Mastercard announces plans to resume services in Syria for the first time in fifteen years, a small piece of news that opens an enormous window onto the history of the Syrian civil war, the weight of international sanctions, and what it means for a country to rebuild from nothing. Fletcher and Octavio explore what happened to Syria, why the world shut its doors, and whether this financial gesture is the beginning of something real.
Mastercard anuncia que planea reanudar servicios en Siria por primera vez en quince años, una noticia pequeña que abre una ventana enorme hacia la historia de la guerra civil siria, el peso de las sanciones internacionales y lo que significa para un país reconstruirse desde cero. Fletcher y Octavio exploran qué le pasó a Siria, por qué el mundo le cerró las puertas y si este gesto financiero es el principio de algo real.
6 essential C1-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| llevar + tiempo + gerundio | to have been doing something for a period of time (ongoing) | Siria lleva quince años sin acceso normalizado al sistema financiero internacional. |
| desmantelar | to dismantle, to take apart (often institutions or structures) | La desbaathificación desmanteló el estado iraquí de una forma que tardó décadas en repararse. |
| de facto | in practice, in reality (regardless of what is official or legal) | Hubo una dolarización informal de facto en Siria durante los años más duros de la guerra. |
| señalización | signaling (in economics, the act of conveying information through actions) | El regreso de Mastercard tiene un claro efecto de señalización para otros inversores internacionales. |
| hawala | an informal value transfer system used across the Arab world and South Asia, based on trust | Las remesas a través del sistema hawala fueron vitales para millones de familias sirias durante el conflicto. |
| diáspora | diaspora; a community of people living outside their ancestral homeland | Hay más sirios en la diáspora que viviendo dentro de Siria en este momento. |
Fifteen years is a long time to not be able to pay for anything.
Mastercard announced this week that it's preparing to resume services in Syria, and I keep staring at that sentence trying to process what it actually means.
Lo que significa es que durante quince años, Siria ha existido al margen del sistema financiero global.
What it means is that for fifteen years, Syria has existed outside the global financial system.
No hablo solo de tarjetas de crédito;
Not just credit cards;
hablo de la capacidad básica de cualquier país para participar en la economía internacional.
I mean the basic capacity of any country to participate in the international economy.
And this goes back to 2011, right, the sanctions that came in after the uprising.
Walk me through the sequence, because I want listeners to understand how a country ends up financially isolated like that.
Para entender las sanciones, primero hay que entender lo que Siria era antes.
To understand the sanctions, you first have to understand what Syria was before.
Siria lleva quince años sin acceso normalizado al sistema financiero, pero antes de eso era un país con una historia de miles de años, una clase media urbana, mercados que conectaban Oriente Medio con el Mediterráneo.
Syria has spent fifteen years without normalized access to the financial system, but before that it was a country with a history of thousands of years, an urban middle class, markets that connected the Middle East with the Mediterranean.
Damascus is genuinely one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on Earth.
When I was in Beirut in the nineties, we used to talk about Damascus the way you'd talk about somewhere that was slightly mythological, like it existed in a different register of history.
Exactamente.
Exactly.
Y esa ciudad, con ese peso histórico, cayó bajo la familia Assad en 1970, cuando Hafez al-Assad llegó al poder mediante un golpe de Estado.
And that city, with all that historical weight, fell under the Assad family in 1970, when Hafez al-Assad took power through a coup.
Lo que construyó no era simplemente una dictadura;
What he built wasn't simply a dictatorship;
era un sistema de control total, sostenido por los servicios de inteligencia y por el apoyo de Rusia y de Irán.
it was a system of total control, sustained by the intelligence services and by the support of Russia and Iran.
And then his son Bashar inherits it in 2000, and there's this brief moment where people think maybe things will change.
Se llamó la Primavera de Damasco.
It was called the Damascus Spring.
Bashar llegó al poder después de haber estudiado oftalmología en Londres, y durante unos meses hubo una apertura tímida: foros de discusión, un poco más de libertad de prensa.
Bashar came to power having studied ophthalmology in London, and for a few months there was a cautious opening: discussion forums, a little more press freedom.
