Rick Steves Travel as a Political Act Read online

  Just being there put me in solidarity with a powerful and surging people’s spirit. Being a head taller than anyone else and clearly a norteamericano, I had lots of friends. Judging from the smiles I encountered, my presence was appreciated.

  Americans march with Salvadorans 25 years after the assassination of Romero.

  The parade culminated at the cathedral where, in his last sermon there, Romero had directed his words to the soldiers: “You are brothers of the poor. These are your people. More important than any order from your commanders is God’s order: Thou shalt not kill. I beg you. I implore you. In the name of God, I command you. Stop the killing.” The next week, while leading a Mass, Romero was shot dead.

  The symbolic resurrection of Romero in his people is depicted in colorful murals showing the people of El Salvador rising like tall stocks of corn with big smiles and bullet wounds in their hands. In Latin America, crosses are decorated with peasants and symbols of their lives—healthy stocks of corn. While this is a land of martyrs, it’s also a fertile land of resurrection.

  Archbishop Oscar Romero said, “If I am killed, I will be resurrected in my community.” Today, he lives in his people, depicted here symbolically wearing his bullet holes.

  Roman Catholic priests and nuns are routinely excommunicated in Central America for their political activism. While technically booted from their Church, they continue their work without missing a beat, believing, as one priest told me, “Part of our vow of obedience to the Church is disobedience to the Church.”

  Oscar Romero is not yet a saint. While the Vatican sends mixed signals, the local Catholic hierarchy is gradually trying to sanitize his image to be less offensive to the rich. But priests, nuns, and people throughout Central America are not waiting. For them, Oscar Romero is already “San Romero.”

  Lie Flat and Strum Your Guitar

  Gathering at a hotel on the last night of our educational tour of El Salvador, we enjoyed a trio of guitarists. They were “100 percent popular” (the safe term used for anything perfectly in tune with the peoples’ struggle). Enjoying their performance, I thought of the guerillas who once lay flat on the floors of their shacks under flying bullets. Strumming guitars quietly on their bellies, they sang forbidden songs. Music is the horse that carries the message of poems—the weapons of a people’s irrepressible spirit.

  Listening to their music—love songs to their country—I stared at the musicians and considered the ongoing struggle. Watching those slender Latino fingers crawl between the frets like guerillas quietly loping through the jungle, I thought of the courageous advocates of the people throughout the developing world, not running from the forces of globalization but engaging them.

  They sang, “Our way of life is being erased…no more huevos picados, we now have omelets…no more colones, we now have dollars.” They wondered musically, “How can a combo meal at a fast-food chain cost $8, while $20 gathered at church feeds 200 hungry mouths? Why did God put me here?”

  Wrapping up my El Salvador visit with this inspirational concert, I considered how the superstars of nonviolence (Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon, Oscar Romero) all seem to get shot. Are the pacifists losers? As a competitive person, I don’t like this idea.

  My 1988 visit to Central America was filled with hope. I came again after the defeat of people’s movements in both El Salvador and Nicaragua in 1991. The tide had turned, and I wondered how the spirit of the people’s movements—so exuberant just three years before—would fare after the American-funded victories in their domestic struggles. Then, in 2005, after 14 years of globalization, it was clear: There was only one game in town.

  Refocusing on the troubadours, I heard them sing, “It’s not easy to see God in the child who cleans the windshields at a San Salvador intersection…but we must.”

  Epilogue: Back to the Barrio

  In December of 2010, after the publication of this book’s first edition, I returned to El Salvador. While my first visit, in 1988, was to witness and understand an actual war, today that struggle has become a political one. The problems caused by the gap between rich and poor, which fueled the revolutions and civil wars of the recent past, now fill the docket in parliament. And today, both headlines and peoples’ minds are filled with the struggles caused by that persistent gap—petty crime, the drug war, and gang violence.

  Driving from the airport into the harsh urban scene of San Salvador, I saw a big banner proclaiming, “Nothing will intimidate El Salvador: Government and society united against crime and violence.” Since my last visit, the already rising tide of gangs in El Salvador had gotten even worse. (Many believe this is driven by Salvadorans who go to find work in the US and bring back their shiny new gang memberships. In a sense, El Salvador exports labor and imports gangs.) I was told it was unwise to walk around after dark, for fear of being robbed at knifepoint by a group of young thugs. It was clear that the fear and violence that wracks a society because of a desperate poor class is bad for the economy. It’s terrible for tourism, and, more importantly, wonderful people who would otherwise dedicate themselves to building their nation instead dream of escaping to the USA.

  When a society fails to mind the gap, you have armed guards welcoming you at shops, hotels, and finer residential neighborhoods.

  Excited to reconnect with someone who’d meant a great deal to my understanding of El Salvador—and global poverty concerns in general—I headed to the barrio to see Beatriz. Right down to the hardscrabble chicken roaming the yard, her home seemed unchanged after five years. It was fun to give her a copy of the book and watch her daughters read the passage about their illiterate mom to her.

  We sat down to a lunch of brawny chicken, chicken soup, delicious fresh-ground corn tortillas, and a tall plastic bottle of Coke to share. Their Christmas tree looked a little funny; they explained that it was the bottom half of a fake tree that they shared with an uncle—they just bent up one of the big branches to give it a “top.”

