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Good Advice & Bad Advice - The International Fugitive, a fairly well known book on disappearing by Kenn Abaygo, is said to 'draw on his more than 20 years of experience slinking undetected through the world's great cities.' One would think that in 20 years an astute individual, who claims to be an authority on disappearing would learn that Costa Rica is more or less useless as a place to disappear, as are most of the other ports of call that Abaygo mentions. Abaygo presents himself as someone who wanders around areas where there are grenade launchers, thermal imaging visual apparatus, dressed in battle camouflage. What utter bullshit. It's the sort of pap that appeals to America's far right radicals who would love nothing more than to machine-gun somebody to justify their lack of political lucidly. No one with a brain carries a gun.
If you need a gun to get by you're already dead. Does Prime Minister Tony
Blair carry a gun? Does Bill Gates carry a gun? Does U.S. Secretary
of State Colin Powell, a former Military General, carry a gun? The
answer is no. Maybe these people don't watch Chuck Norris movies.
Or maybe they are too smart to need a gun. If you need protection
there are no end of people who are trained and capable of protecting you.
They are the type of people who get shot while smarter people are getting
away. Smart people don't carry guns, grunts carry guns and a grunt
is usually, if not always, a well designed and expendable idiot.
The idea of carrying a gun and being a James Bond type appeals to the lowest
possible type of intellect. My best advice for people who draw their
sense of life from the cinema is to stay in America where they won't disturb
anyone who thinks. Carry a brain in place of a gun, it will get you
a lot further. In the places I've been a gun won't get you much other
than a bullet in the head or jail cell. You can think your way out
of more places than a gun can help you shoot your way out of. The
best use for a gun for those false men with a Wild Bill Hickok cinema-based
mentality is to use the gun to commit suicide before they get raped.
Costa Rica has over 150 airports, most of them private. Venezuela has over 250 airports, Ecuador over 180. While a professional like Abaygo is traveling by dugout canoe, complete with mosquito repellent, his Uzi semiautomatic, thermal imaging visual apparatus, dressed in stylish Hollywood camouflage; you and I can fly to the same destination with a couple of Cuban cigars, a bottle or two of Pilsner, our suntan lotion and a good book. .
I don't wish to single out Abaygo, as most of the books on disappearing are worthless, and I've read them all. What I find infuriating is when Abaygo makes statements like, "...Most countries require you to give up your American citizenship if you want to become a citizen of their country." That's news to me. I don't know of any country that makes that requirement. Dual citizenship is almost universal. Many of the books I've read also discuss false ID. It's very easy to get real ID, why would anyone want false ID? We'll deal with ID and citizenship in a future article. As we've seen, getting from one country to another is rather simple and there is no need to complicate it. Abaygo's idea of using a boat is a great idea and in cases where air travel is not an option, using a boat is always worth considering. The border checkpoints for auto-traffic are usually much more annoyingly tedious than those of the harbor master. In much of latin America it is fairly simple to cross any border without passing a checkpoint in any regard, but only if you speak Spanish or Portuguese. Wandering around latin American backwaters without a command of the local language is a bad idea. Going from country to country by boat is therefore a better option. So we'll deal with boat travel in a future article. Can You Make A Living In Cartagena? My assumption is that the internet allows anyone with half a brain to make a living from anywhere they can log on. We'll, it's not really that simple, but it's as simple or simpler than trying to open a business on Main Street. A good webmaster can make a living building websites for others in almost any location, and if the idea is well planned, being a webmaster can be made into a mobile profession. What we need to make it right, is a place to keep our own websites, i.e. our own server. With our own server, each of our website clients becomes a client for our hosting service. With a critical mass of websites hosted on your server you have residual income coming in 24 hours a day seven days a week. example: If you have created 150 websites, and 100 of them are hosted with you on your private server, and if you receive $10 profit per hosted website per month you have a residual income of $1,000 per month. A friend of mine once designed a mobile 'sign painting' shop in the back of his camper on a truck. He wandered around the western US stopping in small towns and getting jobs painting signs. He stayed near the coast so he could spend all of his free time surfing. He always made a living, spent his time living that sort of lifestyle he preferred and never worried about tomorrow. If the surf was down he painted signs, if the surf was up he surfed. He also did pin-striping on cars, which was very popular at the time. He ultimately went to Hawaii and started a business making surf boards and painting his own wood-carvings which he sold to tourists. I knew him since high school, and I never knew him to have a legitimate job in his life. I cannot recall ever seeing him broke. Being a mobile webmaster is a modern version of what my old buddy Joel used to do. You can provide many add-on services to your main service. With a laptop, a roving internet connection and some services already in place you have a business you can work from almost any location worldwide. It is imperative to learn any foreign language that is required of your location. It should go without saying that it is crucial to really be good at building websites. EscapeArtist.com is going to add some tools to help others make a living worldwide in the coming year. Building websites will be among them. While designing websites is mentioned only as example, I know from experience that there is a shortage of qualified & talented webmasters in much of latin America, if not the world. I will only mention one book in the resources about building websites. It's a $3 book. If you are going to build websites, read it, if you have a website, read it. I could have written the book myself I agree with it so totally... It's called The Big Red Fez. I have associates in Panama who are constantly crying for a good webmaster. I don't know how long it would take someone to become a good webmaster, there are important things that most so-called webmasters don't know, and I include myself. I am a rank amateur as a webmaster. I've often considered taking the time to learn how to really create high quality design websites, but I've never had the time to take the courses required. I have to assume that anyone could learn to be a good webmaster in about a year. Finding a qualified place to learn is the question. Obviously a couple of days spent searching the web will supply you with some direction as to where and how to learn the art. Living In Cartagena & Other Refuges - Let's go back to the subject of Cartagena and discuss living there, or in other refuges around the world. Go
To Page Three of: "How To Disappear In Six Easy Lessons" ~
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See
Overseas
Judicial Information by Country & Subject - In
the resource section at the end of this article. Find out what your rights
are as an American Abroad - What kind of assistance can you get? Not just
what can they do to you, but also what can they do to protect you?
(Can the country you go to protect you from the country you've left?
Other complicated issues - 