This crap has been happening all over South America for too many years. The last time I flew through Lima, I literally thought we were going to have a stopover in Tokyo. I asked the azafata at the Aerolineas Argentinas desk, "This IS the flight to Buenos Aires, correct? Really?" Get on any flight to Peru and half the people on the plane will be speaking Japanese. They own the country. Holy shiat, they even elected a guy named Fujimori, ruled for like a DECADE when I was in South America. He was like Margaret Thatcher.

Almost everybody I knew in Chile in the 90s is now part of the Chilean Indigenous Movement. They want to restore lands to the displaced, especially the Mapuches in Southern Chile. It kinda started when the music group Illapu was allowed back into the country after being exiled by Pinochet. Really interesting history. I don't think there's a book. Maybe I can find a publisher. Anyways... The Indigenous Movement really took off in the 90s, and Chileans became very European about recycling, dams, and how they WRECK ecosystems, etc. It's all very annoying for a person trying to get a job. But holy crap... MY friends are the leading generation of a movement of fairness. It's all very inspiring.

One of my best friends grew up in a really bad part of Santiago in the 80s. Just imagine the lifestyle. But as teenagers, I loved him because he was like a New-Yorker. He was polite, but sharp. We were in a cab once in Osorno, Chile, and he tells the cab driver, "Look, I'm going to talk to you like a Santiaguino. I know this craphole and I don't want to 'see the sights,' so let's just skip this shiat and get us to where I told you we need to go."

He and his whole generation (my generation) is part of the hippy indigenous rights movement in South America. There are a lot of them, and they believe in social justice, especially the ones from my generation who grew up under a dictatorship. (Do yourself a favor and buy some iTunes stuff from Illapu and Los Prisioneros. You won't be sorry.) That being said, Ecuador needs to get their shiat together. First of all, it took them like 7 wars to lose half their territory. I'm surprised they still have access to the ocean. Second, they own the Galapagos. How they didn't lose those islands to some sort of turtle insurrection, I'm shocked. They really need to re-focus on tourism, because EVERYWHERE in South America is beautiful. God, It's just beautiful.

Go there. Be there. Contribute to the economy, so they don't have to sell it to China. Seriously.