Starting april 1st, the european community will begin to formally demand every bolivian citizen that enters this region to previously obtain a visa. According to official sources cited in the spanish newspaper El Pais, this measure was taken due to the “intense migratory pressure” from Bolivia. Other countries of the area already in the list of nations that need a visa include Colombia, Peru and Equator.

Despite the declarations made by spanish and european community’s authorities, it seems pretty obvious that in a short term other latin american countries will be added to the list. I hope I’m wrong, but I’m not usually optimistic in these issues. And even less, if we analyze how has the migratory policy and the US - Europe tourism regulation evolved, with increasingly more strict measures.

A couple of weeks ago, I had to go to a travel agency, and on the computers you could see a paper sign with the entry demands to the European community. A certain amount of money per day, credit cards, round trip tickets with no more than a 90 day stay in the region, etc. And I thought, while an european backpacker can travel almost anywhere in the world with a relatively small amount of money and have a long trip, most of us are not allowed to do that. Eventually, only thos with the right passport will be able to backpack around the world. Or am I being to pessimistic today? (Thanks, José, for the notice).

Peruvian food in Buenos Aires has been traditionally asociated to a cheap alternative, usually available in neighborhoods such as Abasto, where many peruvians live since the 90’s. To transform this peruvian food into an attractive option for the gourmet market is a complex task, one that implies separating from the “cheap food” imaginarium and fighting the racist prejudices against Peru which are easy to find in Buenos Aires.

In this sense, peruvian food -which, at least in Buenos Aires, consists basically of creole coast and andean dishes, but practically none of the forest region food- starts with a disadvantage facing other culinary traditions. And peruvian food is one of the most attractive and interesting foods of this area of the world, and quite a reason of pride for those who live in Peru.

And to insert itself in the gourmet tradition, peruvian food has to transform itself and adapt to the form plates are served in the haute cuisine tradition. On one side, it has to stop looking like “cheap, popular and aboundant food”; on the other side, adapt its preparation and presentation ways to a haute cuisine tradition.

Do you think this is not happening? In the last number of Luz magazine that comes with Perfil newspaper on sundays (july 3 issue), the peruvian chef Marco Espinoza, owner of Moche restaurant, said about he behavior of the first customers of his restaurant:

“When they realized we had peruvian food, some customers wanted to leave. We offered them not pay for anything if they didn’t like the food. Now, they’re our clients!”

Now, well, it’s important not to exaggerate with a certain purist defense that would say “peruvian food, when adapted to the gourmet market, loses its essence”. First, because the culinary tradition in this country is in fact a product of multiple hybrids with chinese, spanish and other places’ cuisines. So there’s no much place for purism. Second, because within Lima, and not only in Buenos Aires, “cocina novoandina” (nouvelle andean food), a marketing-derived name used to designate the gourmetization of traditional peruvian cuisine, has grown considerably. So, in the end, andean cuisine is separated from the imaginarium of “cheap, popular and aboundant food” and taken to the more expensive restaurants territory.

And here’s another important issue that we could take as a hypothesis: where do prejudices over a culinary tradition meet negative imaginaries on a particular social group? Many people from Lima have little positive preconceptions about everything from the highlands. To what instance does this “novoandina” representation is not trying to eliminate these negative imaginarium about the products that are historically related to the highlands?

I must remark this is just a hypothesis and part of a discussion proposal.

At least in Buenos Aires, the movement to trace a distinction between peruvian food of a more economic background, and a more expensive tradition, begins several years back. The fist step was made by places like Contigo Peru, but now it has more expensive exponents such as Moche (apparently, still doesn’t have its own website) and Cilantro. Note: we’re not talking about highly expensive restaurants on the base of prices, but we’re on a cost level quite above the average supply of peruvian restaurants in Buenos Aires in the 90’s.

I might have left out some restaurants, so you feel free to leave your contributions on the subject in the comments area to cover those historic holes I’ve left.

There are interesting references about the restaurants mentioned here at El Cuerpo de Cristo (spanish), an argentinean wiki about cuisine and culinary issues. Links, spanish only:

Contigo Peru
Cilantro
Moche. There’s also a note about this restaurant in La Nacion newspaper, although it’s pretty light.

This week I published a brief note about the conflictive relation between tourism and the ocupation of land that was taking place in the location of Tilcara, in the argentinean province of Jujuy, which is visited by thousands of tourists every year. Starting on an email and a note published in Salta Libre, I told some of the things I’d read, and asked if anyone could provide some information.

