A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (15 page)

Still in his pajamas, he grabbed his laptop and went out to the elevator. Holding his open laptop with one hand, he touched the button. He rode down to the business center on the second floor and entered. It was, fortunately, empty.

While the computer searched for the wireless connection, he decided that he wouldn't tell Priya yet. For one thing, he didn't want to burn Lenka by just blabbing about her leak right away. He should use it only in the event of an emergency, and then he would have to use it in such a way that it wouldn't get back to Evo. It had to be handled carefully.

Still, there would be no harm in planting a seed of interest in Priya's mind now. Although Priya had claimed that she wanted valuable information, when he had handed her the exclusive that Evo was set to win the election, she hadn't been as impressed as she should have been. So he needed to cultivate within her the desire for something specific, and only once the desire had achieved the correct ardor would he indulge her appetite.

After his computer had connected to the hotel's server, he wrote Priya a short e-mail:

TO
:
[email protected]
FROM
:
[email protected]
SUBJECT
: evo's economic team

I might be able to find out the name of one of Evo's picks for his economic team in the coming days. If so, I'm hoping to meet with that person before anyone else does and glean something about the future administration's intentions regarding natural gas.

In the meantime, I continue my research into Santa Cruz.

—Gabriel

After he'd sent the e-mail, he Googled the name Luis Alberto Arce Catacora.

Catacora was a professor of economics at Bolivia's largest university, Universidad Mayor de San Andrés. He worked in the Central Bank of Bolivia in the 1980s but had been in academia for the past sixteen years. He was an ideal target; an academic might even be flattered to be interviewed by a freelance reporter.

Gabriel sat back, picked up his phone, and dialed the university.

A receptionist answered.

"Can you put me through to Professor Luis Alberto Arce Catacora?" he said.

The phone rang five times before the answering machine picked up. After the beep, Gabriel spoke, in Spanish. "Hello, Professor Catacora, my name is Gabriel Francisco de Boya, and I am a freelance journalist. I'm writing about Bolivia's changing economic situation, and I would love to talk to you." He gave his room number at the Hotel Gloria, along with his phone number.

Gabriel checked his e-mail. No reply yet from Priya. Then he opened his E-Trade account. The markets weren't open yet, but he checked the account anyway. It was a funny tic. Like opening the refrigerator to check that a new bottle of champagne was still there.

Since he had started working at Calloway, Gabriel, who had been living paycheck to paycheck before, had socked away $54,000 in the stock market. His initial deposit of $24,000 had all gone into a risky double-leveraged Latin American fund. If Latin American stocks had a bad day, Gabriel had twice as bad a day, and if Latin American stocks had a good day, he had twice as good a day. So far, he was up 12 percent on that buy.

He checked the account constantly. He stared at the balance as it fluctuated during trading hours, refreshing every few minutes when he was at his computer. He did some light research, but it wasn't really significant. Really, he didn't
do
anything. He rarely bought or sold shares. He just stared at the account. On days when his holdings grew by more than 2 percent he felt awash with euphoria and confidence. On days when it sank, he was crestfallen. It wasn't that much money, really. The account had grown by about $5,000 so far. It was worth $59,422 when the market opened that morning. At her base salary, reportedly $9 million, Priya made more than half that when she showed up for work. On the whole, Gabriel's account grew more than it shrank, but that was beside the point. The issue was how much he
cared
about the account. What, precisely, was he seeking when he refreshed his browser again and again on an inactive trading day? Other people were addicted to gambling, work, sex, but Gabriel was mesmerized by the fluctuations in his brokerage account. It was trite and it was a waste of time and yet somehow Gabriel suspected that he was not alone in this.

In Theravada Buddhism, the cause of all human suffering is identified, very succinctly, as
craving. Tanha,
it's called, and it gives rise to the parasitic defilements of greed, hatred, and delusion. But the root of our problem, the cause of all human misery, is
tanha:
our insatiable craving for
more.
Economists have come to a similar judgment of the human condition, although they don't levy any value judgments. To them, it simply is.

