The Latin America Red Pill: My Search for Freedom South of the Border by Fergus Hodgson offers a bold, firsthand journey through the political and economic realities of Latin America. In this first chapter, you’ll get a taste of the book’s content, discover whether it’s the right read for you, and find links to purchase the paperback or audiobook versions.
My Latin America journey began in Bogotá, Colombia, in January 2010, after a mammoth flight from New Zealand by way of Los Angeles and Fort Lauderdale. Many people were fearful I would be captured by narcos or guerrillas, but I was too eager for an adventure to let fears get in the way. A Colombian friend from college had piqued my curiosity back in 2006 and, after years of anticipation, I was full of piss and vinegar.
That initial journey took about four months, until May 2010, when I arrived in Santiago, Chile. I traveled entirely by bus, passing through Ecuador and Peru, but I would not do it again and do not recommend bussing such long distances alone. The trip zigzagged and had plenty of backtracking, but my longest stay of about two months was in Quito, where I learned Spanish and salsa dancing.
The other cities that hosted me for at least a few days or more during those months were—from north to south—Medellín, Armenia, Cali, Pasto, Manta, Guayaquil, Lima, Tacna, and Santiago. Making it to Santiago was somewhat of a transition back to the First World. Chileans were noticeably wealthier, and the city was cleaner and structurally more advanced than the others I had visited. Further, Santiago, at least at that time, was still a magnet for other Latin Americans and even some American and Spanish expats.
While I have countless memories from those months, more than I can squeeze into this chapter, a few notable observations have stuck with me and become clearer in the years since. There is overlap, but I have distilled them down to five—crime, poverty, class division, anticapitalism, and low trust—and I outline them here. In subsequent chapters, I address these in more detail and seek to offer explanations and ramifications.
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Crime
When I arrived in Bogotá, my Spanish was superficial, resting on lines from a few evening classes. A driver grabbed me by my collar and led me to the overnight bus to Medellín, since I could not understand the announcements at the station.
However, my observations were accruing rapidly. The forewarnings of Colombia’s generous cleavages, public displays of affection, and insane bus drivers proved accurate. In Cali, for the first time in my life, a prostitute near Sixth Avenue solicited me—not that she was appealing. Drivers, of both cars and buses, operated with a different paradigm and nonchalantly passed each other even when there was traffic coming in the other direction.
The emphasis on security was like nothing I had ever experienced. In Bogotá, locals warned me not to walk on specific streets. In the countryside, locals warned me of guerrillas on less-traveled roads. Traveling in a taxi was a risk, although Uber has helped in recent times, and at all times I had to stay close to and keep an eye on my possessions.
I could not help but notice the common practice of driving large pieces of broken glass—often from used bottles—into walls to dissuade thieves. Some walls were more sophisticated and had razor wire, but the message was clear: crime was an ever-present concern.
The level of crime that plagues Latin America—especially the Northern Triangle: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—is difficult for an Anglo to comprehend. Given the prevalence of extortion, I now describe it as the law of the jungle. War zone better conveys the situation in criminal focal points such as Caracas, Venezuela. Witnessing an armed robbery in Caracas, right in front of a large crowd by the metro, made me more sensitive to the problem. Being held up at gunpoint is par for the course in the region, as a New Zealand friend found out in Quito, Ecuador.
Statistics and anecdotes abound. Nine of the top 10 murderous cities in the world are in Latin America and 17 of the top 20. Including Kingston, Jamaica, given proximity, raises that to 18. In Guatemala, with good reason, there are at least four times as many private security guards as there are policemen.
Latin America’s reported annual murder rate of 23.8 per 100,000 residents is five times higher than the murder rate in Anglo-America, which is 4.9 as a weighted average. My strong suspicion is that the official numbers in Latin America meaningfully underreport murder rates. Mass graves in El Salvador, for example, bury the truth, as noted by investigative journalists at InSight Crime. Further, the profound corruption of police means they invoke little trust or reason to report crime. Worse, as perpetrators and partners with organized crime, police are not about to report themselves.
