Like many people, journalist and documentary filmmaker Sean Langan had heard about globalisation
He'd seen the anti-globalisation riots and protests on television, but apart from some vague notion that Nike, mobile phones and a Big Mac were all somehow involved, he wasn't really sure what globalisation really meant. So he travelled from one end of Latin America to the other, to find out what it means for the people there, and, more importantly, to see for himself what impact it's had on their lives. Travels of a Gringo, a three-part series for Channel 4, follows Sean on his long journey of discovery. Part one begins in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina. Sean arrived in the city last year, just a few months after the country was declared bankrupt by the international community. Buenos Aires looks like Rome on the surface, but is now a city living without credit, cash or banks. Sean tries to find out what went wrong. He tracks down officials from the IMF as they return from a shopping trip and asks how much they paid for their hats. He sets off in the footsteps of Che Guevara, meets children who play Russian roulette and ends up in Bolivia, where tin miners are striking against their British-owned company. In Episode Two Sean Langan arrives in La Paz, the capital of Bolivia, during the middle of a presidential election, Langan immediately finds himself hanging out with coca-chewing politicians and anti-gringo protestors. Next stop is Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, where the president has recently survived an attempted coup welcomed by George Bush and the protestors are even more angry and even more anti-gringo. Following various protests and shoot-outs, a full-scale riot breaks out. Sean concludes his journey from one end of Latin America to the other in an attempt to discover the true impact of globalisation on ordinary people's lives. At a banana plantation in Honduras, Sean meets some of the workers and witnesses at first hand their working and living conditions. With globalisation, cheap labour has become as vital a resource as bananas and, in Central America, multinational companies have established factories specifically to exploit the cheap labour. The series ends on the Mexican-US border, where Sean meets a range of people about to risk their lives crossing illegally into the States; all trying to escape the poverty of Latin America - a poverty they believe is aggravated by the very country to which they are running.
