Below are seven quirky facts about countries in Central and South America. (Two of the entries were suggested by a Latin America Fanatico via Twitter).

1. Venezuela adopted its own time zone in 2007. The time the country adheres to is 4.5 hours behind GMT. Before the change in 2007, Venezuela was 4 hours behind GMT. Critics claim that Hugo Chavez implemented the change to put his country on a different time zone than the U.S. (thank you @meningioma).
2. A new constitution approved by Ecuador last year grants rights to nature. Under the constitution nature “has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.”
3. Costa Rica has no military. It was abolished in 1949.
4. It was not legal to obtain a divorce in Chile until 2004.
5. In Chile, which is home to one of the world’s most arid deserts, water rights are considered to be private property. (thank you @jillybean65).
6. Presidents in Mexico are limited to one six-year term. There is no vice president.
7. In Brazil, 90% of new cars have flex-fuel engines that can run on any mixture of petrol and ethanol.

Got a quirky fact about a Latin American country? Leave a comment.

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One summer when I was in law school I helped defend someone who was on the wrong end of one of the biggest drug busts in the history of Baltimore. If you’d read about “Doug” in the newspaper, he’d probably seem like a scary guy. He had a long arrest record, a serious drug abuse problem and was allegedly connected to the mob.

But as I got to know him during prison visits and down time in the court room, I was surprised at how likeable he was. Always ready with a funny story or self-depreciating joke, at the end of the day he seemed more like someone who was headed for happy hour instead of a jail cell.

It was probably Doug’s charm that helped set the stage for his alleged involvement in such a notable crime.

The same might be said about Thomas Kohnstamm, the author of Do Travel Writers Go to Hell. Like reading about the latest drug bust, when Kohnstamm’s book came out in 2008 I was more interested in the magnitude of his ethical lapses than why he committed them.

Riveting Read. But when I finally got around to reading his book while on vacation last week I found it nearly impossible to put down.

On paper, at least, Kohnstamm has credentials that most aspiring guidebook writers would covet. His master’s degree in Latin American Studies from Stanford, extensive travel experience and ability to speak Spanish and Portuguese must have made him the ideal candidate for Lonely Planet when it was looking to hire someone to update its guidebook for Northern Brazil. If all of this wasn’t enough, he had previously written a phrase book for Lonely Planet focusing on Costa Rican Spanish.

Besides his impressive resume, Kohnstamm seems like a fun person. He shows himself to be a good story teller who has a knack for making friends and striking romantic encounters with attractive women.

Guidebook Writer’s Sins. Unfortunately, these qualities do not make for a model guidebook writer. Kohnstamm admits, among other things, that he:

• accepted free meals and rooms from the restaurants and hotels he was reviewing, and
• wrote about towns he had never visited.

By Kohnstamm’s account, he had no other choice but to resort to these tactics because of Lonely Planet’s low pay and tight deadlines. He also says that he received almost no guidance from the editors in LP’s home office.

Like some other disaffected former LP writers, Kohnstamm attributes this to the publisher’s transformation from a small guidebook publisher that catered to backpackers to a corporate behemoth that aims to serve every segment of the travel market. This sentiment was echoed on Travelojos last year by Jens Porup–the former writer of LP’s Guide to Colombia. He said:

I used to believe in Lonely Planet. That was why I applied to work for them. I believed that Lonely Planet was about “telling it straight”. That, as an author, I would be allowed, even encouraged, to tell it like it is.

Then I started working for LP, and I realized this was not the case. It may have once been true twenty years ago. Now, all Lonely Planet cares about is making money.

The problem is simple: telling the truth hurts. The BBC (LP’s new owner) is interested in one thing only: maximizing profit. The way to do this is to minimize potential offense to any group, no matter how small.

The result? Guidebooks I don’t want to write, and guidebooks I don’t want to use.

While many of the criticisms Kohnstamm lodges against LP are probably well founded, he undermines his case by admitting to so many all-night parties, drinking binges, and romantic trysts. Working under LP’s constraints seems like it would be difficult for even the most professional travel writer. Kohnstamm shows that the task is all but impossible for someone who is mainly interested in having a good time.

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The anti-corruption group Transparency International annually publishes a “corruption perceptions index,” which measures the level of government corruption in each country.

In the latest index, which was released in November, the majority of the 180 countries analyzed scored below five on a scale from 0 (perceived to be highly corrupt) to 10 (perceived to have low levels of corruption).

The highest scorers in the 2009 CPI are New Zealand at 9.4, Denmark at 9.3, Singapore and Sweden tied at 9.2 and Switzerland at 9.0.

U.S. The United States was at 7.5, just below the the United Kingdom.