Duró menos de un año.
It lasted less than a year.
El viejo aparato del Estado lo aplastó.
The old state apparatus crushed it.
An eye doctor who became one of the most brutal leaders of the twenty-first century.
That biography still doesn't compute for me, even now.
Es que el poder no lo transforma a uno;
Power doesn't transform a person;
revela lo que ya estaba ahí.
it reveals what was already there.
Y lo que estaba ahí era alguien dispuesto a mantener un sistema de privilegio a cualquier precio.
And what was already there was someone willing to maintain a system of privilege at any cost.
Then 2011 comes, the Arab Spring, and Syria erupts.
The protests start in Daraa of all places, a small city in the south, almost by accident.
No fue exactamente por accidente.
It wasn't exactly by accident.
Fue la respuesta del régimen a unas pintadas en un muro.
It was the regime's response to some graffiti on a wall.
Unos adolescentes escribieron consignas antirrégimen y las autoridades los arrestaron y los torturaron.
Some teenagers wrote anti-regime slogans and the authorities arrested and tortured them.
Cuando las familias salieron a protestar, el ejército abrió fuego.
When the families came out to protest, the army opened fire.
Y así empieza una guerra civil que dura catorce años.
And that's how a civil war begins that lasts fourteen years.
The scale of what followed is hard to hold in your head.
Half a million people dead.
Twelve million displaced, more than half the country's population at the time.
Y en ese contexto, la comunidad internacional empezó a imponer sanciones.
And in that context, the international community began imposing sanctions.
Primero la Unión Europea, luego Estados Unidos con la Caesar Act en 2019.
First the European Union, then the United States with the Caesar Act in 2019.
El objetivo declarado era presionar al régimen de Assad.
The stated goal was to pressure the Assad regime.
El efecto real fue aislar a la economía entera, incluida la población civil.
The real effect was to isolate the entire economy, including the civilian population.
The Caesar Act is named after a Syrian military photographer who smuggled out fifty-five thousand photos of torture victims from regime detention facilities.
That detail matters.
The law was built on a foundation of documented horror.
Y sin embargo, ahí está el dilema permanente de las sanciones económicas: ¿a quién perjudican más?
And yet there lies the permanent dilemma of economic sanctions: who do they hurt most?
Las élites del régimen tenían acceso a sistemas financieros alternativos, a intermediarios, a dinero en efectivo.
The regime's elites had access to alternative financial systems, intermediaries, cash.
Los que perdían el acceso a Mastercard eran las familias en Alepo que intentaban comprar medicamentos.
The ones losing access to Mastercard were families in Aleppo trying to buy medicine.
That tension is real and it never gets resolved cleanly.
I covered sanctions regimes in Iraq in the nineties and it was the same argument.
You're trying to strangle a government and what you actually strangle is a neighborhood.
La libra siria perdió el noventa por ciento de su valor durante la guerra.
The Syrian pound lost ninety percent of its value during the war.
La inflación fue catastrófica.
Inflation was catastrophic.
Y en ese entorno, la ausencia de servicios como Mastercard no es un inconveniente;
And in that environment, the absence of services like Mastercard isn't an inconvenience;
es una barrera estructural que impide cualquier actividad económica normal.
it's a structural barrier that prevents any normal economic activity.
And then, late 2024, Assad falls.
He flees to Moscow.
The rebel coalition led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham takes Damascus, and suddenly the whole geopolitical calculus shifts.
Cae en cuestión de días, Fletcher.
It falls in a matter of days, Fletcher.
Eso es lo extraordinario.
That's what's extraordinary.
Un régimen que había sobrevivido catorce años de guerra civil, que contaba con el apoyo aéreo ruso y las milicias iraníes, se derrumba en menos de dos semanas cuando las fuerzas rebeldes avanzan desde Alepo.
A regime that had survived fourteen years of civil war, that had Russian air support and Iranian militias, collapses in less than two weeks when rebel forces advance from Aleppo.
La velocidad del colapso sorprendió a todo el mundo, incluyendo, creo, a los propios rebeldes.
The speed of the collapse surprised everyone, including, I think, the rebels themselves.