Now, Jaro Godoy, the author of the note in Salta Libre, answered my questions and extends some of the topics in his note. He authorized me to publish the text, so I’ll copy it below:

Dear Jorge: I’m very interested in giving this topic the difussion it needs, the problem is worsening with the passing of he days, there’s much injustice from the usual generals, I’ll give you some details:

The intendent of Tilcara, authorizes without reason, the construction of more hotels, hostel, sidewalks, casinos, and now there are rumours of a night club. The intendent pays no attention to any accusation. The Province Government has just sold land in Yacoraite (an archaelogical site), where 15 families have lived their whole lives, to Mr. Adrian Garcia del Rio.

The UNESCO has sent fonds to some organizers, all of them with economic mindsets, who don’t really care about preserving these lands, such as Mr. Jose -Architect “Champa”, who has a Tea House in Tilcara and land properties in Juella. They’ve made a congress in the Hotel del Turism in Tilcara, to -in theory- help the tilcaran people. In that congress only 7 tilcarans assisted, the rest of the people were outsiders who intend to keep building hotels destroying nature. The Patrimony of Humanity was made with economic reasons and was thought for big opportunist enterpreneurs to buy land without caring for anything at all.

A CLEAR EXAMPLE OF HOSTILITY AND PERJURY:

On saturday 10, 2005, a City Commissary, evicted the young mother Mariela Cemarrelli -Sister of Cachamay (a very popular tourist guide)- from the home the Government gave to her deceased mother many years ago -Fiscal land in B°24 Viviendas- Malka, this sir in complicity with Judges and the Police, proceeded to evict without pity this woman and her two children, who at this moment have nowhere to live.

The situation in Tilcara is getting more dangerous every passing day, today the few tilcarans left are at risk and there’s no law that protects them.

We’re exposed to strangers coming with documents, taking away the little the’ve got left. And that belongs to them for human and moral rights.

It’s up to this, my friend, the little information I can share with you about the obscurity around this topic, that no government wants to deal with, much less intervene.

The touristic enterpreneurships are multiplying these days, of course camouflaged behind big walls, but soon they’ll see the light, when there’s nothing we can do to stop it, the land since it was declared patrimony has raised in some cases 3000 %, it’s a big business for certain dark sirs who ride around in their Mercedes and dissapear.

If anyone wants to add or rectify some information, you have the comments space to your disposition. I’m really interested in digging more into this problem in Tilcara, which is not only quite interesting, but it hasn’t been boarded by the argentinean media.

Few speeches have seen so generalized in the latest years as the one that sustains that the physical world is less important, as social and labor relations are delocalizing. The greater presence of the Internet has helped to create this impression, for which the entire world seems to leave behind its historic roots based on the possession of material spaces, to enter an era marked by the domain of the network and the symbolic.

Such appreciations are clearly exaggerated. While many proclaim the decadence of the physical world, there are a series of facts to be considered. I will point them out, in an isolated way. One, a part of the world clearly concentrates the biggest economic income. Two, in almost the whole world, the value of real estate are raising, and at least for two years now people talk about a “real state bubble”. Three, oil reserves are becoming so valuable that many opt to “physically” invade others to maintain its domain on them.

So, where are we then? Is the world becoming symbolic and virtual or is it still as anchored on the possession of material physical assets, as it has been for centuries? More likely, both things are taking place, simultaneously. The economy is increasingly having a bigger weight on the nets of value construction anchored in knowledge and the symbolic -there are the huge numbers of electronic transactions made everyday, or the value of innovation in business processes- but at the same time this “virtualization” is taking place within a process of notorious revaluation of certain “physical” properties, such as real estate, oil reserves, natural resources. And there’s nothing contradictory in it -although it provokes a long series of tensions, of course. Rather, we have a relation between both phenomena, in the same way in which, for example, communications media are fragmenting but at the same time are focusing into property.

The next years will be a sample of particular tendencies. A greater increase in the virtualization of certain social relations -particularly with the growth of teleworking, a phenomenon that presents advantages to the employers and also to the employees- and the growth of the value of scarce physical assets. Don’t be surprised: in a world where in theory everything is becoming “more virtual”, many of us will have as an almost impossible dream buying a house. As Lash and Urry would say, we’re heading towards a real economy of signs and spaces.

Those particular paradox of market economy: the poorest continent of the world, Africa, has been in the latest years the region of the world with the biggest growth in the number of mobile phones. It went from 7.5 millions of mobiles in 1999 to almost 80 millions, today; 1 of every 11 africans has a mobile phone. This represents a 58% annual growth, while Asia had a growth of 34% in the same period.

How can poverty and the demand for new services be combined? Facing the bad infrastructure of fix lines, many people opt to do what in technology studes is known as leap frog: to skip one state of technology installed and to use directly the newest one. In this case, not even install a fix telephone line and head straight to a mobile. It’s paradoxical: despite most of africans live on US$ 2 a day, many of them need to have access to mobile phones to be able to work. Add to this the explosion of economic mobile phones supply, with prepaid plans that allow to control the consumption by charging overpriced on air minutes. This is similar to what is going on in Latin America, by the way. Two interesting pointers. One: the fifth part of the continent’s cell phones are concentrated in South Africa. Two: in 2003, Nigeria’s telcos had to suspend the sale of chips and new devices to renovate the net, which was completely saturated.