The countries in Latin America scored as follows:

• Chile 6.7
• Uruguay 6.7
• Puerto Rico 5.8
• Costa Rica 5.3
• Cuba 4.4
• Brazil 3.7
• Colombia 3.7
• Peru 3.7
• El Salvador 3.4
• Guatemala 3.4
• Panama 3.4
• Mexico 3.3
• Dominican Republic 3.0
• Argentina 2.9
• Bolivia 2.7
• Honduras 2.5
• Nicaragua 2.5
• Ecuador 2.2
• Paraguay 2.1
• Venezuela 1.9

I was surprised to see how poorly Argentina scored. For one thing, it has the second highest GDP in South America (behind Brazil).

A recent story in the New York Times about North Americans who are purchasing real estate in Nicaragua cited the country’s low CPI score. Referring “to incessant traffic shakedowns and bribery attempts performed on gringos by police patrolling the roads,” the story quoted one of the purchasers as saying “if you drive to Managua, it is very unlikely that you won’t be pulled over.”

How do these government corruption scores match up with your own experiences in these countries?

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What line you say? The arbitrary one established by CONAR—Brazil’s nongovernmental agency in charge of regulating advertisements. (Hat tip to the Wallet Pop blog for this post).

Brazil showed its prudish side earlier this year when it considered legislation to ban violent video games.

That issue seems pretty straightforward compared with the logic behind CONAR’s decision to investigate the propriety of the Paris Hilton beer ad.

The case stems from shots of a sultry Paris Hilton in a commercial for Devassa Bem Loura (very blond) beer. There can be no doubt that the beer ad is steamy.

But that also seems to be the case with beer ads featuring Brazilian women. It’s hard to see how these ads are any less provocative than the one featuring Hilton.

Bavarian Beer

Skol Beer

Costel Beer

When I think of Brazil, the phrase “blame it on Rio,” comes to mind. I picture rowdy crowds partying during carnival or the beaches populated by people with tiny bathing suits and a care-free attitude. Or–on a darker note–the country’s lawless favelas.

But the country appears to be a bit more straight laced when it comes to virtual interactions.

A bill is pending in Brazil’s Senate would make it a crime to make, import or distribute “offensive” video games in the country. Those convicted of an offense would be subject to one to three years in prison.

Brazil has already prohibited the purchase of several specific games and is second only to Australia in the number of titles banned, according to a list compiled by Wikipedia.

If the broader ban is enacted, Brazil will follow Venezuela, which in November put into effect its own prohibition against violent video games.

Games are not the only type of video content that Brazil has tried to shield its citizens from. In early 2007, a judge banned YouTube in Brazil in an attempt to block footage of Brazilian supermodel Daniela Cicarelli having sexual relations with her boyfriend, banker Renato Malzoni. It was Malzoni who filed the lawsuit the resulted in YouTube being blocked for a few days. The judge subsequently reversed his order, saying he intended only to block the video and not YouTube.

Photo by Life in LDN (Via Creative Commons)

Bloggers are intimately familiar with the negative and positive aspects of giving their work away for free. Most follow a business model in which they receive little or no compensation until they lure enough readers to attract sponsors and/or sell their work as a book or e-book.

With tens of millions of blogs out there, it’s certain that only a few bloggers will make it to this point.

Despite these long odds, many feel it’s worth the effort because attracting a readership no longer requires an agent, publisher, or other gatekeeper. One of the main benefits of cutting out the middle man and selling directly to your audience is that there is no question as to who owns the intellectual property you’ve created.

In his book Free, Chris Anderson explores the different ways that writers, artists, and businesses are successfully harnessing the power of just giving it away.

One of the most interesting examples involved Brazilian musician Gilberto Gil. Gil, a former political prisoner, served as Brazil’s Minister of Culture from 2003 to 2008. Upon taking the post, he championed the distribution of intellectual property rights.

In an interview last year, Gil spoke about how the Internet is empowering individuals by giving them the means to express themselves to the point where they can declare “I am the media.”

Despite these advances, Gil said that much of the world’s intellectual property laws remain outdated.  Gil’s attitude, the New York Times reported, was shaped by his own experiences:

Like many other musicians he signed contracts early in his career that essentially gave away publishing rights to the songs he wrote. But he waged a seven-year court battle to regain his rights, which ended recently with a favorable ruling that opens the door for other Brazilian artists to regain their rights as well.

One of Gil’s first actions after becoming Cultural Minister was to work with the Creative Commons movement, which seeks to offer an alternative to traditional copyright law.

The movement’s adherents believe that the “all rights reserved system” stifles creativity and ill suited to the Internet. Creative Commons “has created licenses that permit creators and consumers to copy, remix or sample a digital work of art, so long as the originator is properly credited,” the New York Times story said.

