by Rick Steves
That first trip lit a fire in me. I realized I have the right, if not the responsibility, to form my opinions based on my own experience, even if it goes against the mainstream at home. It was liberating, empowering…and exhausting. After that first trip, I published my journal, flew to Washington, DC, and spent two days hand-delivering it to the office of each Member of Congress on Capitol Hill. Deep down I knew that my efforts would likely end up in congressional recycling bins, but I needed to do it. And doing it felt good. That little mission marked the start of the time when my travels became more than just recreation.
In 2005, I returned to El Salvador for the first time in nearly a decade and a half. Landing in the capital city, San Salvador, I was met by César, who whisked me away in his car. In his coin dish, I saw shiny Lincolns and Washingtons. I’m never very confident upon arrival in a new country, and this confused me. César explained, “We’ve been dollarized now since 2001.” My coins had become the local coins. (In a kind of voluntary colonization, local elites chose to adopt the US currency to avoid losing their personal fortunes in case of a radical change in their government.) My hunch was that much more had changed in El Salvador than just the currency.
El Salvador politics line up on two sides: The left includes the FMLN guerillas-turned-politicians, students, labor groups, Protestant churches, and many Catholic priests and nuns (especially those who espouse a Liberation Theology approach). The right includes the establishment ARENA party, the military (and Civil War–era death squads), big business, wealthy elites, and the official Catholic Church hierarchy. These two forces are locked in a seemingly endless battle for the souls of El Salvador’s campesinos (peasants). During its 20 years of rule, the ARENA party created a highly regressive tax code that strongly favored wealthy Salvadorans and international business. Traditionally, the US has supported the right wing, both to protect its own economic interests and—back in the 1980s—to fight the perceived “communist threat” of the left.
While the players remain the same, the game has changed. The peace that ended the country’s Civil War also ushered in an era of globalization. By my 2005 visit, North American chains—from Pizza Hut to Texaco to Subway—appeared to be thriving. The Marlboro Man looked good on his horse. And as I cruised through town past a cancan of American-owned franchises, it seemed the victory of the US-supported faction had been a huge success.
And yet, it was also immediately clear that living in San Salvador—a city of a million and a half people—was still no picnic. Through the 2000s, El Salvador was running neck-and-neck with Honduras for the highest homicide rate of any country in the Western Hemisphere, and gang violence was rising steadily. Exploring San Salvador, it was clear that any nice home came with a fenced-in and fortified front yard. Rolls of razor wire were on sale in the newspaper. In the wealthy neighborhoods, each street had an armed guard.
The relative lack of news about Latin America since the 1980s had lulled me into thinking that perhaps things were getting better for people there. But suffering that’s not covered on the nightly news is still suffering. This trip reminded me of the power of our media—even over those of us who are determined not to be misled.
Under a Corrugated Tin Roof with Beatriz
El Salvador provides the norteamericano with a hot and muggy welcome. After one day, I had settled in quite well. I was speckled with bug bites and accustomed to my frail cold shower, noisy fan, and springy cot. I knew to brush my teeth with bottled water and to put used toilet paper in the wastebasket to avoid clogging the toilet. I was ready for some serious education… and I got it. I was shocked to learn how amazingly blind I was to people’s daily reality just a short plane ride south of the border.
Since my previous visit, Salvadorans had been dealt some miserable cards. When coffee prices crashed in the early 2000s, it sent the economy into a tailspin; many desperate young people joined gangs, while well-off people built bigger and bigger walls around their property. Eventually the maquiladora industry (sewing clothing for rich world corporations) moved in to provide jobs—but only after the government agreed to lower the minimum wage. By my 2005 visit, the minimum wage was about $1 an hour ($144 a month). While in the US, minimum wage is considered a starting point, most Salvadorans aspire only to minimum wage…and that’s all they get.
The Western Union office is a busy place in El Salvador. Money wired home from immigrant laborers in the US keeps many Central American families afloat.
To make ends meet, most Salvadoran families struggle to send one person abroad to earn money. These expats seek a menial labor job in the US and send back what’s called “remittances.” More than 15 percent of El Salvador’s economy is money wired home from the USA. “Refugee aid” like this is common throughout the developing world. In fact, each year throughout the world, refugees working in rich countries send about half a trillion dollars to their families back home. But the cost to those home countries is an expensive “brain drain.” Half of El Salvador’s university students aspire to leave the country. They see higher education as their ticket out. And, while immigrants send home lots of money, the resulting broken families—poor single mothers trying to raise children alone—leaves a society ripe for the growth of street gangs.
In 2001, two huge earthquakes destroyed or badly damaged a quarter of the private homes in the country, leaving 1.5 million homeless (in a nation of about six million people). Of course, in a big shake, it’s the poor whose homes crumble—seismic safety is a luxury only the privileged can afford. (An earthquake of the same magnitude hit my hometown of Seattle that same year, and there was almost no damage.) For protection, the most that shantytown residents can do is to live in what they call “miniskirt housing”—cinderblocks for the lower half of the walls, and then light corrugated tin for the upper walls and roof. If a miniskirt house tumbles down, it won’t kill you. And when it’s over, you just scavenge a few two-by-fours, reassemble the frame, and nail your sheets of tin back in place.