  Like many families, Beatriz’s husband had emigrated to the USA with the promise of sending home money. Eventually the money stopped flowing, and he established his own life in the States. He’s now married again, with a second crop of children.

  Beatriz’s daughters are now well into their twenties and, I imagine, would like to live on their own. But that’s not possible. They each work 48-hour weeks and make about $300 per month (about $1.50 per hour). It’s typical for young women to work in textile plants sewing garments for international corporations. As part of a globalized labor force, they are competing with the most desperate labor on the planet. These maquiladora plants, while pretty miserable by US standards, are considered a blessing here, as they bring relatively solid jobs to a land otherwise without much industry.

  The driving daily concern for Beatriz and her daughters is no longer the old war against a military dictatorship, but the new war against crime and the rising cost of living. The daughters told of the daily fear they experience riding the bus to work. Routinely thieves stop the bus and enter from each end, extorting all of their valuables. They don’t leave home with anything of value without considering, “Do I want to risk losing this?”

  We discussed one of the biggest changes since my last visit: The scrappy, can’t-get-no-respect FMLN party had finally taken power in 2009. Only by offering up a less political candidate for president—Mauricio Funes, who was better known as a journalist than as a politician—could the former guerillas win a slim majority. Their priorities were to improve education and health care; to address gang violence; and to reform the tax codes that aggressively favored the rich. But the FMLN’s win set up a startling reality check. It’s easy to be the guerilla opposition and just complain. But once in power, it’s a delicate balancing act: staying true to your populist past, accepting the reality that capitalism drives our globalized world, and being constantly tempted by the inherently corrupting trappings of power. Beatriz said that every guerilla has his price; in the view of many poor Salvadorans,
the FMLN’s ideals have been compromised, and the new leaders are only marginally better than the old. Beatriz explained that the voice of the Church is now gone—a symptom of a society tired of political struggle. People complain that there’s no way to organize.

  My hunch is that the wealthy elite are hardly mindful of the downtown realities because they can function fine without ever crossing paths with this humble side of their society. The fortified housing compounds of the wealthy—with their stout walls, razor wire, and armed guards—had been beefed up even more since my previous visit. Wealthy locals (and tourists) happily pay triple for a reputable taxi to hop from one “safe zone” to another.

  To get a better look at El Salvador’s upper crust, I went to La Gran Vía, one of several top-end malls serving San Salvador’s wealthy. These are more than just malls; they function as a city center for people who live in gated communities. The mall had the fantasy aura of Disney World, with a happy pedestrian boulevard flanked by two floors of restaurants, shops, children’s playgrounds, and a multistory garage filled with very nice cars. Little sightseeing trains took visitors on the rounds. The Starbucks had a vast terrace—clearly a place to see and be seen.

  La Gran Vía: Imagine a San Salvador where everyone’s rich.

  I ended up sharing a drink with a Salvadoran couple. It became clear that in my two days of sightseeing, I had experienced more of San Salvador’s pithy core than these residents had in years. They peppered me with questions about their own city. As they considered it so dangerous to go downtown, it mystified them that an outsider had ventured there.

  I capped my Gran Vía night at the cinema, enjoying an American comedy alongside Salvadorans for whom razor wire is a status symbol. Sitting in that air-conditioned comfort munching on popcorn, I thought back to Beatriz’s dirt floors and handmade tortillas. Actually experiencing contrast makes abstract lessons picked up in our travels not only concrete and human, but lasting.

  El Salvador, along with the rest of Central America, is evolving. Their fragile democracies are maturing. The revolutionary force in El Salvador (like the one in neighboring Nicaragua) has morphed into a pragmatic and moderately corrupt political party that actually won an election. Hollow as that victory may seem, the brutality of earlier strongman governments is a thing of the past. It seems to me that the country, exhausted by extremism, is determined to be peaceful.

  The more I travel, the more it seems to me that different societies (whether El Salvador, Iran, Egypt, China, or the USA) are on parallel evolutionary tracks. Absent impatient external forces, if left to their own devices, societies develop in a way that is good for their people. As we capitalists believe in the invisible hand of the marketplace, I see this as the invisible hand of the political arena.

  In talking with so many local experts over the years, it has occurred to me that US liberals coming to Latin America in search of understanding (like me) want the story to have black-and-white clarity. But the sobering reality is much more complex. Seeing how things have changed—and yet stayed the same—over more than two decades of visits, I realize that some of the easy answers I’ve espoused in the past now seem naive and unhelpful. I returned home from my latest trip without the clean epilogue I sought. But at least my visit gave me a sense of optimism: A pluralistic society is trying to work things out without war. El Salvador is moving fitfully but steadily forward. As Martin Luther King, Jr., often remarked, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” You can’t help but fly home from Central America rooting for its beautiful people…and wanting to do more.

