Latineos - Latin America, Caribbean, arts, culture

After years of production and extraction, owning farms and plantations across the continent, Starbucks are increasingly breaking into the commercial side of their business in the high streets and city centres of Latin America. Lima and Buenos Aires are those I’ve personally come across but a quick Google search reveals stores have popped up in Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile and Brazil. More are on the way, and not without difficulty—a store in Cusco will follow McDonald’s and KFC’s lead and open on the main Plaza de Armas to meet the frappuccino needs of the gamut of tourists en route to Machu Picchu. It’ll do so amidst fierce public protests and after much consultation with (and, if you ask the suspicious opinion of some locals, extra economic incentive for) the Catholic Church, who are landlords of all the property on the main city square.

Go into one of Starbucks’ stores on the continent and you’ll notice the identikit décor, the ever-present cod-Italian menu jargon, the same laid-back music, the baristas’ precisely casual uniforms, the prices comparable from Manhattan to Miraflores, Moorgate to the microcentro. Minute differences like a Dulce de Leche Latte in Argentina (a genuflection to that omnipresent caramel flavoured condensed milk type stuff), a taciturn security guard, or the chain’s less calorie-anal approach outside of the US, are only noteworthy for their rarity.

But there is a small difference that should not be underestimated. Take, for example, a store in New York serving Jamaican, Peruvian, and Bolivian blends. Here, the fair trade ethics of Starbucks are expounded relentlessly. Ethical projects, like say: building schools; drilling water wells; helping worker’s co-operatives; are publicised with great fanfare. When you go in for a cup of coffee—in the words of Starbucks themselves—‘it’s not just what you are buying, it’s what you are buying into’. By partaking in this consumerist act you are not simply purchasing and imbibing a quantity of steaming black caffeinated liquid, you are “buying into” those anti-consumerist projects—helping school kids, supporting local communities and so on—which are designed to tackle the vagaries of global consumerism and which, according to Slavoj Žižek, used to be separate projects before the advent of ‘cultural capitalism’ in 1968 . It is, Žižek claims, a ‘semantic burden’, ‘cultural capitalism at its purest’, where ‘you buy your redemption from only being a consumerist’. Leaving aside the psychoanalytical issue as to whether we really “buy” this in our minds, a materialist will note that instead of really and truly solving the problems that arise from the inequalities which this altruistic impulse seeks to alleviate, the structures of uneven development are merely strengthened (even if there is an actual, real-world benefit for those receiving the charity funded through Starbucks).

[Žižek evidently did his research by buying Starbucks coffee, so in the spirit of scholarly investigation, I hope you’ll excuse the undue amount time as well as Soles, Dollars and Pesos I’ve spent in them. It seems that I too may be “buying my redemption” by writing this article after the act of consumption.]

Yet, visit Starbucks in the gentrified Parque Kennedy area in Lima or Ave. Florida in Buenos Aires and you’ll note how the geographical and social referents are not an amalgam of an American hackneyed Italian café style with Caribbean and Latin American sourcing—but wholly European and, of course, North American. What you’re offered is ‘Verona Blend’, ‘Italian Roast’, and (weirdly as a filter blend of the day) ‘Espresso Blend’. No mention of third-world poverty alleviation projects. No heavy emphasis on fair trade. No celebration of Andean farmers and their tasty beans. Considering the alarming proximity to terrible levels of poverty and degradation it seems peculiar that no mention is made of helping the farmers and communities Considering the alarming proximity to terrible levels of poverty and degradation it seems peculiar that no mention is made of helping the farmers and communities not too far from the borders of the city.

There is no grand mission set out for the consumer to follow and redeem themselves ‘from only being a consumerist’. The intrinsic guilt over the inequalities of wealth between the British, American, Canadian consumers and the Peruvian, Bolivian, Columbian producers, is utilised ruthlessly by Starbucks in those first-world nations but not so in those producing countries. This is an admission of guilt from Starbucks. Exploitation and the extraction of wealth will not be removed by Starbucks tempering the excesses of their trade through charitable projects. Well intentioned, relatively beneficial, they may be. However, their primary focus—due to the logic of capital—is to their shareholders, not to the farmers. To respond to this their marketing is geared towards the taste of the Old World. By buying Starbucks you are stepping into an enclave of the colonial heartland, by paying four times the amount as you otherwise would for a coffee you are, for a moment, European bourgeoisie. It is a strange evocation of imperial class structures brought into a particularly present globalised café lifestyle, a resurrected nostalgia that masks a very current economic neo-imperialism.

It is a great irony that in so many coffee-producing countries you have some of the world’s finest exports—grown mostly on land owned by Starbucks and other North American and Western European conglomerates—yet finding a decent cup is a tough job. Any local, tourist, or traveller will notice this when in, for example, Peru or Bolivia, they order a coffee (in anywhere apart from very few cafes) and are asked whether they like their Nescafe on its own, with sugar, or con leche.

There are a few material factors behind this. One has to do with the fact that the high-quality, high-value, and mass-produced beans are exported for sale in commodities markets (and bought up by Starbucks and the like) before they even have a chance to touch the inside of a local’s coffee mug. Other farmers can cobble together small scale co-ops to put out a highly inconsistent product that could be a mix of beans grown at massively difference altitudes for low-level local sale or to export. Or, a far rarer option on a much smaller scale, a farmer can sell to specialist coffee suppliers.

I know that there are more pressing concerns for those nations than the quality of their coffee. But when Starbucks are posting profits in excess of $200 million  while many in these countries live in dire poverty that cup of steaming black liquid really is of great concern.