The Reckoning: The U.S. As A Banana Republic?

--Trash is everywhere.  One of the first things visitors notice is the ubiquitous filth. 

--Streets are filled with whisper-thin stray dogs and cats. 

--In very poor barrios there are no trees or grass or flowers to be found.  Just dirt or mud, depending on the weather.

--Car and bus drivers are supposed to be licensed, but with few police and effectively no traffic control, no one knows how many actually are.  Obeying traffic signals is a matter of personal preference.  Car insurance is a luxury and “not required” as one official told me.  Remember this the next time you read about yet another bus accident in Central or South America, where a bus tumbles off a highway and down a mountain, killing everyone on board. Traffic accidents are a leading cause of death in much of the third world.

 --Unfinished buildings are everywhere, frozen in time, awaiting further funds from adult children working in the U.S. or Spain.  An estimated one in ten young Ecuadorians has emigrated for work reasons, often, tragically, leaving their own lost children to the uncertain mercies of friends or family. 

-- The relative opulence of a home is often a testament to the number of children a family has working abroad.  The poorest of the poor live in shacks made of cane sugar stalks. 

-- It’s not unusual to see visitors walking along looking at their feet.  That’s because the sidewalk is uneven and holes, including sewer holes, as well as sudden mountains of pavement, can appear unexpectedly.  Roads can be so rutted that taxis refuse to navigate them. 

--People get around by bus.  Driving a bus is an entrepreneurial activity for upwardly mobile families in Ecuador.  A family saves up enough to buy a second hand bus and they’re in business: the dad drives and the kids go along for the ride and collect the fares.  Mom is probably at home managing the small store that is the front room of their three room house. The store sells to their neighbors whatever vegetables the family has raised and other small items, like cigarettes at three for a dime or bottled water for 25 cents. 

--I saw police (or were they soldiers? Hard to tell when the military and law enforcement are interchangeable) only twice during the time I spent in Ecuador.  They were standing guard outside banks, state of the art weaponry at the ready.  What little law enforcement exists seems there to protect the property of the rich. 

--Criminal activity is a constant concern. Barred windows appear in all areas of the country and among all types of homes.  In my daughter’s travels, she found that armed robberies on busses were rather routine, which accounts for the fact that many busses have a barrier behind the driver separating new and possibly dangerous arrivals from seated customers. 

--Typical for third world countries, public education is limited. It is usually only the families who can pay whose children attend school. Huge numbers of families can’t afford tuition or uniforms or books, children may go to work before their teens, and the country remains impoverished. 

--A few thousand of Ecuador’s estimated 13 million citizens are tall and white and Spanish, unlike the majority who are Indian or mestizo (mixed race).  They are the upper class, and for many decades, they were the ruling class.  Today they live behind tall barriers in exclusive enclaves, and they trust no one from outside with so much as their phone numbers.  They hire body guards, send their children to be educated in the U.S., and remain active in politics in this politically unstable region.

--Since precise statistics are unavailable and most estimates in the third world are essentially guesses, no one knows the true extent of unemployment in Ecuador.  Nevertheless, we observed massive numbers of people, with neither education nor skills nor available jobs, who simply stayed at home every day.  We were awed by the lack of productivity in much of the country.  

My daughter made good friends in Ecuador with people who were, in many ways, very much like us. Their ability to stay in touch after her tour ended was nearly impossible, however, since the mail system in Ecuador is close to nonexistent and because the overwhelming majority are too poor to have good access to telephones or computers.  Even if they did, those living in or near poverty spend most of their time on tasks necessary to their survival. 

Concerns with public health and safety are ample reasons to hope the U.S. doesn’t descend too far into the approaching abyss.  But there is also much to recommend this other world.  Families are strong, neighborhoods are stable. Life is simple, ads for the latest trinkets are nonexistent, and no one worries about keeping-up consumerism. 

As U.S. citizens travel the economic path laid out by our multinational corporate government, we may all have reason to look for the bright side.

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