He checked the account constantly. He stared at the balance as it fluctuated during trading hours, refreshing every few minutes when he was at his computer. He did some light research, but it wasn't really significant. Really, he didn't do anything. He rarely bought or sold shares. He just stared at the account. On days when his holdings grew by more than 2 percent he felt awash with euphoria and confidence. On days when it sank, he was crestfallen. It wasn't that much money, really. The account had grown by about $5,000 so far. It was worth $59,422 when the market opened that morning. At her base salary, reportedly $9 million, Priya made more than half that when she showed up for work. On the whole, Gabriel's account grew more than it shrank, but that was beside the point. The issue was how much he cared about the account. What, precisely, was he seeking when he refreshed his browser again and again on an inactive trading day? Other people were addicted to gambling, work, sex, but Gabriel was mesmerized by the fluctuations in his brokerage account. It was trite and it was a waste of time and yet somehow Gabriel suspected that he was not alone in this.
In Theravada Buddhism, the cause of all human suffering is identified, very succinctly, as craving. Tanha, it's called, and it gives rise to the parasitic defilements of greed, hatred, and delusion. But the root of our problem, the cause of all human misery, is tanha: our insatiable craving for more. Economists have come to a similar judgment of the human condition, although they don't levy any value judgments. To them, it simply is.
Still, the capitalist paradigm is predicated on an acceptance, if not a passionate embrace, of that craving. When Gabriel first went to Bolivia, young and callow, he wrote in his Moleskine, "The American dream has turned out to be just that: a dream. It is an impossible fantasy." How revelatory it felt! It had seemed sublime and easy, as if the diagnosis were also the cure.
After ten minutes gawking at his E-Trade account, Gabriel checked his e-mail again—still nothing from Priya. Then he resumed researching Santa Cruz Gas and its founder, Lloyd Pingree, who turned out, ironically enough, to be a devout Buddhist. While a student at Berkeley in the 1970s, Pingree had been convicted of selling marijuana. He dropped out of college to spend some time as a Buddhist monk in the Himalayas. He eventually moved back to Canada and began trading penny stocks on the mineral exchange in Vancouver, where he acquired for almost nothing a supposedly defunct gold mine that turned out to be bloated with gold. He used the capital to pole-vault into further ventures, including one at the Blind Elk mine in Wyoming. There, one of his cyanide-heap leaching pits seeped into local waters. By the time the EPA shut down the mine, in 1991, the damage was done. Blind Elk was declared one of the worst environmental disasters in American history. Pingree picked up the nickname Leachy Lloyd, and the EPA more or less chased him out of the United States.
There was, of course, no shortage of opportunities abroad. He made Singapore his new base. By the mid-1990s he was owner of the world's most prolific nickel mine, located in Canada. Directly or indirectly he had major excavations under way on every continent on the planet except Antarctica, which was protected, for the time being, by a shield of glacial ice.
A recent article pictured Pingree, like some over-the-top supervillain in a James Bond movie, in his personal helicopter hovering above a vast crater in Inner Mongolia, surveying a gash he'd recently cleaved into the planet. This despite the fact that a couple of decades before he'd been a few hundred miles away, clad in saffron robes, barefoot, his pale head shorn, begging door to door for alms. These days, up there in his helicopter, the man who still identified himself as a Buddhist gazed at the world laid out beneath him and pondered his options.
6. Altitude Sickness
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
LUIS ALBERTO ARCE CATACORA was smallish, with tiny hands that he folded across a yellow legal pad on his desk. His wedding ring was scrawny and silver; his fingers effete. He looked reptilian—not metaphorically, or pejoratively, but literally lizardlike: angular features, broad mouth, eyes set far apart, a nose that did not protrude but simply seemed a part of his face's overall arrowhead structure. He wore a pale gray suit with a black shirt, oval eyeglasses. Gabriel didn't have to look under the desk to know he was wearing black loafers with tassels. His office, on the third floor of the Monoblock, was boxy and petite, proportionate to the man, really. A narrow window offered a view of some stained rooftops. It was midmorning. The office reeked of stale coffee and a heavy mélange of microwaved leftovers.