There's a parallel there with the fall of Kabul in 2021, this sense of a government that was propped up externally just evaporating the moment the prop was removed.
La comparación es pertinente hasta cierto punto.
The comparison holds up to a point.
La diferencia es que en Siria, el régimen de Assad no dependía solo de un apoyo externo;
The difference is that in Syria, the Assad regime didn't just depend on external support;
dependía de una red de lealtades compradas y de miedo manufacturado.
it depended on a network of bought loyalties and manufactured fear.
Cuando el miedo se quebró, la red se desintegró.
When the fear broke, the network disintegrated.
So now you have a new government, or something that's trying to become a government, and the world has to figure out what to do with Syria.
And Mastercard returning is part of that.
Es exactamente eso.
That's exactly it.
Mastercard no toma estas decisiones en el vacío.
Mastercard doesn't make these decisions in a vacuum.
Necesita luz verde jurídica y política, lo cual implica que hay una relajación en el marco de sanciones.
It needs legal and political clearance, which implies a relaxation of the sanctions framework.
Estados Unidos ha dado ya pasos concretos para aliviar ciertas restricciones sobre Siria desde la caída de Assad.
The United States has already taken concrete steps to ease certain restrictions on Syria since Assad's fall.
Which is a remarkable thing to say given that the U.S.
spent years designating Hayat Tahrir al-Sham as a terrorist organization.
The group running Syria now used to be on the State Department's list.
Bienvenido a la geopolítica, donde las categorías son siempre provisionales.
Welcome to geopolitics, where categories are always provisional.
Lo que sí es verdad es que el nuevo liderazgo sirio, encabezado por Ahmed al-Sharaa, ha enviado señales claras de que quiere reintegrarse en la economía global, y parte de eso pasa por recuperar el acceso a los sistemas de pago internacionales.
What is true is that the new Syrian leadership, headed by Ahmed al-Sharaa, has sent clear signals that it wants to reintegrate into the global economy, and part of that means recovering access to international payment systems.
Let's think about what this actually means on the ground for ordinary Syrians.
Because when you've been cut off from international banking for fifteen years, you build workarounds.
You develop a whole parallel economy.
Completamente.
Completely.
Siria desarrolló un sistema de remesas informales llamado hawala, que existe en todo el mundo árabe pero que en Siria adquirió una dimensión descomunal.
Syria developed an informal remittance system called hawala, which exists throughout the Arab world but in Syria took on enormous dimensions.
También hubo una dolarización informal de facto, una dependencia del efectivo, y un mercado negro de divisas que en algunos momentos fue más real que el mercado oficial.
There was also an informal de facto dollarization, a dependence on cash, and a black market for currencies that at times was more real than the official market.
And those systems don't just disappear when Mastercard shows up.
They're embedded.
People built businesses around them, people made livelihoods in that shadow economy.
Tienes razón, y hay algo más que complica la reintegración: la destrucción física de la infraestructura bancaria.
You're right, and there's something else that complicates reintegration: the physical destruction of the banking infrastructure.
Muchos bancos fueron destruidos, los registros desaparecieron, la gente perdió documentación.
Many banks were destroyed, records disappeared, people lost documentation.
Reintegrarse al sistema financiero formal requiere una reconstrucción institucional que va mucho más allá de que Mastercard acepte transacciones.
Reintegrating into the formal financial system requires an institutional reconstruction that goes far beyond Mastercard accepting transactions.
There's a historical template here, though imperfect.
Post-war Germany, post-apartheid South Africa, Myanmar to some extent.
How does economic reintegration actually work after a long period of isolation?
Los estudios históricos muestran que la reintegración financiera genera un efecto positivo casi inmediato en las clases medias urbanas, porque son las que tienen capacidad de aprovechar el nuevo acceso.
Historical studies show that financial reintegration generates an almost immediate positive effect for urban middle classes, because they're the ones with the capacity to take advantage of the new access.
El problema es que las zonas rurales, que en Siria son enormes y que fueron las más devastadas por la guerra, tardan mucho más en beneficiarse.
The problem is that rural areas, which in Syria are vast and which were the most devastated by the war, take much longer to benefit.
