Personal Account of Journalist or Professor in Central or South America

Wild Chocolate

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The Book of the Week is “Wild Chocolate, Across the Americas in Search of Cacao’s Soul” by Rowan Jacobsen, published in 2024. in this wordy, redundant volume, the author described in great detail, the single-digits 2000’s trend:

In fragmented and complex ways, individuals and families have become the stewards of cacao trees and in environmentally friendly ways, have harvested their beans that are made into high-quality, expensive chocolate sold worldwide. The trend has been comparable to that of microbreweries of the 1990’s. The takeaway was that no one can corner the cacao-bean market anymore.

The author listed just a few different source-countries of cacao trees– Belize, Guatemala, Trinidad, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, Ghana, and Ivory Coast. He also described just a few of the risks and dangers associated with the numerous steps of the complicated process of how chocolate products are made. Among them:

lack of access to cacao trees (when the kingpins of the cocaine trade are occupying the remote areas of the Amazon rain forest, or Mexico, where the trees grow);
the flooding of a river around the cacao trees;
lack of fermentation and drying sheds to accommodate the amount of beans harvested;
ruination of an entire batch of beans due to mishaps in connection with food chemistry; and
problems caused by animals’ (electric eels, anacondas, crocodiles, and tucanderas, etc.) sharing the same habitat as the cacao trees.

The author visited the Bolivian Amazon rain forest where the Indigenous tribes do slash-and-burn agriculture, growing rice and herding cattle. By the 1990’s, urbanites were deforesting the region for farming. In 1991, Volker Lehmann, a member of the German Volunteer Service (the equivalent of America’s Peace Corps) sought to re-forest the region via the wild cacao tree. He had to talk to the Chiname tribe.

In June 1991 in Bolivia, the Drug Enforcement Administration of the United States raided the cocaine labs in Santa Ana de Yucuma, but the cocaine trade continued, because growing coca plants (and poppies for the heroin trade) was still more lucrative than the alternative crops of bananas, pineapple or hearts of palm, offered by the German Volunteer Service.

Read the book to learn much more about how much time, effort and expense goes into making chocolate products.

ENDNOTE: The author interchangeably used the terms “jungle” and “rainforest” but they are different.

Unforgetting – BONUS POST

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The Bonus Book of the Week is “Unforgetting, A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas” by Robert Lovato, published in 2020. El Salvadorans are more populous in Los Angeles than any other major American city. The author wrote about his own family’s involvement in the politics, economics and violence that have given rise to the stereotypes surrounding El Salvador in recent decades.

It took the author decades to get his father (Ramon, born in 1922) to describe the traumas he experienced throughout his life, and especially as a nine-year old at the start of a revolution of Salvadorans of indigenous descent. Ramon’s parents weren’t married; plus he was of indigenous descent, so he was cursed by society at birth. Ramon’s father too, was illegitimate, but inherited a coffee-bean plantation, which made him a wealthy man, until the market crashed in summer 1931. However, Ramon was denied his family’s riches. He lived in a shack with his mother. A few valuable family connections did allow him to move to the United States for a better life.

Born in 1963, the author grew up in the San Francisco Bay area. As a teenager, he rebelled against his father’s lies, beatings and organized-crime dealings. He began hanging out with a drinking, drugging, petty-crime-committing crowd. But learning more about his family’s and homeland’s histories helped him to better understand his own and his father’s actions and failings. In his early twenties, the author found religion.

El Salvador was just one of many countries whose tribal, religious and political conflicts became American-taxpayer-funded military quagmires that started in the second half of the twentieth century; schemes gone awry initially backed by one or another U.S. president have persisted ever since. Pursuant to declassified documents and insiders– the CIA, other intelligence services and special-forces have engaged in top-secret international adventures in Korea, Guatemala, Cuba, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, etc., etc., etc.

The Reagan Era ushered in secret CIA-training of “counter-insurgency” techniques (translation: the atrocities of a dirty little war on par with Argentina’s) among young males fighting in El Salvador, with the ostensible goal of making the world safe for American-style democracy. Hilarity did not ensue. The usual hypocrisy, cover-ups, historical revisionism, and far-reaching devastation of war later on, did.