Catacora said, "Evo is the first rebel who stands a chance of survival here. This is, historically, an unfriendly place for rebels." Catacora was speaking in English, although Gabriel had initiated the conversation in Spanish. Catacora was understandably proud of his English. According to Gabriel's research, Catacora had earned his master's at the University of Warwick, in England, he must have been fluent when he matriculated.
"Great rebels come here to die," Catacora went on. "In 1781, Tupac Katari's heart was ripped from his chest and burned in a square up in El Alto. In 1908, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were shot to pieces near the salt flats in the south. Che Guevara was captured and executed, also in the south, in the 1960s. And those are just the very famous ones. We've had dozens of martyrs and rebels killed here in the past hundred years. The most famous Bolivian novelist, an outspoken dissenter named Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, was tortured and killed by Meza in the 1980s. They incinerated his corpse in a tin smelter near my brother's house."
"And Evo is different how?" Gabriel was trying to move it along. He had stopped in on his way down to interview the diplomat Foster Garnett. Catacora's rhetorical style reminded Gabriel of his mother's. Incredibly digressive, he killed time skillfully, methodically, with his words. Gabriel had been there half an hour and had enjoyed a very compelling survey of twentieth-century Bolivian history laid out in baroque megaparagraphs, but he had nothing remotely useful to show for his time. And his time was running out. He was supposed to meet Foster at the Tennis Club in ten minutes.
"Well, Evo is going to be in charge, for one thing," Catacora said. "None of the others were actually in a position of power. Evo will be president. Despite our rich tradition of rebellion, we have never managed to give a rebel real power. They have set fire to the presidential palace many times, but they have never inhabited the place."
"Isn't that just the thing? I mean, in the last ten years South America has elected its share of leftist reformers, but none of them have stood firm once they took power. It is easy to make grandiose promises when you're stumping, but governing a country like Bolivia doesn't leave you with a lot of viable options. So I guess my question is: what makes you think he'll hold his positions once confronted with the realities of the job?" The question was aimed at Catacora as well, of course, an attempt to gauge his appreciation of the practicalities of the position.
Catacora shook his head and readied himself to unfurl another monologue, which began, "He won't change because—"
"But what about the consequences?" Gabriel stopped him short. "If he does what he says he'll do, the World Bank and others could cut off aid; foreign investors could flee. If the foreign aid stops, what then?" He was pushing toward his point. Trying to modify the question until it contained enough complexity that it couldn't be answered with a digression about history. "Bolivia isn't rich enough, like Venezuela is, to reject that aid. If Evo allows the economy to sag, he'll be kicked out. Don't you agree?"
"That is one view. I think he will have the support of the South American countries, no matter what. Chavez, as you just pointed out, has lots of money."
"Well, not that much—not enough to replace the aid supplied by the World Bank."
Gabriel had downloaded and read Catacora's master's thesis that morning. Written in 1986, just after the debt crisis had concluded, it was a survey of the monetary policies of the various Latin American countries affected, but it focused mainly on Mexico. Catacora had also written an extensive addendum in 2003, which studied the monetary policies of countries
that had gone through credit crises in the late 1990s, and it would probably have been more revealing, but Gabriel couldn't get his hands on it. He did find an abstract. From what he could tell, the first paper showed a somewhat standard devotion to Milton Friedman; the second demonstrated a sharp departure. Catacora's grasp of the issues had become more sophisticated. He had, by then, been present for several miserable new chapters in the country's history. He had seen Friedman's ideas backfire, spectacularly. He admired Chile's approach in the mid-1990s. The Chilean finance minister had instituted a temporary levy on short-term investments; foreign investors who committed to Chilean companies for more than a year paid no tax, but speculators had to pay heavy fees. In this way, Chile kept warm by globalization's hearth but had enough distance that it was not scorched when the embers lit its neighbors' more ostentatious houses.