The possesion of a mobile phone is a business opportunity in these types of countries. I can only cite one example that I’ve seen several times in Bolivia: people who have several cell phones tied around their waist, that allow people to make phone calls by paying a fix fee, one that’s cheaper for many destinations than the traditional fix network’s. While this is related to how expensive it is to talk on the phone in Bolivia, it’s interesting as an example of survival and finding new opportunities to make money with communications services.

The news can be seen in the Herald Internationl Tribune, and I originally saw it at New Mobilities, at el Cemore’s blog.

Bonus: some info about poverty in Africa

Number of refugees: 15 millions -3.3 millions had to leave their countries for some kind of conflict, and 12 millions had to move to other parts of their country as refugees.

Annual city growth: 3,5%

Percentage of population under 25 years old: 71%

Percentage of population that depends on agriculture to survive: 66%

Taken from Purse Lip Square Jaw.

In the last weeks, I’ve dedicated a couple of posts to the topic of Afghanistan and its importance in the conformation of the current world (dis)order. This weekend, as I strolled around Parque Rivadavia, in Buenos Aires, I stumbled across John Lee Anderson’s The Lion’s Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan. The book has a completely different narrative style than Rashir Ahmed’s Taliban: Islam, Oil, and the New Great Game in Central Asia. While this last one rebuilds the history of Afghanistan since the appearing of the taliban (1994) to beginnings of 2000 -when it seemed this political force would take over the entire country-, Lee Anderson’s book is a series of journalistic chronicles made during the american invasion to Afghanistan after the september 11 2001 attacks. This time cut is interesting, since it finely complements Ahmed’s book. Although, I recommend reading this last book first not only for a chronological issue, but also because The Lion’s Grave takes for granted a series of knowledge about Afghanistan and the different political features in struggle.

Update: as far as this years goes, 64 U.S. soldiers have died in Afghanistan during confrontations with the taliban. This number marks a growing tendency. In 2004, 52 soldiers died; while in 2003, 47 and in 2002, 43. More at this AFP note.

Few nations of the underdeveloped world have had as much influence on the current geopolitic world configuration such as Afghanistan. Despite this, this country barely makes it to the news, or goes in and out from the media’s agendas every certain period of time.

When in 1979 the ex Soviet Union invaded the country to support the local communist government, a series of consequences took place and still today hold great relevance. To defeat the communists, the United States, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia strongly supported the islamic combatants, also known as muyahídin, of radical tendencies. They also let them get involved in the traffic of opium to help them collect more income. The fall of the communist government didn’t calm things down, although Afghanistan simply dissapeared from the news. In 1992, this country was in the middle of a fierce civil war that led to the appearing of a new combat group in 1994: the taliban.

In 1996, the taliban had taken over almost the entire country, thanks to the financial support, particularly from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and the money from drugs traffic, a commerce tolerated for the CIA, the famous U.S. intelligence center.

Progressively, the speech of the taliban adopted a strong antiamerican tone and against Saudi Arabia, while Osama Bin Laden’s influence grew. For then, the U.S. government had Bin Laden in sight and accused him of several attacks to its embassies in Africa. The taliban was the most radical group of all: the prohibited all sports, forced their women to stay home and denied their right to get education, they tried to impose their order to the entire country, despite the fact that Afghanistan is a multiethnic nation.

In summary, thanks to the money of many countries, the consolidation of a new type of islamic radicalism was stimulated, that ended up biting the hand of the main financists of this phenomenom. Looking to defeat communism, thousands of millions of dollars were spent creating the conditions that allowed the appearing of the taliban, who left the power when the country was attacked towards the ends of 2001 by the U.S. after the attacks in New York.

After the attacks, Afghanistan has dissappeared again from the media’s agenda. Maybe we should worry: the changes that occured in this country while no media gave importance to it, ended up in noticeable consequences for the world today. The situation of the country is, despite the american occupation, a complete disaster. Recently, Forbes magazine considered Kabul the world’s most dangerous city to visit. Even if it seems impossible, the city is even more insecure than Bagdad, the iraqui capital. The important number of troops that the U.S. destined to Afghanistan still hasn’t achieved the main goal, to capture Osama Bin Laden and the taliban leaders.

The case of Afghanistan is one of the most interesting ones when revising how myopic the media many times is. The crucial facts that happen outside the “first world” are usually left out of the radio of facts to be covered. Only when the historic process that emerged in Afghanistan ended up causing attacks in the United States, the media turned to this nation torn down by more than three decades of war.

