LET THE TRADE WINDS BLOW; SECURITY; PATIO GARDENING; NEW ARTICLE ON LATIN AMERICA
La Guardia, Isla de Margarita, Venezuela, Sunday, 11 February 2007

Let the Trade Winds blow

Several factors have made the past week interesting for me in La Guardia. At first I was a little at loose ends following the departure of my younger brother and his wife back to snowy Canada. I was well provisioned with lots of leftovers in the fridge. But the house seems more than a little empty again. But then, Klaus is still stopping over at the posada and he and I take off occasionally around the island to visit a new beach, have a swim and then lunch in one of the beach restaurants. We are getting to be specialists on Sopa de Mariscos, seafood soup. Klaus will be heading back home to Hamburg mid week. I shall be sorry to see him go.

The weather is also just about perfect right now. The Northeast Trades blow steadily all day and often well into the evening. During the night we frequently get a light shower, enough to make the patio tiles look like a mirror when I get up in the predawn light. Breezes and showers keep things reasonably cool, and the sighing sound of the wind in the palm trees is wonderful. The sunlight playing on the leaves of the trees as you look at them against a backdrop of azure blue with just the occasional puffy cloud in the sky is enchanting. This is springtime, I guess, for many local trees and shrubs. Many have very small flowers on them and the humming birds and huge bumble bees are everywhere.

Friend Jens has returned to his posada from Germany. He has a lot of heart troubles at present – and I don’t mean the physical kind. His marriage has broken up and he has to decide whether to move back to Germany to be near his children. That means going back to the deadly world of regular work not to mention that he will be starting at the bottom of the career heap. Or should he stick to the free-and-easy Caribbean life-style that he has been living for fifteen years now, first on a sailboat and, for the last three or four years, on Isla de Margarita where he has built his posada (inn) and built a wooden peñero (motorboat) for fishing.

He drops by frequently to verbalise his thinking, to try to make some sense out of his life. Anyone who has been divorced will recognise all the symptoms. If you are used to being decisive you soon find out that you can be as decisive as you like but it does very little to hasten the end of the pain. Only time heals wounds. If you are lucky it also provides a little perspective.

Security

On a practical level having Jens back means for me also that perhaps we can move forward with the security measures for the house. One project is the electrification of the roofline and the walls of the patio. I personally think the electric fence-wiring looks terrible on all the other “casas” that I see around here. It’s bad enough having broken bottles stuck up all around the top of the brick walls. Some houses have even gone in for stainless-steel razor wire. Makes things look even more like a prison!

I can understand, of course, why the electrical fencing and the razor-wire are there. But nobody can claim it makes for a friendly impression. Clearly there are historical reasons for it. The poor envy and resent the well-to-do (any normal middle-class American would be considered very well-off down here). Theft and burglary is endemic especially since most of Latin America has just been through decades of economic slump. Those with property are certainly not inclined to give it up and therefore must take steps to protect it, not to mention attend to their bodily safety as well. Results: high walls crowned by broken bottles; electrified fencing; razor wire around the rooves; guard dogs. Understanding all this does not change much on a practical level, I guess, and a private revolution is not going to get one very far either. Maybe, long-term, Mr. Chávez will change the economic balance.

Rather than electric fences, razor wire, bottles and the like, my idea is to plant the whole perimeter wall with bougainvillea. After two years there would be a fantastically beautiful “blumenmeer”, a sea of flowers, all along those long walls. It grows like a weed and, since bougainvillea is very thorny and the branches rather weak, nobody is likely to push his way through the thicket to climb the wall. Even if one still decided to go for wire and electricity, the high bougainvillea would help take some of the harshness off it at least visually. Where there is a will, of course, there is a way. I suppose one could lean a ladder over the bushes against the top wall and then scale it. But, how many burglars carry a ladder around with them? At least it will have become more difficult and ladrones (thieves) could not simply hop over the wall without leaving the ladder as evidence behind them.

There may be some difficulty with the owner of the vacant lot next door. But a wall of pink, mauve and white flowers would be a benefit to both the owner and “Mr. Chicken Man” who has his blue shack on that vacant lot. I think the village would benefit from the beauty of the wall of flowers too. I secretly think that even the beer drinkers at the Chicken Shack might also stop pissing on our wall if they have to deal with thorns. I shall have to ask Luiz, the Chicken Man, if he objects before I start buying plants. Of course, I could just start shoving plants into the ground one at a time and hope nobody notices for a while.

Gardening

Life in the tropics is nearly always outdoors. The patio to the rear of the house is where everybody lives when they are not actually sleeping, or at least not actually sleeping in the hammocks. The patio itself is, as I have mentioned, totally walled though there is a sliding garage door at one corner to get the little car in and out. The space offers lots of potential for “decorating”. Not only is there a need to get some plants into the space for visual relief from the glare; but the reddish-brown tiled floor and the white masonry walls also store heat until long into the evening. (Of course the house itself does so even more. But cooling down the house without using air conditioners is another project.)