It seemed to Gabriel that Catacora was an academic economist, most comfortable writing long papers on events that had already happened and analyzing other economists' failures under the generous illumination of hindsight. He didn't often make pronouncements on how to proceed. Like any historian, he preferred forensic analysis of the deceased to diagnosis of the living. Still, and despite his years in the academy, he very much inhabited the weasel-like mindset of a midlevel Third-World bureaucrat. He was insecure about his station. His allegiances lodged uncomfortably between a passionate sympathy for the poor—he had grown up in poverty, and had been one of the very few to make it out—and an appreciation of the rewards of upper-middle-class life.
Fortunately, he did not seem to find anything odd about Gabriel's line of questioning and earnestly endeavored to answer whatever questions came his way. Gabriel knew that as long as Catacora was still just a professor, his schedule would be wide open. So he decided not to push too hard that first day. He had to go to the Tennis Club, anyway, so he apologized for having to leave so soon.
He stood and shook the man's small hand. "May I come back and talk to you tomorrow?"
"I won't be here tomorrow. How about Friday?"
Gabriel nodded. "Noon? I'd like to take you to lunch—if you have time."
"I'd love that," he said, escorting Gabriel to the door.
After orchestrating the successful revolution in Cuba, Che Guevara wrote in his journal:
I've got a plan. If some day I have to carry the revolution to the continent, I will set myself up in the jungle at the frontier between Bolivia and Brazil. I know the spot pretty well because I was there as a doctor From there it is possible to put pressure on three or four countries and, by taking advantage of the frontiers and the forests, you can work things so as never to be caught.
He made many flawed assumptions about Bolivia's readiness for his revolution, the most crucial being his belief that Bolivians were as outraged by their condition as he was. When he got to the spot he'd identified, he found that few locals were interested in taking up arms. Most believed that they had already had their revolution, in 1952, when dynamite-toting miners revolted. So in the 1960s, when Che pointed to the direness of their living standards, they were, if anything, offended. The locals turned on him. They gave him away to the CIA.
He had a small, poorly armed force. Their position was not ideal, as it had been in the mountains of Cuba. It was marginal, and it was impossible to defend. Che's last stand took place in the early days of October 1967, at La Higuera, in the jungles of southern Bolivia. He was captured, briefly tortured, and then shot by a firing squad.
Félix Rodríguez, the CIA agent who had followed Che to Bolivia and who was there in La Higuera during Che's final days, still wore the watch he'd pried off the dead revolutionary's wrist. Rodríguez had been there when a doctor sawed off Che's hands. The hands, preserved in jars of formaldehyde, were sent to Argentina for fingerprint analysis. Once their identity had been confirmed, the hands were forwarded to Cuba, as a message.
In 1781 Tupac Katari was ripped apart by four horses in El Alto, and his severed limbs were sent to the outlying Aymara villages, also as a message. Katari, like Guevara, would take on a mythic status in Bolivia once executed. Total failure had come to be seen as a badge of honor in the country where only villains won. The country's history was itself a litany of defeat, plunder by foreigners, and further defeat, so it made sense that all of the national heroes had failed to accomplish what they'd set out to achieve. On the Plaza Avaroa, near Gabriel's hotel, a statue of General Eduardo Avaroa commemorated the man who had been roundly beaten in the battle for the Pacific, when Bolivia lost its coastline to Chile. The statue showed the fallen general with his hand outstretched—either to keep fighting or to ask for help, it wasn't clear.
And yet, now it finally looked like the country was wresting control of her fate from others, striking out for victory. That was the narrative favored by left-leaning intellectuals anyway, who were keen on erecting Evo as an avatar for some kind of liberal resurgence. But how many Bolivian leaders had been elected in order to fight corruption? More than half. And how many had eventually been kicked out for becoming corrupt? Almost all. Gabriel, and many other onlookers, had been leaning toward a pessimistic view of Evo at first, guessing that he'd backpedal once in office, but Lenka had successfully convinced Gabriel that Evo was the real thing. Investors, meanwhile, put a 60 to 65 percent chance on the likelihood of Evo's sincerity. How long would he last? Estimates varied. Most of those in the business of prognosticating regional political and financial shifts were not yet prepared to speculate on whether he would survive his first year in office.
