Running: Part II

As I said before, running let's you see experience things up close in personal ways.  In San Pedro, that means walls, gates, and barbed wire.  Not one single house along my routes, aside from the poor ones just past the river is without a wall and gate.  My house is relatively exposed; see through iron gate, 10 foot walls, and no security guard.  The nicest houses have 15 foot walls, solid metal gates, and maybe a security guard sitting out by the road with a shotgun.  Some of the really nice ones even have a small guard "tower" in a corner above the wall.  

This isn't where it stops.  Some of the neighborhoods, or "colonias" as they are called here, have gates / checkpoints.  This consists of metal pole crossing the road, manned by two or three guards.  We have one just outside of our offices.  Each day I'm waved in without any fanfare but the gate locks after 6.  After then the whole neighborhood can only leave through the one gate that is open all night. 

It's slightly surreal to run through these mini-canyons of cement.  You can look through some of the iron gates as you go past but others allow only a slit between two metal, sliding doors.  I think that it's important to recognize that this is the cost of grave inequality in a country.  

According to the UN, the ratio of the average income of the richest 10% of Hondurans to the poorest 10% is 59.  This number is shocking to me.  To provide some context: Haiti - 54, Mexico - 21, US - 16.  The map below from wikipedia is of the gini coefficients of countries worldwide.  The higher the coefficient, the more unequally income is distributed in the country.  Note the red, orange, and pink countries. 

Looking at these statistics, should we be surprised that people like Chavez and Morales are winning elections?