Exploring the city’s poor neighborhoods, I found myself in an urban world where it seemed that solid jobs were rare and half the workforce was in the informal economy—basically selling things on the street. In most of the old center of San Salvador, sidewalks were taken up by shanty shops jammed against the walls of local businesses, forcing pedestrians to share the streets with cars.
San Salvador’s informal economy bullies pedestrians off the sidewalks and into the streets.
People entertain themselves creatively. I joined one gang of men gathered around a rustic checkerboard. There was no table—they were holding the board up together. It was a spirited gang, using bottle caps—turned either up or down—for pieces. With the end of the game, I was invited to play the winner. It was fun…until my opponent got a “queen,” and I learned that in Central America, the queen has vastly more powerful moves than the “king” where I come from. With his Salvadoran queen on the rampage, I was swept from the checkered battlefield…and finished in no time.
Member-supported checkers game.
In the midst of relative affluence, Americans seem to operate with a mindset of scarcity—focusing on what we don’t have or what we might lose. Meanwhile, the Salvadorans I met, with so little, embrace life with a mindset of abundance—thankful for the simple things they do have. They’re extremely generous, considering their tough economic reality.
Our group dropped in on Beatriz and her daughter Veronica, who live in a miniskirt shack on El Salvador’s minimum wage. The place was as clean and inviting as a tin-roofed shack with a dirt floor can be. Beatriz sat us down and told of raising a family through a Civil War: “The war moved into the capital, and our little house happened to sit between the police headquarters and the guerillas. At night, I hid with my children under the bed as bullets flew. For ten years, the war put us in never-ending fear. Mothers feared the forced recruitment of our sons. Finally, we arranged a peace. But the peace accords didn’t benefit us poor people.” She explained how this “peace” w
as no more than an acknowledgment of the futility of a continued struggle.
About her life, she said, “My house becomes a lake in the rainy season. Still, we are thankful to have this place. Our land was very cheap. We bought it from a man receiving death threats. He fled to America. While we make $144 a month in the city, the minimum out in the countryside is much less—only $70 a month. Nearly half the families in our country are living on $1 a day per person. To survive, you need a home that is already in your family. You have one light bulb, corn, and beans. That is about all. Living on minimum wage is more difficult now than before the war. Before, electricity cost about $1 a month. Water was provided. Today electricity costs $19 and water $14—that’s about one-quarter of my monthly wage. My mother has a tumor in her head. There is no help possible. I have no money.”
Beatriz’s strikingly beautiful 22-year-old daughter, Veronica, dreamed of going to the US. But the “coyote” (as the guy who ferries refugees across Mexico and into the US is called) would charge $6,000, and she would probably be raped before reaching the US border as a kind of “extra fee.”
As a chicken with a bald neck pecked at my shoe, I surveyed the ingenious mix of mud, battered lumber, and corrugated tin that made up this house. It occurred to me that poverty erodes ethnic distinctions. There’s something uniform about desperation.
Beatriz and Veronica prepared for us their basic meal: a corn tortilla. As I ate a thick corn cake hot off the griddle, it felt like I was taking communion. In that tortilla were tales of peasants who bundled their tortillas into a bandana and ran through the night as American helicopters swept across their skies.
For me, munching on that tortilla provided a sense of solidarity—wimpy…but still solidarity. I was what locals jokingly call a “round-trip revolutionary” (someone from a stable and wealthy country who cares enough to come down here…but only with a return plane ticket in hand). Still, having had the opportunity to sit and talk with Beatriz and Veronica, even a round-trip revolutionary flies home with an indelible understanding of the human reality of that much-quoted statistic, “Half of humanity is trying to live on $2 a day.”
Globalization: The -Ism of Our Time
Beatriz and Veronica—and you and I—are players in a vast global chess game of commerce. As the world’s economy evolves, modern technology is shrinking the planet, putting the labor, natural resources, and capital of distant lands in touch with each other and revolutionizing the way products are made and marketed. Globalization is a complicated process that, frankly, nobody can control or even fully understand. But the people I met in El Salvador made it more meaningful for me than any book or lecture ever could.
The rich world likes to imagine that globalization brings needed resources to poor nations. And often, it does. In this equation, a company from a wealthy country decides to have their product manufactured in a poor country. The company enjoys a much lower payroll than if they employed workers back home, while still paying a wage that’s considered generous in the local economy. It’s a win-win. At least, that’s the hope.
But in reality, all too often, globalization is driven not by altruism, but by an ambition to open new markets to firms and products. The legally mandated responsibility of a corporation is to maximize profits. And if that means exploiting cheap labor in poor countries, they do it. That’s why, if you talk with people in El Salvador, even proponents of globalization don’t claim anything compassionate about it. It’s presented simply as unstoppable: “Globalization is a big train, and it’s moving out. Get on or get run over.”
