Irony

After the visit from the Minnesota group, the three of us volunteers found ourselves "aprovechar"-ing the Monopoly board game that the group donated to youth/children´s efforts here. Monopoly, more than any other board game, is MY game (yes, Mom, even more than Trivial Pursuit). I´ve played it since I could count, practically. When my grandfather lived with us during my early teenage years, we played often, and I had the good fortune to be the first person to beat him at it in 40 years...never let that man get a Monopoly on the green properties. EVER. He will have a hotel on North Carolina Avenue before you can say "bankruptcy." Accordingly, I learned the good ole gam of free-wheeling, unadulterated capitalism from the best of them, and then beat him at it, the good ole American way.

Fast forward a decade. I´m 23 now, not 13, and living the life of a volunteer in Uruguay. I´m reading my way through Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina (Eduardo Galeano, who is uruguayo), a classic text on how, since 1492, Latin America has suffered the economic abuse of Europe and the United States. Enter a game of Monopoly. I played, predictably, like the cutthroat Monopoly player that I am. KD, too, is a fierce Monopoly player, and Doro´s every bit as ferocious as the two estadounidenses.

Pause. As I´m rolling the dice, the thought crosses my mind of how incredibly, almost disgustingly, stereotypically norteamericano this game is. This is EXACTLY what Galeano is writing about. The board is the world, its countries the players. We all roll the dice - some of us get lucky, and some of us don´t. The ones who do luck out use what they get to take everything they can from the other players. Sometimes, they win. Sometimes, things backfire because someone else has a good break. However, the truly great players know how to keep winning, at least most of the time - they don´t just wave off money when someone comes up short at Marvin Gardens. They make them pay. Thy make them sell off their money-making houses and hotels, then mortgage their properties, and even sell them if they have to. That´s how United Fruit ran Central America for decades, how the World Bank and IMF stay afloat.

Play. I roll, make my move, and think about how very funny it is that I´m playing Monopoly with a copy of The Open Veins of Latin America right next to me.