IKN

I don’t accept anonymous comments. Said it before and I say it again. So when they come (more often than you’d imagine) I just hit the reject button. But the one that just came in this morning is so annoying, just so asinine that it’s not getting away that easily. Here it is, in its glorious entirety:

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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post “Another thought on Peru’s “growth” in 2009“:

You guys follow the usual USA campaign trying to highlight all the negative you can about Latin America, so you make investments run away from our countries, keeping them poor and trying to ruin them so they can control them.

For instance, there was absolutely no coverage about the visit of George Bush to Peru during the APEC meeting on CNN; following the policy of not showing that good or important things can happen in this side of the world as well, and if they do, just ignore them or highlight the negative side.

Nice try, but we don’t buy your stuff.

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I mean, where do you start with this? I live in South America. I’ve lived here for well over a decade. My wife is from here. My kids have single nationality. I’m an equities analyst. I put food on the plates of my family by talking LatAm business. Why on earth do you think that I don’t want this region to develop and improve?

Anyone who bothers to read this blog for more than a day will know that I cheerlead the good guys. But why should we down here accept the samo samo gringo attitude of “they should be thankful for our investments”? If you think this blog is the ‘usual USA campaign’ you need to get out more.

We (yeah, “we”, and no apologies for being born somewhere else) down here want Chinese investment in mining. We want the US investment in agriculture. We want the Russian investment in hydrocarbons. But we’ve also proved conclusively that we don’t want the Bechtel style of usury water privatization in Bolivia. We don’t want the Siemen’s corruption and bribery techniques. We don’t want the Chinese investment in mining that leads to slave labour. We don’t want Texaco/Chevron deliberately spilling oil into a jungle region as it’s the easiest way of making roads passable to trucks.

Regional investment should look to make a profit. Goes without saying. But the days of coming here, bribing politicos for the lucrative contract, extracting oil and giving local governments $3/bbl are now over. Or at least they will be if anonymous and others like him ever get an education. Nowadays words like justice, transparency, equity, fairness, win-win etc should be an integral part of doing business in Latin America.

If this blog has one thing to say about doing business in the region, it’s all this. Nobody from gringo origins can have more respect for Latin America than this humble correspondent, though I’m glad to say that many come equal on this score. But the bottom line is simple; the world is welcome to do deals and invest in Latin America, and all you need to do to prove this is ask any reasonable Latino. But not at any price. Not any more. Come and play fair and you’re welcome. Come to screw us over and you can crawl back to the sewer you came from right now.

You, anonymous, are a prize dumbass.