Poverty
My plan when I first arrived in Colombia in 2010 was to get to Chile and settle there for the foreseeable future. However, a friend in Ecuador, who had been at Boston University with me, said that was a bad idea, given Chile’s awkward, distinct Spanish. The conventional wisdom was that the cleanest, most neutral Spanish was in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. That led me to stay in Quito and get to know the community.
With an eye on employment there, I also began to get a sense for the remuneration on offer, and it was not pretty. A video journalist shared that she made US$800 per month, and she was happy with that. Latin America’s monthly GDP per capita, as of 2020, was $640, versus $5,100 in Anglo-America. That suggests Latin Americans earn 87 percent less than Anglo-Americans.
As with the murder rates, I am skeptical of the official numbers, especially those from Argentina, Cuba, and Venezuela. On the other hand, some countries such as Guatemala have broad informality, and GDP numbers there could fail to capture a meaningful portion of the economy. As a rule of thumb, anyone making over $1,000 per month in Latin America has achieved middle-class status; $500 is typical.
A recent anecdote from March 2024 helps explain these numbers. At that time, 96 Cuban medical doctors arrived in Honduras for work. They generated immediate controversy with what was perceived by locals as exorbitant compensation: $2,000 per month plus housing, transport, and food.
These doctors are slaves of the Cuban dictatorship, which pockets the compensation and passes down a meager stipend. However, the Honduran Medical Association lambasted the cost—presumably a foreign-relations gesture. The association highlighted 11,000 unemployed Honduran physicians and local compensation of $1,137 for general physicians and $1,300 for specialists.
When I first visited Venezuela in 2014, a friend with a US college education was earning the equivalent in bolívares, at the time, of $90 per month. I wondered why she bothered going to work. With so much visible wealth around, I could also understand why someone would be tempted to align with the plunderous regime.
The situation in Venezuela has worsened since. The nation—along with Cuba—consistently tops the misery index for crippling unemployment and inflation. Cubans earn regime-set monthly salaries of about $50, and the middle class there survive on remittances from the diaspora, chiefly in Miami, Florida.
Back in Ecuador, a school offered me $6 per hour to teach English, which locals thought was generous. I realized being a wage earner in Latin America was not going to cut it. I would either have to start my own business or return to Anglo-America, so I began applying to jobs and receiving offers. Eventually, I settled on a reporter-editor role in New Orleans covering Louisiana state policy.
Class Division
When wealth above subsistence is in short supply, people predictably gravitate towards those who have it. Further, people make more of an effort to demonstrate their socioeconomic status—such as via their clothing, familial ties, or gated-community residence—and self-segregate along socioeconomic lines.
In Patagonian Argentina, for example, resource extraction fz3| (mining and petroleum) dominates the otherwise backwater economy and attracts foreign firms that pay markedly better than local firms. Argentine men who manage to snag such roles don jackets with petrolero (oil worker) written in all-caps and bold letters, and these attract women like bees to honey.
We can debate why, but it is no secret that Latin America is highly segregated and a home of high income inequality. A handful of African nations top the Gini coefficient rankings, but Brazil (eighth) and Colombia (ninth) still make the top 10, as does Latin-adjacent Belize (seventh). The Gini coefficient, since it seeks simplicity and comparability, necessarily misses a lot. Still, it is the most recognized metric, and it is suggestive of the reality on the ground.
Inequality, in and of itself, is not an ethical problem. However, it is often the product of other problems, such as monopolies granted to privileged classes. Perhaps Latin America’s inequality is particularly noticeable because of the striking rural-urban and Creole-indigenous divides. Take an early morning walk down La Avenida Reforma in Guatemala City, and you will see different societies living in the same place yet barely interacting. In many ways, the world has passed by Latin America’s rural populations, although often that seems to be their preference.
A weekend trip to Otavalo, a couple of hours north of Quito, opened my eyes to these divides. Otavalo is famous for its colorful outdoor market, where foreigners flock to buy artisanal items. The local indigenous communities, who tend to speak Quichua, offer all manner of items for sale.1 If you are willing to negotiate, there are bargains available in convenient US dollars.2 There are also plenty of disabled/injured people begging and raking in the cash for their handlers.
