this civilization’s development. The Mayans had implemented the use of zeros and positional digits in their numbering system a thousand years before such sophistication reached Europe from India via the Arabs.
This was the highest flowering of Stone Age civilization archaeologists had yet uncovered. Man’s adaptability allowed him, with whatever he had, to develop to extraordinary heights, to create great art and architecture. If he had stone only, he could still create quite a civilization, sometimes more elaborate than many others using iron and the wheel.
On viewing this site with its thousands of buildings, I was struck by mankind’s propensity for social organization and hierarchy. The highest authority appeared to have been a combination of the religious and the civil, as if the ruler were both high priest and commander-in-chief. Like the pharaohs, he was half man and half god. He and his class devoted themselves to civic purposes, as well as to the scientific and artistic pursuits of the high Stone Age.
And what pursuits these were! In Petén, temple-pyramids rose as high as 225 feet. At Uxmal, a single building was composed of 450,000 cubic yards of material, a million tons of cut stone, mortar, and building blocks. The Acropolis at Copán covered twelve acres, rose 125 feet, and was composed of more than 2.5 million cubic yards and 5 million tons of material. None of these buildings was thrown up over a weekend; all were evidence of a successful and prosperous society, a powerful hierarchy, and a centralized administration.
Throughout this trip we encountered many societies with varying social structures that had accomplished amazing feats. We stood now in the ruins of a theocracy, but we’d traveled through socialist, Communist, fascist, and democratic systems, with every gradation in between, along with any number of monarchic ancient civilizations, from the Carthaginians to the Aztecs. What struck me was that in every one a hierarchical structure had prevailed. Whether the system w
as organized by priests, party bosses, barons, kings, capitalist owners, or ward heelers, somebody was on top and somebody else was on bottom. Even if we could magically start out on the proverbial level playing field, no matter what the system, it wouldn’t take more than a day for those who were ambitious and those who were smart to figure out a plan for getting a bigger grass hut or even two grass huts. The fellow who was both ambitious and smart would shortly have himself a dozen grass huts, and the next thing you knew, he’d crown himself king and have his sons and daughters called princes and princesses.
It looked to me like a law of social dynamics.
In Mexico I bought some grasshoppers cooked in thick hot sauce. Tabitha wouldn’t eat them, but I thought they were even better than the grilled termites back in Africa.
Predictably, the government-owned Pemex gas-station monopoly gave poor service and an awful selection.
The people here were mestizo, a change from the indígenas we had seen since Costa Rica. Mexicans seemed more sophisticated than the people we’d encountered for a while. They seemed even sleek and prosperous. Here we found outdoor cafés and public concerts. Like Argentina, Mexico was selling off its state-owned banks, TV stations, and other companies, invigorating them. The stock market was on the front pages of the newspapers, so that boom had to be nearing a top—at least temporarily.
We skipped Mexico City, forgoing its pollution for a drive along a wonderful road through the Sierra Madres to Puebla. The country’s fourth largest city, Puebla was a real charmer, with street after street of old colonial buildings, balconies, tiles, filigree, towers, and churches. It brought home all over again how glorious and rich Mexico and Peru had been in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, during a time when the United States had been little more than a scrub tract. Here had risen centers of civilization with their own art, culture, and religion. Unfortunately, money had come to the citizens so easily that they hadn’t had to invest, become productive, and plan for the future. Their problem had been how to spend it fast enough, and spend they had, on monuments, carriages, houses, and churches instead of on factories, canals, and roads. Consumption rather than investing for the future—it’s no wonder their grandeur was so short-lived.