There occurred not just destruction, deaths, the trauma of fighting, family decimation, but also unspeakable war crimes such as massacres (via firing squads, even in a church(!)) of indigenous Salvadorans and rapes of females of all ages, in large numbers. “Despite the horrific civil war ravaging El Salvador [that began in 1980] the Reagan administration denied 97 percent of all Salvadoran asylum claims.”

The author listed just a few of the times and locations of mass killings, including:

December 1981, El Junquillo

August 1982, El Calabazo

February 1983, Las Hojas

Read the book to learn about war’s estimated 1980’s death toll, the fate of its perpetrators, how families tried to get more details on the fate of their disappeared loved ones, what happened in November 1989 (hint: there was a backlash in which the author played a role), and much more about why the author thought it was so important to investigate El Salvador’s past, rather than forget all that trauma.

In Bolivia

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The Book of the Week is “In Bolivia, the Adventurous Odyssey Through the Americas’ Least-Known Nation” by Eric Lawlor, published in 1989. In the late 1980’s, the author visited various parts of Bolivia, speaking with natives and tourists to learn how the culture evolved, based on its history.

There was labor unrest in the Bolivian mining industry in 1919, 1922, 1927, 1942 and 1967. Over the years, thousands of unarmed, protesting miners of tin or silver died when fired on by the military. In the 1942 confrontation, the government blamed the deaths on Communist agitators, and later, Nazis. The government sociopathically crushed the miners’ revolts every time.

The author visited Santa Cruz, which put out such products as oil, cotton, sugar, rice and coffee. Its major industry was black-market cocaine, sold by small-time dealers. They were left alone because the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) of the United States was interested in catching only kingpin Roberto Suarez. After having made about half a billion dollars a year– some from supplying America with about one third of its illegal cocaine– he was caught in July 1988.

Prior to that, there was a cocaine gravy train. Pilots made lots of money flying the drug to Miami. Even teenage boys made a living, stomping barefoot on kerosene-marinated coca leaves to process them. They were rumored to develop skin cancer. The author was offered but declined a job drug-running, from two different men he’d just met. He bought a small amount of cocaine, and was advised to stash it in his underpants. He was actually fortunate that it was stolen from its hiding place in his hotel room, because shortly afterwards, the DEA came around and interrogated him.

More and more farmers were finding the growing of coca more lucrative than food crops. The Bolivian government warned the drug lords in advance that American law enforcement and the Bolivian army were going to raid their labs. They fled to Panama. Another way America made a token gesture of cracking down on the cocaine industry was to threaten to withhold about $60 million dollars of annual aid. Ordinary Bolivians were angry at U.S president Reagan for crashing their economy and being a hypocrite. They said, “We’ll stop exporting cocaine when he stops exporting weapons.”

The author visited a region in Bolivia called La Loma. The tribe who lived there depended on a river for their very simple lifestyle. There was plenty of fish, and they were happy. The people in Tarija– near the border of Argentina– were unhappy. For, they went on strike to demand that the government build the power plant it had promised them six months prior. The author interviewed a Bolivian army soldier who told him the country should be ruled by the military. The military was nonpartisan, and its goal was to do only what was best for the country, not what was best for the politicians. If it achieved its goal of improving the economy, however, the military budget would grow with it.

The author was trapped in Tarija for weeks. He couldn’t leave by bus, train or plane, and there were guarded barricades all around the city. He spoke with a man who had fought in the Bolivian war with the Paraguayans over disputed territory in the Chaco in 1932. Many more Bolivians died of dehydration, starvation and disease, than from their wounds.

The Bolivians fought incompetently, lacking training and resources. The war ended in 1935, due to attrition on both sides. Bolivians’ emotional turmoil was comparable to that of Americans’ after Vietnam and Watergate. Trust had been broken between the Bolivian people and their leaders. So revolution (during which ninety thousand people died) ensued in 1952. But the aforementioned interviewee thought Bolivians were worse off after the revolution.

Some changes were made: nationalization of the tin mines, land reform, and Indians got the vote. But Bolivia went bankrupt in 1956. The United States instituted a stabilization program there. The military led the country again until 1985. The takeaway from Bolivia’s governments through the decades, is that dictators are largely similar the world over:

“He had wealth and status… He produced nothing and provided no leadership. He was not very smart and had few skills… his contempt for his countrymen and his belief in his own superiority was not typical of what is normally considered moral.”

Read the book to learn a smattering about Bolivia’s history of missionaries, violent occurrences, and mindset over the last several centuries.