Still, the capitalist paradigm is predicated on an acceptance, if not a passionate embrace, of that craving. When Gabriel first went to Bolivia, young and callow, he wrote in his Moleskine, "The American dream has turned out to be just that: a
dream.
It is an impossible fantasy." How revelatory it felt! It had seemed sublime and easy, as if the diagnosis were also the cure.

After ten minutes gawking at his E-Trade account, Gabriel checked his e-mail again—still nothing from Priya. Then he resumed researching Santa Cruz Gas and its founder, Lloyd Pingree, who turned out, ironically enough, to be a devout Buddhist. While a student at Berkeley in the 1970s, Pingree had been convicted of selling marijuana. He dropped out of college to spend some time as a Buddhist monk in the Himalayas. He eventually moved back to Canada and began trading penny stocks on the mineral exchange in Vancouver, where he acquired for almost nothing a supposedly defunct gold mine that turned out to be bloated with gold. He used the capital to pole-vault into further ventures, including one at the Blind Elk mine in Wyoming. There, one of his cyanide-heap leaching pits seeped into local waters. By the time the EPA shut down the mine, in 1991, the damage was done. Blind Elk was declared one of the worst environmental disasters in American history. Pingree picked up the nickname Leachy Lloyd, and the EPA more or less chased him out of the United States.

There was, of course, no shortage of opportunities abroad. He made Singapore his new base. By the mid-1990s he was owner of the world's most prolific nickel mine, located in Canada. Directly or indirectly he had major excavations under way on every continent on the planet except Antarctica, which was protected, for the time being, by a shield of glacial ice.

A recent article pictured Pingree, like some over-the-top supervillain in a James Bond movie, in his personal helicopter hovering above a vast crater in Inner Mongolia, surveying a gash he'd recently cleaved into the planet. This despite the fact that a couple of decades before he'd been a few hundred miles away, clad in saffron robes, barefoot, his pale head shorn, begging door to door for alms. These days, up there in his helicopter, the man who still identified himself as a Buddhist gazed at the world laid out beneath him and pondered his options.

LUIS ALBERTO ARCE CATACORA was smallish, with tiny hands that he folded across a yellow legal pad on his desk. His wedding ring was scrawny and silver; his fingers effete. He looked reptilian—not metaphorically, or pejoratively, but literally lizardlike: angular features, broad mouth, eyes set far apart, a nose that did not protrude but simply seemed a part of his face's overall arrowhead structure. He wore a pale gray suit with a black shirt, oval eyeglasses. Gabriel didn't have to look under the desk to know he was wearing black loafers with tassels. His office, on the third floor of the Monoblock, was boxy and petite, proportionate to the man, really. A narrow window offered a view of some stained rooftops. It was midmorning. The office reeked of stale coffee and a heavy mélange of microwaved leftovers.

Catacora said, "Evo is the first rebel who stands a chance of survival here. This is, historically, an unfriendly place for rebels." Catacora was speaking in English, although Gabriel had initiated the conversation in Spanish. Catacora was understandably proud of his English. According to Gabriel's research, Catacora had earned his master's at the University of Warwick, in England, he must have been fluent when he matriculated.

"Great rebels come here to die," Catacora went on. "In 1781, Tupac Katari's heart was ripped from his chest and burned in a square up in El Alto. In 1908, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were shot to pieces near the salt flats in the south. Che Guevara was captured and executed, also in the south, in the 1960s. And those are just the very famous ones. We've had dozens of martyrs and rebels killed here in the past hundred years. The most famous Bolivian novelist, an outspoken dissenter named Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, was tortured and killed by Meza in the 1980s. They incinerated his corpse in a tin smelter near my brother's house."

"And Evo is different how?" Gabriel was trying to move it along. He had stopped in on his way down to interview the diplomat Foster Garnett. Catacora's rhetorical style reminded Gabriel of his mother's. Incredibly digressive, he killed time skillfully, methodically, with his words. Gabriel had been there half an hour and had enjoyed a very compelling survey of twentieth-century Bolivian history laid out in baroque megaparagraphs, but he had nothing remotely useful to show for his time. And his time was running out. He was supposed to meet Foster at the Tennis Club in ten minutes.

