Miami made me believe in Latin America

The capital of scams and Latin American excellence

When I first moved to Miami, my neighbor ended up being a gringo drug dealer who always had an entourage of a dozen girls at his smoke-filled home. I thought I'd have to suffer the consequences of renting without pre-checking, but in less than three months, he was evicted for breaking his contract.

Contracts, courts, laws. They make Miami so great, despite having so much of the worst of Latin America.

It's such a beautiful place. Creative architecture fuses with nature in a kind of Hispanic Singaporean heatstroke dream, new buildings grow every day, while crime is super low (safer than LA) in a Spanish-speaking city where a flock of exotic cars keeps your childlike ambition alive.

Never mind that those cars are mostly rentals in the U.S. capital of scams and insurance fraud.

In Miami, everybody drives or takes an Uber. Few walk. That didn't stop the city from building three passenger train systems. One of them is the fastest private long-distance railway in America (Brightline), connecting Miami to Orlando.

It has two seasons: From October to March, it's full of wealthy people escaping winter. From April to September, the atmosphere will either melt your eyeballs or drown you in a hurricane.

Mediocrity here is unpredictable. In the same block, the most authentic and delicious restaurant will be side by side with a tourist trap demanding 30% tips, while serving well-plated shopping mall food. Prices in Miami don't correlate with quality.

It's a bunch of paradoxes living together in a metro area whose economy achieves more per year ($533B) than the entire countries of Chile ($330B) or Colombia ($418B). Florida, its state, has an economy almost as big as Mexico.

It feels like an interdimensional Colombian neighborhood, surrounded by Argentine suburbia with a Cuban/Venezuelan enclave. One where people trust the system and enjoy the feeling of fairness and the reward of hard work.

It has to be the rule of law, right? What else is different?

It's easy to argue that everything started with real estate money laundering coming from narcos in the 80s. But isn't that true of our own Latin American towns as well? How come they aren't this rich?

The politicians, businesspeople, workers, and customers are all the same Latin Americans you find in Bogotá, Santiago or CDMX. Why do they make more money here?

There's so much to dislike about the U.S. system. Americans are lonely, scared about going bankrupt for an illness, struggling against crazy rents in a culture where every interaction is a monetary transaction.

But I have to admire the evidence of what Latin America could be, expressed in the reality of Miami.

The cultures of our countries are so much richer, our cities more interesting, our people more fun. Imagine what we could achieve if we, collectively, decided to enforce a high-trust and respect for contracts, courts and laws.

If Miami, a single city, amidst a Caribbean swamp, was able to build this behemoth of an economy with it, imagine the dream of what the Latin American continent could be.