El Ladrón y La Gringa

San José, Costa Rica

Though I had no idea where I was, the intersection felt important. The streets were wide by Costa Rican standards, and their convergence--at the corner of San José's largest city park--seemed central. But as I neared it, I noted that no cars were passing through. Instead, all four lines of cars stood locked in a deadly face-off, honking and rumbling, but not moving.

Looking for the cause of the commotion, I easily passed through the busy intersection, weaving between still cars and jolting ocassionally at their honks. On the other side of the road, I soon identified an altercation that had undoubtedly lead to the chaos.

Though there were but two combatants, their argument had drawn a large number of spectators and peace-makers. The on-lookers engulfed a small (and terrified) boy caught in a headlock by a much larger, college-aged woman. Her blonde hair and awkward style of dress suggested that she didn't hail from San Jose.

And as she yelled--which she did repeatedly--my suspicisons were confirmed. She was American. Looking toward the spectators, she motioned toward the small boy in her grasp and cried, "¡Es un ladrón!" He's a thief. Her accent was terrible, but the spectators seemed to understand--or at least comprehend that the boy had presumably done something to land in a headlock. The boy struggled and cried, and through his cries and her grasp it became evident who the real criminal was. "Cálmate, gringa," I murmured under my breath.

"¡Es un ladrón!" she garbled stupidly, her red tourist hat beginning to fall off her head as she shook the boy. Seeing no positive response, she continued to yell idiotic things. She then desperately removed one arm from the lock to motion to the boy as though the crowd were somehow unsure whom she was addressing.

Everyone appeared to be waiting for the woman to explain exactly how the boy was a thief or (more properly still) for her to release the boy and discuss the matter in a more civil and less dramatic way. A tall man moved in toward the couple, and said something to them that was lost over carhorns. But whatever it was, he was able to gingerly pull the pair apart and lead them to the sidewalk where I was standing.

The woman seemed very upset now, or at least frustrated that her fifteen minutes of flagging fame had come to so anticlimatic an end. Gasping, she explained in broken Spanish that the boy had tried to sell her drugs. I waited for her to justify the "ladrón" label, but she never really did. Instead, she continued to talk about "drugas"[sic], receiving little more than blank and ocassionally frustrated stares. After a few minutes of not being understood, she pointed a frustrated finger at the crying boy and said simply: "marijuana".

I began thinking nasty things about the woman, and was horrified at my thoughts. Most snobbishly, I questioned how someone with Spanish that poor could really be a reliable witness to a drug offer in Costa Rica. Far more relevantly, I wondered why she wanted to be that witness at all. The boy, holding his neck where the woman had held him, was kneeling with his head on the sidewalk, his head drenched in his own tears.

Ignoring her victim, the gringa added further details to her stoy. She had gone up to the boy to see if he was selling gum, because--apparently--all Costa Rican children double as gum salesmen. She then became "disgusted"--this word was in English--when she learned (or thought) he was selling something else.

The attention of the crowd was running low, and people began to disperse. A man helped the boy to his feet and told him to run along. More people left and the cars drove on.

"Did you see that?" the gringa cried in English, suspecting--correctly--that I could understand her. Insted of replying, I walked away to show her that I too was "disgusted." A kind Costa Rican woman put an arm around her as the last people walked away. I moved on too, and found a nearby bench where I could try to put my thoughts to paper.

My thoughts never did come together clearly, but a number of loosely connected threads began to tie together. I thought first of the Monroe Doctrine, and though it has been two hundred years since its adoption, Americans still believe they have the right to police Latin America. Inspired by an unfailing belief in the superiority of American justice, the history of Latin America is littered by a series of interventions that draw the legitimacy of American justice into serious question.

Of course, the tragedy of the American notion justice is not unique to Latin America, nor is it--by any means--flawed only only in its international appropriations. Within our borders, it fails far more than it empowers. And perhaps therein is the principal that ultimately governs it--the paternalistic notion that an enlightened few have the right to dictacte ethics and their enforcement for the many. That is, at least, how Latin American cases seem to work. When the Latin American people have been included in discussions of American intervention, the only voices tapped are those on whom the United States can rely to support its capitalistic and hegemonic agenda, those voices who will cave to the bad commercial and environmental agreements the United States has thrust upon its southern neighbors. The people never seem to matter.

The phenomenon of American tourism--from which I cannot stand apart--parallels American interventionism. At its core, tourism in Latin America seeks to identify where Latin America can be useful for the American traveler, never the opposite. The impressions and experiences of the American tourist in Latin America are therefore eternally preoccupied not with questions relevant to Latin Americans, but instead with building and enhancing an Amerocentric view of the region--to essentialize not only differences between an American and Latin American way of life, but to prioritize the American--and through it to rectify the perceived inadequecies in the Latin American.

That is, anyway, what I see when I look to Latin American history. And that is undoubtedly what I saw when I watched the woman in the red hat. She believed she saw differences in law and enforcement in Costa Rica, but read them not as cultural variations but instead as a transgression against the infallable notion of American justice. And it was not enough to simply recognize the differences in legal enforcement, or even (unwisely) to comment on the perceived superiority of the American system. Instead, she believed that the onus was on her to be that police force, to bring about a stars and stripes notion of justice to a group of baffled Costa Ricans who had plenty of other more important things to worry about.

If she did anything, she drove home the point that it is insufficient to blame the American government or its partner capitalism for American interventionism in Latin America. The blame extends to all of us as individuals, who tour the world with perverted notions of our own cultural and legal superiority and our promise to extend it to others. That is, for me, what the woman in the red hat did and sought to do. Through her nationality, language, race, and birth, the woman believed that she could identify crime in Latin America and rectify it.

American intervention in Latin America has destroyed families, ecosystems, governments, economies, and people. I thought with horror that I had seen its most recent victim, upset not by governments or corporations, but by a tourist--too blinded by her own notions of justice to identify the redness on the boy's neck as the real tragedy.

Far off in the distance, I felt ill as I watched a young boy stumble home alone, undoubtedly too young to fully understand the history of American inventionism. As he rubbed his neck and limped onward, I felt grieved that he was not too young to feel it.