"Well, Evo is going to be in charge, for one thing," Catacora said. "None of the others were actually in a position of power. Evo will be president. Despite our rich tradition of rebellion, we have never managed to give a rebel real power. They have set fire to the presidential palace many times, but they have never inhabited the place."

"Isn't that just the thing? I mean, in the last ten years South America has elected its share of leftist reformers, but none of them have stood firm once they took power. It is easy to make grandiose promises when you're stumping, but governing a country like Bolivia doesn't leave you with a lot of viable options. So I guess my question is: what makes you think he'll hold his positions once confronted with the realities of the job?" The question was aimed at Catacora as well, of course, an attempt to gauge his appreciation of the practicalities of the position.

Catacora shook his head and readied himself to unfurl another monologue, which began, "He won't change because—"

"But what about the consequences?" Gabriel stopped him short. "If he does what he says he'll do, the World Bank and others could cut off aid; foreign investors could flee. If the foreign aid stops, what then?" He was pushing toward his point. Trying to modify the question until it contained enough complexity that it couldn't be answered with a digression about history. "Bolivia isn't rich enough, like Venezuela is, to reject that aid. If Evo allows the economy to sag, he'll be kicked out. Don't you agree?"

"That is one view. I think he will have the support of the South American countries, no matter what. Chavez, as you just pointed out, has lots of money."

"Well, not
that
much—not enough to replace the aid supplied by the World Bank."

Gabriel had downloaded and read Catacora's master's thesis that morning. Written in 1986, just after the debt crisis had concluded, it was a survey of the monetary policies of the various Latin American countries affected, but it focused mainly on Mexico. Catacora had also written an extensive addendum in 2003, which studied the monetary policies of countries that had gone through credit crises in the late 1990s, and it would probably have been more revealing, but Gabriel couldn't get his hands on it. He did find an abstract. From what he could tell, the first paper showed a somewhat standard devotion to Milton Friedman; the second demonstrated a sharp departure. Catacora's grasp of the issues had become more sophisticated. He had, by then, been present for several miserable new chapters in the country's history. He had seen Friedman's ideas backfire, spectacularly. He admired Chile's approach in the mid-1990s. The Chilean finance minister had instituted a temporary levy on short-term investments; foreign investors who committed to Chilean companies for more than a year paid no tax, but speculators had to pay heavy fees. In this way, Chile kept warm by globalization's hearth but had enough distance that it was not scorched when the embers lit its neighbors' more ostentatious houses.

It seemed to Gabriel that Catacora was an academic economist, most comfortable writing long papers on events that had already happened and analyzing other economists' failures under the generous illumination of hindsight. He didn't often make pronouncements on how to proceed. Like any historian, he preferred forensic analysis of the deceased to diagnosis of the living. Still, and despite his years in the academy, he very much inhabited the weasel-like mindset of a midlevel Third-World bureaucrat. He was insecure about his station. His allegiances lodged uncomfortably between a passionate sympathy for the poor—he had grown up in poverty, and had been one of the very few to make it out—and an appreciation of the rewards of upper-middle-class life.

Fortunately, he did not seem to find anything odd about Gabriel's line of questioning and earnestly endeavored to answer whatever questions came his way. Gabriel knew that as long as Catacora was still just a professor, his schedule would be wide open. So he decided not to push too hard that first day. He had to go to the Tennis Club, anyway, so he apologized for having to leave so soon.

He stood and shook the man's small hand. "May I come back and talk to you tomorrow?"

"I won't be here tomorrow. How about Friday?"

Gabriel nodded. "Noon? I'd like to take you to lunch—if you have time."

"I'd love that," he said, escorting Gabriel to the door.

After orchestrating the successful revolution in Cuba, Che Guevara wrote in his journal:

I've got a plan. If some day I have to carry the revolution to the continent, I will set myself up in the jungle at the frontier between Bolivia and Brazil. I know the spot pretty well because I was there as a doctor From there it is possible to put pressure on three or four countries and, by taking advantage of the frontiers and the forests, you can work things so as never to be caught.