On the edge of town is the Peguche waterfall, another appealing spot for tourists. As I walked the path, indigenous ladies were selling generously sized cheese empanadas, and I asked the price: 10 cents each. This was 2010, so there has been some inflation, but I could not believe the price and bought three. I wondered where the profit margin was. Even if they sold 50, about what they might have had with them, they would have grossed five dollars that day.
This was a wake-up moment for me regarding the poverty these ladies lived with. Back in Quito, there were many US franchises, and they typically charged the same prices as you would find in the United States.
Anticapitalism
One of the stereotypes I held before my initial arrival in Colombia was that Latin America was a haven for corruption. In fact, corruption is the tip of the iceberg, since terrorism and cartel criminality are more severe problems. The choice of Paraguay’s Ciudad del Este, on the border with Argentina and Brazil, for a terrorist epicenter was not random.
My assumption, therefore, was that people would have a strong libertarian streak and little interest in elections or government as a solution to anything. They would see people in office as immoral and to be avoided.
Counterintuitively, the opposite proved to be true, even with pitifully low confidence in election results and broader government activities. Perhaps this stems from class envy, amid the aforementioned inequality, and eagerness to enact redistribution and retribution. Throughout my first trip, I noticed political signs all over the place. People expended great efforts on electoral campaigns and activism, more than I had ever witnessed back in New Zealand and even more than in the United States.
Further, I saw the outward reverence people showed towards public officials. After all, they are the ones who dole out resources and other special favors in crony economies. Sometimes people, notably in the sycophantic media, would refer to the president as the “primer ciudadano” (first citizen). I was eating brunch in a Quito restaurant and the television was on with one of President Rafael Correa’s weekly Sabatina (worship) TV shows. His clown antics did not impress me, but a gentleman next to me stood up and waved his fist: “¡Es mi presidente!” (that’s my president).
(President Rafael “Mashi” Correa later affectionately called me the “extreme right wing of the world.”)
When an Ecuadorian I knew took an English course in Louisiana, some of her readings were about US values and culture. She learned, to her surprise, that Americans respect entrepreneurs and business magnates—in the mold of Steve Jobs (Apple) or John Mackey (Whole Foods Market)—more than politicians, even though no one votes for businessmen. This was before the presidential run of Donald Trump, who leveraged that respect to win the White House.
In my speaking with locals in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and, to a lesser extent, Chile, I also recognized a strong and consistent socialist streak. Although this was not universal, I felt highly outnumbered in discussions. Once you recognize the widespread contempt for laissez-faire capitalism—private property and free exchange—other phenomena make sense. That includes the ever-present threat of land invasions and occupations and widespread admiration for tyrants and thieves such as Fidel Castro and his right-hand man, Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
This was before my connections with various liberal organizations, such as the Foundation for Intellectual Responsibility in Argentina and Latin American Students for Liberty. These are oases for the entrepreneurial and aristocratic classes.
I began to realize how the likes of Hugo Chávez and Correa had gotten into power via the ballot box to lead the Bolivarian Revolution and Citizen Revolution, respectively. Both are locally branded socialist movements.3 There is an unmistakable correlation between trusting societies and their economic activity (GDP) per capita. As noted by Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, Max Roser, and Pablo Arriagada of Our World in Data, “When digging deeper into this connection using more detailed data and economic analysis, researchers have found evidence of a causal relationship, suggesting that trust does indeed drive economic growth and not just correlate with it.”
This makes sense beyond the numbers: “Low trust levels can increase transaction costs … Additionally, low trust levels can discourage people from investing in public goods and infrastructure … as they do not trust that their money will be utilized effectively.”
These five broad observations, which punctuate Latin American society, accrued in an emergent, unplanned fashion. Many of the insights came as a surprise and caused me to overturn or update prior assumptions—or write from a blank slate. The same goes for this book: it grew in a zig-zag fashion over many years. As I worked on more essays and commentaries, the less time-sensitive ones made it in, and my picture of Latin America gradually evolved and became denser, sharper, and clearer.
Buy the Book
- Purchase the print version here.
- Become a YouTube member to access weekly audio chapter releases.