So I have taken to gardening. Or at least, gardening as practised in a large tiled patio! There are two palm trees, one with very long fronds that hang down almost to the ground, there is a guayacam growing against the far south wall, there is some sort of out-of-control but shady deciduous tree trying to choke out one of the palms and, finally, there is a wild bougainvillea growing out of a crack in the tiles. I am training it to grow over the gazebo.

Everything else has to be put into pots. Many of the plants and not a few of the pots have seen better days and I have been sorting, discarding, re-potting and re-positioning around the patio. I did buy two shrubs with wonderful dark green and gold leaves. They should cast a certain amount of shade. I also bought some jasmine parfumado: I hope they will perfume the night air once they have taken. I already have lots of oregano (it grows like weed) and basil plants in several of the pots, and when you stroke the leaves in passing you get a wonderful Mediterranean smell.

Surprisingly, it is hard to get big flowers to grow here in this climate; with exceptions, most shrubs have only rather small blossoms. All excepting bougainvillea, of course. Maybe Frangi panni too. I am looking for easy-care plants with bright-coloured leaves to make up for the lack of actual flowers. The plants also have to be able to take the summertime heat and glare. Their main jobs are to shade the tiles, provide a variety of colours for the eye and give some structure to the patio which otherwise might remind one of Tienemen Square in Beijing.

Jens and I shall be going to the garden centre over in Asunción soon. I emptied one of the pot-bound aloe verde plants, broke up the whole into about thirty smaller plants and gave them to Jens who needs them at the posada. We still have lots here. I shall set them outside around the old guayacams in front of the house. And I still have lots of plants that need potting. For the moment they are in buckets of water. I hope they last till I can get them potted again.

This afternoon we drove over together to visit Jake and Virginia. Jake has a couple of building projects in mind that Jens might take on. I now scout everybody’s garden for anything I might use for the patio. Jake gave me two coconuts that had fallen from his immensely tall palm. One of them already has a little root coming out. I intend to pot them for the patio.

New article on Latin America

My article on political and economic trends in Latin America has been finished in draft for weeks. The more I work it, though, the longer it seems to get. I really need to get it shortened. But there are so many factors that need to be observed and commented on. In essence:

1. bourgeois democracy has taken root in most of Latin America (good news);
at first, members of the privileged middle-class took the reins of government;

2. in addition to promoting democracy (for themselves, at least), they advanced the neo-liberal agenda (“the so-called “Washington Consensus”), i.e. less government involvement; totally free markets at home; removal of trade barriers and entry into the global market; no government social security networks; etc., etc.

3. In essence, the Washington Consensus has failed miserably leaving both Latin American countries and their citizens worse off than they were twenty-five years ago;

4. Democratic leadership has now passed to the impoverished masses;

5. New democratically-elected leaders (call them populist, progressive, leftist or whatever) have come to power promising to eradicate poverty, ignorance and hunger in their lands;

6. To achieve this they aim to take tighter control of natural resources (especially hydrocarbons), which have largely been plundered free of charge until now, and to renegotiate the punishing load of international debt;

7. It is uncertain what exactly their new socialism consists of; the old Stalinist, East German model is not well thought of; most likely the move will be to a mixed economy (government and private) of some sort; the details are not yet clear even, probably, to the new leadership;

8. Developing a Latin version of the New Deal (also called “Socialism for the 21st Century”) includes openly declaring itself independent of American hegemony (anti-imperialism);

9. Latin American governments are able to strike off in new directions because the lending/aid cartel (IMF, World Bank, etc.), so long dominated by the U.S. and E.U, has now been broken;

10. It has been cracked because oil-rich Venezuela ($30 billion in reserves) is ready, willing and able to function as a lender of last resort (four other Latin American countries are also hydrocarbon producers);

11. In place of American hegemony, Latin American leadership is now actively promoting some form of Latin America integration (Chávez’ Bolivarian concept, for example); the move will commence with regional-free trade and more political cooperation but will likely move to even greater political integration as well (E.U as example);

12.. The old ruling classes and oligarchies are terrified; they run as always to Washington for succour while calling the new leaders dictators and communists, always a sure-fire way to get D.C.’s attention, and trying to force them from their elected offices;

11. Distracted by failed military adventurism in the Middle East it is currently unclear, however, how Washington can or will react; it may soon need to face up to the fact that most of Central and South America has joined the “Pink Tide” (only Paraguay and Columbia remain clearly outside still; Mexico came within a hair breadth in its last federal election).

You can see why the article has become rather large. Maybe I should try to convince the editor to let me split it into two pieces and serialise it.