In the internet there are some resources to follow up what’s going on in Afghanistan. For example, Afghanistan News; Afgha.com and Afghandaily. You can also see the article about Afghanistan in the Wikipedia.

An excellent source of information is Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban: Islam, Oil, and the New Great Game in Central Asia and Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia, edited in spanish by Peninsula in 2001 (the book in english appeared in 2000). Despite being edited before the attacks in september, 2001, it’s an excellent source of information on the evolution of the taliban and how this group’s act ended up provoking enormous wordly consequences. I’m reading this book now, so expect to see some more notes about this really interesting topic.

If anyone has more interesting info about Afghanistan, leave your contribution in the comments section.

One of the biggest problems of supporting tourism -that is, developing specific national policies to stimulate the growth of the sector- is the political context. For example, in 2001 the New York attacks brought down all of the year’s perspectives, and caused such an impact that the world tourism market -not only the american, although the numbers there were even worse- lost thousands of millions of dollars in revenues. Now, the recent attacks in London is going to cost this city the loss of more than 500 millions of dollars.

Tourism is a part of the economy that has to be promoted. But to excessively encourage the idea that it’s a sure development tool is highly questionable. It only takes a few modifications to the exchange rates or relevant political facts to seriously affect the efforts done. And all of this without taking into consideration those facts where tourists are the object of terrorist attacks, as it happened many times in Egypt -last time, few days ago.

Bonus: interesting info about the volume of the tourism business in Egypt. Anual revenues of 6600 millions of dollars, mainly concentrated in the pyramids area nd the resorts in the Red Sea; 8.6 millions of tourists per year and plans to double this number by year 2010; one thousand dollars a year of investment to build the necessary hotels to hold the growth in the number of visitors; the tourism sector is the biggest private employer in Egypt. More at Reuters.

During may this year, the argentinean version of the Rolling Stone magazine published and article signed by James Kunstler about the end of cheap oil, and the tendency to finish up this valuable resource’s reserves in the next few years. The note is available in english at this site.

My idea is to focus on Kunstler’s prospective on the relation between the end of oil and the travel’s industry.

The hypothesis is simple: the end of oil in the next fifty years will provoke a collapse in the mobilities industry. Airlines will not be able to work, cars will become much more expensive and will reach lowe speed, and in general, the whole industry around mobility will enter a brutal crisis. Next to this, suburbs will collapse, since they depend on automobiles, and so will all shopping centers and businesses that are along the highways. Quotidian life will suffer a long series of transformations, that will totally change society’s form of organisation.

Part of this diagnosis doesn’t soun too new. It has the same tone found in books as The limits of growth, edited in the 70s, where it was established that the correlation between population growth and the running out of natural resources will lead the world economy to disaster. But in this article, Kinstler rather stresses on one point only: the problem of running out of oil. He says that in this year we’ll reach the production peak and that, slowly, this will decline year after year. While he estimates there still are big reserves, as years pass, these will become harder to reach, situated far away from the most developed countries borders, and where the cost of extraction will be much higher.

Along with this problem, we have to point out the development of alternative fuel has not provided of any option that can completely replace refined oil. Not to mention the problems arising from the lack of energy in other areas, or the absence of plastic and how it will impact on many industry’s costs.

It’s interesting to think how the travel industry is strongly linked to oil and the fact that this can be sold at relatively low costs. The increasing decline of this resource’s supply will force us to look for other alternatives. Now, when will huge aircrafts be able to move on some kind of alternative energy? In the case of cars, one could say that there will be a sensible loss in speed since new engines can’t develop such potency, but in the case of aircrafts, these might just remain in the ground. Will the 1950-2050 period be remembered as the physical mobility period? Because with the increasing cost of oil, covering long distances at reasonable costs will become much harder. Unless, of course, we turn to the Internet in resignation…

Myanmar (also previously known as Burma, in english, and Birmania, in spanish) is probably the least Pacific Asia country known by western travellers. To add some light to a destination, there’s an interesting review at WorldHum of Finding George Orwell in Burma. The writer lived there for many years during the 1920s and the book analyzes his life there.

Myanmar, by the way, has for a long time lived under a dictatorship that has the worst records on human rights issues. While all opposition has been suppressed a long time ago, in the latest months some terrorists attempts have occured, causing a great number of deaths. Anyways, the presence of Myanmar in the big media news is close to zero, which forces us to use the Internet to find a little more about this country.

If you want to know more about this destination, you can check the site of Lonely Planet on Myanmar, or check the FreeBurma sites, a movement that seeks the democratization of this nation, and Burma Project, where you can find recent news about the economic situation of its inhabitants, which by the way is not quite good.

Spanish Version Here