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Hey team!
Just a quick post today. I went to Guatemala last week with my girlfriend. Twas great! I wanted to share some learnings.
But first, me on a playground slide in Guatemala City.
Big learning:
US colonialism created by the Monroe Doctrine was brutal for Central and South America. It’s almost hilariously clear how bad the US was.
For example, the brothers John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles were Secretary of State and CIA director in the early 1950s. They were also on the board of the United Fruit Company (now, Chiquita Banana). When Guatemalans democratically elected a left government to give workers more rights, the United Fruit Company didn’t like that. So the CIA initiated a coup.
lol nice.
That eventually led to a 35-year Guatemalan civil war from 1960-1995 where 200,000 Mayans were killed in a genocide.
Guatemala and the rest of the banana republics are just now restarting their social and economic growth.
Sigh.
It reminds me of my TikTok video from last August trying to understand Egypt and Kenya. To know the present we need to understand…the past! Shocker. Three things:
1. Existing tensions like those between the 40 tribes in Kenya or the 22 indigenous groups in Guatemala. 50% of Guatemala is indigenous!
2. How colonialism extracted value and pushed existing social and economic structures to collapse. For example, Christian priests burned almost all of the Mayan books. The priest Diego La Landa wrote at the time:
We found a large number of books in these characters. They contained superstition and lies of the devil, so we burned them all, which the Maya regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.
rip
It wasn’t just Guns, Germs, and Steel that led to a 90% death rate in the indigenous population. It was the genocide of the memetic ecosystem as well. Out with native ways of being, in with Western and Christian narratives.
3. Current forces like China, religion, and tech.
China doesn’t have much of an influence in Latin America (yet). They’re focused on Africa.
Religion: There’s a pretty interesting point here about the fastest-growing religions.
From one view, Islam is the fastest-growing religion because of the demographics in Africa. The world will go from 8B to 11B people by 2100. That’s 3B people of growth, all in Africa, and much of it will be new Muslim babies.
But from another view, evangelical Pentecostals are the fastest-growing religion. They’ve grown to almost 750M in just the last 50 years. Much of this growth is in Latin America where existing Catholics and Protestants are converting to Pentecostalism.
It’s not new baby Christians (like with Islam), but within-Christianity converts.Tech is having a huge impact in Guatemala of course. We talked to one rural woman who said that in the last ten years everyone got both electricity and smartphones.
Signs like this are everywhere. Hungry TikTok wants growth. Eye balls nom nom nom.
Meanwhile, here’s a picture of someone actually using a payphone! Catch it in the wild before your hipster friends begin using payphones as retro fashion.
Anywho, excited for the upcoming growth in Latin America and for the continued reckoning of US foreign policy in the 20th century.
Let me know if you have any additional learnings from Latin America. I know very little about it!
Back to your normal programming next week. 🙂
Hope you have a great week!
Warmth, Rhys
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