As far as Gabriel was concerned, the question of whether Evo would last or not was secondary. The real question was whether Evo's commitment to his ideals would yield the desired results. Could the country find enough footing to begin building sustainable economic growth under Evo? Gabriel was completely undecided on that matter. A good economist would argue against Evo's anti-market ideas, but Gabriel believed that good economic theory didn't function very well in all situations. Piloting an impoverished country through such intense macroeconomic chaos was like flying a tiny airplane through a hurricane: the laws of physics could, in the immediate term, be overruled by meteorological circumstances.
In any case, Evo would be the first Bolivian president to claim power with the passionate support of the poor and the opposition of the rich, which counted for something in terms of his potential life span. The Bolivian poor might never have managed to elect one of their one before, but they had certainly ejected their fair share.
The story, cited often in Bolivia, was that just before Tupac Katari was drawn and quartered, he said, "You can kill me now, but tomorrow I will return, and I will be millions."
When Gabriel had stood at his hotel-room window on Election Day watching those thousands of people milling around on the streets below, it had occurred to him that Katari's prophecy might yet be realized.
***
Gabriel hailed a taxi outside of the Monoblock and continued down the hill to the Tennis Club for his meeting with Foster Garnett. Memberships at the club were de rigueur among well-heeled expatriates. A foreign diplomat could have a temporary membership for $250 a month, while a Bolivian had to either inherit a membership or pay $18,000 to initiate one, along with the $250 monthly fee. Foreigners stationed in cities like La Paz didn't have that many options socially and were happy to pay dues for the ability to congregate daily with their peers. They needed somewhere with tennis courts, a swimming pool, a bar, and a serviceable restaurant. It had to be kid friendly. So places like the Tennis Club could be found hiding behind tall walls in most major Third-World cities, and in every such club at least half of the members were foreigners.
The Tennis Club was tucked away in a crevice at the southern end of the city, where the upper classes lived. Because of its altitude, La Paz had an upside-down layout. In most cities, the wealthy inhabited the peaks, and the poor pooled in the valleys. But in La Paz, the rich filled the deepest ravines, where the altitude was less oppressive, while the shantytowns w
ere splashed on frigid, windblown perches.
At the front desk, Gabriel announced himself in English lest he be mistaken for a local by the guard. He gave the Americanized version of his name too, with the broad a and no trill on the r: GAY-bree-el. That was what he liked most about his name, the versatility of it. When speaking to a gringa at Brown, he'd use the Spanish version. With Latinas he could do either, depending on the context. A heavily lipsticked girl in a discotheque in Bogotá would get the Americanized name, whereas a tattooed indie rocker Chicana at the Glasshouse in Pomona would get the Spanish: Gah-bhrri-el.
The guard glanced over a list and found him. There was a note: Foster was playing tennis and would not be available for another hour, but Gabriel was free to make himself at home.
Gabriel walked through the lobby and out to the grounds, where Aymara governesses clad in boxy maroon uniforms chased giggling children around the pool while somber-faced parents in mirrored sunglasses dozed in the blinding sun, occasionally waking to sip colas and paw at bowls of peanuts. A robust lawn rolled away from the pool to a series of tennis courts, delineated by tall hedges. A squad of leathery men in coveralls misted the clay of the empty courts with hoses while members in gleaming tennis whites lunged around in nearby games. Apart from the sounds of grunting players and their thocking balls and the splashing children, the place had a hushed tone, a dreamily serene quality—like a singular somnolent oasis in that coarse terrain.
Gabriel loosened his tie and wandered. It occurred to him as he walked that thanks to the layout, a person, once inside, could not see any evidence of the city of La Paz in any direction. What he could see was a gigantic pale swath of sky, some burly shrubbery, the jagged peaks of a few mountains. Gabriel hadn't realized how tense the poverty was making him until he got away from it. Now he felt a little drowsy and decided to go inside to wait for Foster. Upstairs, the restaurant was empty. Adjacent, a handful of graying gentlemen were gathered at a bar, which had a sign gently explaining, in cursive, that under-twenty-ones were not allowed. Gabriel sauntered in, eyed his options, and selected a stool at the bar. He looked over the questions he'd planned to ask Foster, which he'd arranged into two categories: mild and aggressive. None of them were going to do the trick, he sensed. His attention wandered.
A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism Page 12