There’s no question that Roosh Vorek, the author of South American travelogue A Dead Bat in Paraguay, is a “player” when it comes to the ladies. Before self publishing a memoir about his travels in Brazil and other countries, Vorek wrote Bang—“a collection of simple but powerful techniques, moves, and lines that make it easier for the average 20-something man to be more successful with women.”

This helps explain why so much of a book about traveling in South America is devoted to techniques for picking up women.

While sometimes it seemed that Vorek was obsessively focused on his interactions with the opposite sex, I found it hard not to like him.

In many ways he reminds me of some of my friends several years ago. Always ready with a story about their last conquest or a funny anecdote about a time when they were in a public place with an upset stomach.

The friends I’m still in touch with have grown to respect women more, but they’re still good for a laugh.

Romantic Failures. To his credit, Vorek is just as quick to share his romantic failures as his successes.

That’s a good thing because otherwise he wouldn’t have much to write about. Ironically, the man who literally wrote the book on picking up women lays waste to the myth that Latinas are attracted to gringo tourists. Despite his best efforts, Vorek’s dry spell extends through Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru. Partly to blame are the crowded hostels he stays at and his near constant stomach problems.

It’s not until he begins to wind up his trip in Argentina and Brazil that he hits pay dirt.

In recounting his time in South America, Vorek effectively describes the insular approach that many young tourists take when visiting the continent. Budget-minded travelers from Canada, the U.S., Australia, or Europe typically stay in the same hostels and drink in the same bars.

Same People, Guidebooks. If they’ve had a chance encounter with one another in one country, chances are they’ll see each other again in a different nation because they’re all using the same guidebook.

Like former-Lonely Planet writer Jens Porup’s comments in a previous post, Vorek also had some negative things to say about Ecuador–where he is pick-pocketed–and Peru, which he says

took full advantage of Machu Picchu. There was a $40 admission charge, a luxury hotel built right outside the compound, and a monopoly on transportation to and from the ruins. It was their ATM cash machine, and while they had every right to profit from the ruins it was my right not to care for it.

He seems to enjoy his time in Rio, Brazil the most. But his positive vibe appears to be more about his romantic interest than the place.

In the end, it’s unclear if the highs and lows Vorek experienced during his travels changed his outlook about women or anything else. While it took him several months of built up angst before he set off to South America, he seemed to have no trouble deciding to leave. Given the physical maladies he suffered throughout his trip, it’s understandable. But I wonder if it made him more like the older version of my friends.

Disclosure: Travelojos received a free review copy of this book.

Photo by Celso Flores (Via Creative Commons)

As Rio prepares to host the 2012 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, much of the world is watching the picturesque city continue to struggle with gang and drug violence. 

A police helicopter was shot down with a high caliber weapon this weekend, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.

Much of the violence emanates from the favelas or slums where, according to the New York Times, about one third of the city’s six million residents live.

The squalid and violent conditions of these shantytowns has been the subject of movies (City of God) and, more recently, audio slide shows.

New Yorker Magazine published this slide show on Rio’s gang a couple of weeks ago. Last year, travel website World Hum ran this audio-slide show on favela tourism. The latter slide show is an example of how beautiful images and poverty are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

But unless you’re caught up in the drug trade, my guess is that chances are you can visit the city unscathed. If you think you might be up for it, check out this New York Times In Transit blog post. It has lots of great links to information about Rio.

Photo by Rodrigo Soldon (Via Creative Commons)

In his new book Bicycle Diaries, former Talking Head’s front man David Byrne writes about his perceptions of cities throughout the world as viewed from his bicycle. One of the cities he rides through and writes about is Buenos Aires.

Although I haven’t read it yet, the book is on my radar screen because one of Byrne’s central themes is the need for cities to be safer for bicycles and pedestrians.

As an avid runner whose had some close brushes with cars, I couldn’t agree more.

He has more musings about Latin America on his blog or “journal”–as he refers to it. For instance, he has an informative post about Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá (Colombia) who revolutionized the transportation and parks in that city. I wrote this post about Peñalosa earlier in this year.

But Byrne’s interests extend well beyond urban planning. Other topics that he opines about on his journal include his thoughts about:

• the paucity of art and music produced by Costa Rica. He compares the so-called Switzerland of Central America to its more artistic neighbors Panama and Nicaragua and wonders if one has to experience pain to produce art or music.
• Mexican newspaper reviews of one of his performances, which include quotes of him saying things he never actually said. “One paper quotes me as saying ‘Mexico, los quiero, mi desea es que esta noche sea magica’, translated loosely as, ‘I love Mexico… and my desire is that this night will be magic!’ Well, it goes on but I never said anything remotely like that.”
• racism based on skin color in Brazil as compared to the same type of racism in the U.S.