  Chapter 5

  Denmark: Highly Taxed and Highly Content

  Everything’s So…Danish

  Danish “Social-ism” and the Free Rider Problem

  Living Large While Living Small

  Christiania: Copenhagen’s Embattled Commune

  Traveling through Denmark, I enjoy a constant barrage of experiences that give me food for political thought. Scandinavia (including Denmark) is Western Europe’s least populated, most literate, most prosperous, most demographically homogeneous, most socialistic, and least churchgoing corner. This most highly taxed corner of Europe likes its system. An exceptionally affluent society, it chooses to sip rather than to gulp. It’s a traditionally blonde corner of Europe that struggles with immigration issues. And Copenhagen’s famous hippie commune, now more than 40 years old, is standing strong against a rising tide of free market trends.

  There’s plenty in Denmark that Americans who travel as students of the world can ponder in order to spice up their take on well-worn social and economic issues back home. This chapter delves into a few of the joys and challenges of Danish life. It also serves as a practical example of how one European country embraces that continent’s more socialistic system and faces the immigration challenges that I discussed in Chapter 3. This snapshot of Danish life is a reminder that you can glean powerful lessons even when you travel to more comfortable countries that don’t seem so different from back home.

  Everything’s So… Danish

  Wherever you travel, you encounter societies that are driven by a desire for their people to live well. Denmark seems particularly adept at this feat. In survey after survey, when asked whether they’re content with their lives, the Danes are routinely found to be among the happiest people on earth. With each visit to Denmark, it’s become my mission to figure out: What makes those Danes so darned happy?

  Expensive, highly taxed, and highly efficient Denmark confuses me. The affluence of Denmark’s Scandinavian cousin in Norway can be explained by their North Sea oil bonanza. But the Danes’ leading natural resources are wind power, pigs, and pickled herring. Considering the very high cost of living here, the Danish lifestyle seems richer than their modest after-tax incomes would suggest. In fact, the Danes live extremely well. Traveling through what seems to be a fantasy land, you keep wondering, “How do they do it?”

  First off, there’s the obvious: Denmark is, simply, pleasant. I’m impressed by how serene things are, even in the bustling capital of Copenhagen. Their subway is silent, automated, on the honor system (with random ticket checks rather than turnstiles), and frequent—trains go literally every two minutes. The streets are so quiet (thanks to downtown pedestrian-only zones) that I don’t yell to my friends from a distance… I walk over to speak to them in a soft “indoors voice.” On my last visit, I saw an angry young man at the Copenhagen train station barking into his mobile phone—and it occurred to me that in a week in the country, that was the only shouting I’d heard.

  When you get beyond Copenhagen and travel into the Danish countryside, you find yourself saying “cute” a lot. Thatched-roof farms dot a green landscape of rolling hills and fields. Sailboats bob in tiny harbors. Parents push kids in prams along pedestrian-only streets. Copper spires create fairy-tale skylines. The place feels like a pitch ’n putt course sparsely inhabited by blonde Vulcans. Travelers here find the human scale and orderliness of Danish society itself the focus of their sightseeing. Everything is just so… Danish.

  The local Disneyland—Legoland—is a wildly popular place featuring 35 million Lego bricks built into famous landmarks from around the world. (They claim that if you lined them all up, they’d stretch from here to Italy.) The place is crawling with adorable little ice-cream-licking, blonde children. Although stoked with piles of sugar, the scene is strikingly mellow. Kids hold their mothers’ hands while learning about the Lego buildings and smile contentedly as they circle around on the carousel.

  Riding Danish trains is also thought-provoking. Wandering into a nearly empty, sleek train car, I noticed that each seat was marked Kan reserveres. I figured that meant “not reserved,” and sat down. Then I was bumped by a friendly Dane with a reservation. He said, “The sign means the seat ‘could be’ reserved…we don’t promise too much.” Noticing several young men with shaved heads and the finest headphones listening to iPods as they made clockwork connections on their commute to work
, I thought that Denmark seemed so minimalistic and efficient…and so well-ordered.

  On another train ride, I was filming a segment for a public television show. I’d look into the camera and say, “A fun part of exploring Denmark is enjoying the efficiency of the great train system.” As usual, I needed about six or eight “takes” to get it right. My Danish friend was chuckling the whole time. He finally explained that our train was running eight minutes late, and each time I said my line, all the Danes on the train around me would mutter, “No, no, no.” Clearly, it’s all relative. While only two trains a day serve my town back home, these trains go six times an hour. And while many Danes go through life without ever getting around to buying a car, they still grouse about things like public transit. My friend said, “We Danes are spoiled. We love to complain.”

  Danish “Social-ism” and the Free Rider Problem

  Of course, there’s much more to Danish contentedness than being quaint and orderly. It’s all built upon a firm cultural foundation. Danish society seems to be a finely tuned social internal-combustion engine in a glass box: highly taxed, highly connected, and highly regulated, with all the gears properly engaged. Their system is a hybrid that, it seems, has evolved as far as socialism can go without violating the necessary fundamentals of capitalism and democracy. It’s socialistic… but, with its unique emphasis on society, it’s also social-istic.

  What happens when a tune-up is needed? My Danish friends tell me they rely on their government. Rather than doing what’s best for corporations, the Danish government clearly looks out for the people’s interests. The Danes say, “If our government lets us down, we let ourselves down.”