A ‘truth smackdown’. Andy Lee Graham has traveled the world continually for 20 years to 112 different countries (you kind a wonder how he’s never hit the other 90 during all that time). Think about that. He never spends longer than 3 months in one place (the length of a tourist visa). On his blog he sells his travel books and on Amazon he sells his own line of travel gear. I won’t try to cover all his musings, but I will try to convey 2 thoughts of his on Latin America as they confirm exactly what I’ve thought for years. The resulting dysfunctionality of Latin America affects Americans directly through illegal immigration and the crime wave they send us. 13 Americans a day die as a result of illegals or the narcotics they bring in.

In this video (“Ask Andy”) a blog reader asked him to compare Mexico to Ecuador and Argentina to Colombia. Expats look to Andy for a lot of info on where to escape the coming apocalypse in America (some sarcasm). For one thing he points out Colombia’s reputation as a narco state is mostly confined to one state. Another was that Ecuador speaks more of a Cotillón Spanish while Mexico speaks a hillbilly Spanish. I laughed when he said that, I always wondered what the difference was, he explained it in 2 seconds by being honest. Truth bombs cut through the crap.

Andy also explained crime stats. He said Africa pumps up their crime stats because they want to portray themselves as the crimiest and most destitute in order to get aid money from the UN. Which makes sense as Africa is nothing but a welfare continent. Latin America tries to suppress their reputation as a group of lawless nations as they are trying to bring in tourist dollars. Andy, who is no dummy, then explained the roots of this.

“Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano, Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca was a Spanish Conquistador.” Cortez was a Land Pirate, as Andy put it. He raped and pillaged Central America and especially Mexico in the tradition of pirates, and that tradition is carried on to this day by the “leaders” of those countries. Operating on the theory that a country gets the leaders they deserve, Latin America really takes it in the shorts. There is no earthly reason why a land so rich in resources and people can’t function at a self-sustaining level.

A good description of a low-class person is one who never looks beyond today. Someone who never looks ahead, who can’t put off their immediate gratification. What Latin America has managed to elect for generations (when there hasn’t been a military coup d’état), is a succession of ‘land pirates’. Thieves, crooks, swindlers and conmen.  Leaders who were never looking towards the future for their people, but only at what they could steal today. 

“The reason why multiculturalism exists is to pretend that inferior cultures aren’t inferior and that superior cultures aren’t superior. It’s a way to tell nice lies about rotten cultures and rotten lies about great cultures.” – Bosch Fawstin

So because no one is willing to tell the truth, we get these intergenerational lies where nothing ever gets fixed, nothing ever changes and the corruption never ends. Kind of like Washington. We at least have the pretense of the rule of law, they have nothing. Latin America operates on its own version of ‘trickle down’. They don’t have prosperity that trickles down though, they have graft and corruption that trickles down. The people of those countries know their leaders are screwing them. They know that their employers are screwing them. So the guy you deal with, the desk clerk at the hotel, the waitress at the restaurant, the clerk at the store, they’re fed up with the system too. They take it out on the only one they can; you. The gringo. The tourist.

Now,  if anyone ever starts telling the truth, things might start to change. But if they continue to refuse to even acknowledge the problem, there is absolutely no chance in hell of solving the problem. 

I tend to trust a guy who’s seen every culture in the world firsthand for 20 years, rather then some idiot egghead telling lies in his quest for grant money. So you end up with a region of the world with about the nicest climate and the most beautiful scenery, that does a very nice rendition of hell on earth. The reason why Andy’s narrative is so effective, is he isn’t overly dramatic or heavy-handed like me, he just tells it like it is.

[After watching some more of his videos, that are ostensibly about travel, I realize he is actually the explorer with the machete hacking his way through life’s jungle. What he ends up talking about is your emotional stability that in the end determines how you deal with life. Your brain power is predetermined, its out of your control. Your physical skillsets are also predetermined. In the end about the only thing you have control over is your own emotions. Your emotions decide how you will apply your talents. And what the ‘land pirates’ do is the worst crime of all, they steal the fruits of those talents. They end up stealing your life essence.]