In Central America, egregious examples of mishandled globalization are numerous. An American biotech giant forced the people of Honduras to sell the patent rights for plants that produce local folk cures. Now, those poor campesinos (who can’t afford international pharmaceuticals) can legally be charged for using their own traditional remedies. Another example: trade levies, which increase with processing, make it easy for a poor country to export raw peanuts—but make it prohibitively expensive to produce far more profitable peanut butter.
Many participants like to think of globalization as “tough love,” as the rich world tries to pull up the poor world. The scorecard tells a different story. In the last 40 years, the average annual income in the world’s 20 poorest countries—places where people make on average less than $1,000 a year—has barely changed. In that same period, the average per capita income in the richest 20 nations has nearly tripled to over $30,000. The bottom 40 percent of humanity lives on roughly 5 percent of the planet’s resources. The top 20 percent lives on over 75 percent. The greatest concentration of wealth among economic elites in the history of the human race is happening at the same time our world is becoming a global village.
So what am I? Anti-globalization? No. I’m just anti–bad globalization. If implemented thoughtfully and compassionately, globalization could be the salvation of the developing world. Progress can include or exclude the poor. And, as wealthy people who reap the benefits of globalization, I believe we have a moral obligation to be responsible.
As a businessman who manufactures some of my travel bags in South Asia, I’m keenly aware that globalization can be either a force for good or a force for harm. I have struggled with and understand the inevitability and moral challenge of it—there’s simply no way to produce a bag that will sell in the USA without finding the least expensive combination of quality, labor, and materials. I contribute to globalization only because I’m confident that the people who stitch and sew my bags are treated well and paid appropriately. If I believed that the factory conditions were bad for that community or for its workers, I’d take my business elsewhere. To ensure this, I fly one of my staff to the factory for a periodic re-evaluation. It’s a carefully weighed decision that I make with my humanitarian principles (and with the plight of Beatriz and Veronica) in mind.
Privilege brings with it the luxurious option of obliviousness. No comfortable American enjoys being told how her cat has more “buying power” than some hungry child just south of the border, how his investments may be contributing to the destruction of the environment, how the weaponry we sell and profit from is really being used, or how—if you really knew its story—there’s blood on your banana. But here in the rich world, the choice is ours: awareness and concern, or ignorance and bliss.
Painted clay figurines featuring a bloody, slain peasant (the “Christ figure”) at the feet of two camouflaged, US-equipped-and-funded soldiers (considered “the new centurions,” tools of empire) filled Central American Christmas markets during my earlier visits. During the heat of the Civil War, poor Salvadoran children scooted these gory trios into their manger scenes along with Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds. They were a vivid Liberation Theology reminder of Roman Empire / American Empire parallels and how Christ knows their struggles. While I didn’t see them on my later visits, I keep this statue—my favorite souvenir from El Salvador—on a prominent shelf in my office.
American Empire?
In my travels—whether to El Salvador, Europe, or Iran—I find that many people outside our borders think of the US as an “empire.” But anytime I mention this back home, I get a feisty response.
You could debate long and hard about whether the US is an empire. But in reality, what you and I think is irrelevant. The fact is, much of the world views us as an empire, and therefore, we’ll be treated as one. We might not literally claim other countries as part of our own territory. But only we can declare someone else’s natural resources on the far side of our planet “vital to our national security.” When others look at us, rather than see a hardworking, freedom-loving policeman of the world, they see a nation with less than 5 percent of this planet’s people shelling out 40 percent of the world’s military spending, and maintaining military bases in 150 countries.
Every empire in history has been plagued by angry forces on its fringes that refused to play by its rules. Romans were pestered and ultimately defeated by barbarians. The British dea
lt with and lost to colonial American guerilla patriots. The Habsburgs were plagued by what they derided as “anarchists”…and were eventually defeated. And today, if you’re hugely outgunned—as all enemies of America are—you get creative. You shoot from the bushes like we did when we fought the Redcoats. Our enemies know that if someone decides to fight the US, they have two choices; be dead, or be “a terrorist.” Our challenge in combatting terrorism is that there’s always been terrorism and there always will be terrorism. It’s a technique, not an enemy.
Some might brush off American military might by saying, “Well, that’s just the government.” We are our government. We cannot rest on the notion of the “innocent civilian.” If I pay taxes, I am a combatant. Any bullet that flies or any bomb that drops—whether I agree with it or not—has my name on it. That’s simply honest, responsible citizenship.
I find it’s helpful to view questions of US military involvement through a prism of “hard power” (employing military might) versus “soft power” (earning goodwill through humanitarian acts). For example, imagine using our military to build bridges and highways instead of blowing them up. It’d be better for the innocent people who live in those places (not to mention better for our troops). Improving the “Brand of America” in this way would make it much harder for foreign terrorists or bombastic leaders to mobilize people against us. While this might seem a little too “touchy-feely” for our militaristic society, it’s less expensive—and certainly less destructive—than hard power.