Halfway down the Danube

A random thought about Mexico

It's really random, because I've never been to Mexico.

Still: I ran across this link over at Randy McDonald's Livejournal.  It suggests that Mexico, having gone through the demographic transition, might be headed for a Spanish or Italian-style demographic collapse.  That led me to google up the time series on Mexico's Total Fertility Rate (births per woman):

An incident from my bachelor days

This was inspired by a recent post over at Randy McDonald's blog.  Randy linked to an article mentioning the 100th anniversary of the arrival of Japanese immigrants in Brazil.  That was back in the days when Japan was a poor, developing country that was exporting immigrants because it had too many people.  (A hundred years, hey?   My grandfather was about Alan's age then.  There are people alive today who remember it.)   And today there are something more than a million ethnic Japanese in Brazil.

This brought me back to my days on Saipan, in the Marianas Islands.  I don't talk about the Marianas much on this blog.  Well, I lived there for seven years in the 1990s, and it was pretty interesting.  It's... gulp... ten years since I left.  Still keep in touch with friends, but yeah, Saipan was a while ago. 

But anyway: back when I lived in the Marianas, I was sitting at the beach one day with some friends.  Now, like most beaches on Saipan, this one had several hundred tourists and maybe half a dozen locals: us.

In those days the tourists were all Japanese.  (I understand that today it's more a mix, with lots of Koreans and Taiwanese and even some mainland Chinese too.)  The Japanese tourists were pretty much of a piece.  Men wore baggy shorts.  Women wore one-piece bathing suits with floral prints.  A few younger, more daring sorts might wear Speedos or two-pieces, but even these were pretty conservative.  People went down to the water, splashed a little, then sat on beach towels.

And then we saw this one girl.

North of south, or the economic consequences of Elliott Abrams

Salvaged from the WiP, or why I haven't been posting much...

Okay, here's the set-up. In 1903, the U.S. sponsored the independence of a mercantile breakaway region of Colombia in a strategically very intriguing location. The constitution of this new country permanently linked its new currency, the balboa, one to one with the dollar. In 1914, the Panama Canal was opened. Canal Zone policy did not allow sales to ships on credit. Banks in Panama filled the gap.

Jump-cut bone to space station here. Seventy years after, in a region whose major products were coffee, bananas, and death squads, Panama managed to seize this tiny bit of comparative advantage and leverage it into a national economy centered around financial services. Swiss-style bank accounts, generous corporate tax policies, and a major re-exporting hub, combined with the use of the U.S. dollar and the low inflation caused by the Balassa-Samuelson effect: all these things made Panama an attractive site for many types of business activity.

Small problem: Manuel Noriega. A scary guy, and I'm not talking about the acne. He was the chief of secret police for the charismatic leftist populist Chicago-influenced leader of Panama, General Omar Torrijos, and the guy who (in theory) was going to disable the Panama Canal if the 1977 treaty didn't go through; and after Torrijos's plane mysteriously crashed in 1981, Noriega quickly moved to consolidate power behind the scenes. Money laundering, drug smuggling, dogs and cats living together, mass kleptocracy. One of the cuter scams was that Noriega's associates ran the company responsible for security in the re-export zone. Guess how that worked.

Now, somehow Noriega had got on the bad side of Uncle Sugar. It's rather difficult to pin down the proximate cause, since the fellow had been messing with drugs and money since the 1970s, when he was heavy petting with the CIA, but whatever. Suffice it to say that by the late 1980s, Noriega had turned from "our bastard" to "liability" in the eyes of the Powers That Be. The change might even have been made in good faith.

Manuel Noriega was indicted in a Miami court on February 4, 1988. On March 3, 1988, all the U.S. accounts of the Banco Nacional de Panama were frozen. The Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, Elliott Abrams, gloated to the press about this neat idea, quipping like only an apparatchik can: "Noriega is hanging on by his fingertips. He'll be out of power in a week. Now we'll see who stole the strawberries." But it was a neat idea, if not very well thought through.