So there's a risk that this becomes a recovery for Damascus and Aleppo's commercial centers while the rest of the country stays in the same hole.
Ese es el riesgo central, y es el que debería preocupar a los planificadores internacionales.
That's the central risk, and it's the one that should concern international planners.
Siria necesita un plan de reconstrucción que no replique las desigualdades que contribuyeron a la inestabilidad previa a 2011.
Syria needs a reconstruction plan that doesn't replicate the inequalities that contributed to the instability before 2011.
Si la recuperación económica solo beneficia a ciertas élites urbanas o a ciertos grupos étnicos o religiosos, se está sembrando la semilla del próximo conflicto.
If the economic recovery only benefits certain urban elites or certain ethnic or religious groups, you're sowing the seed of the next conflict.
The deeper question is whether we've learned anything from Iraq and Libya, where the physical removal of a regime was followed by a complete failure to rebuild the state.
And the honest answer is that the track record is not encouraging.
Aunque hay diferencias importantes.
Though there are important differences.
En Irak, la coalición liderada por Estados Unidos tomó decisiones activas que desmantelaron el estado, como la desbaathificación y la disolución del ejército.
In Iraq, the U.S.-led coalition made active decisions that dismantled the state, like de-Baathification and the dissolution of the army.
En Siria, el régimen colapsó de dentro hacia fuera y hay una continuidad institucional, por imperfecta que sea, que no existía en Bagdad en 2003.
In Syria, the regime collapsed from the inside out and there is an institutional continuity, however imperfect, that didn't exist in Baghdad in 2003.
That's a fair distinction.
And actually, I want to come back to the Mastercard piece specifically, because the symbolism of it is interesting.
A payment network returning to a country is not the same as reconstruction funds or diplomatic recognition, but it signals something.
Señala que el sector privado internacional está evaluando el riesgo de Siria como manejable.
It signals that the international private sector is assessing Syria's risk as manageable.
Y esa señal, en los mercados, vale tanto o más que cualquier declaración política.
And that signal, in markets, is worth as much or more than any political declaration.
Cuando las empresas empiezan a volver, otros siguen.
When companies start to return, others follow.
Es lo que los economistas llaman un efecto de señalización.
It's what economists call a signaling effect.
Fifteen years is a long time to be locked out of the global economy.
My rough calculation is that a Syrian kid who was five years old when the sanctions started is now twenty years old and has grown up in a country where basic financial infrastructure didn't exist.
That's a generation shaped by absence.
Y a esa generación le han robado algo más que el acceso a tarjetas de crédito.
And that generation has had something stolen from them beyond access to credit cards.
Le han robado la posibilidad de imaginar un futuro normal dentro de su propio país.
They've had the possibility of imagining a normal future within their own country stolen from them.
Por eso la diáspora siria es tan enorme: hay más sirios fuera de Siria que dentro.
That's why the Syrian diaspora is so enormous: there are more Syrians outside Syria than inside.
Que vuelvan es tan importante como que vuelva Mastercard.
Their return is as important as Mastercard's return.
Okay, I have to ask you something that came up earlier.
You said Syria 'lleva quince años sin acceso normalizado.' I've been hearing 'llevar' used that way a lot lately and I think I understand it but I want to make sure I do.
Claro.
Of course.
En español, cuando queremos expresar la duración de una situación que empezó en el pasado y sigue ocurriendo ahora, usamos 'llevar' más un período de tiempo más un gerundio.
In Spanish, when we want to express the duration of a situation that started in the past and is still ongoing, we use 'llevar' plus a time period plus a gerund.
'Llevo tres horas esperando' significa que empecé a esperar hace tres horas y todavía espero.
'Llevo tres horas esperando' means I started waiting three hours ago and I'm still waiting.
'Siria lleva quince años sin acceso' funciona igual.
'Siria lleva quince años sin acceso' works the same way.
So it's like the Spanish way of saying 'has been doing something for X amount of time,' but it feels more immediate somehow.
More continuous.
Más vívido, diría yo.
More vivid, I'd say.
'He esperado tres horas' es un hecho terminado.
'He esperado tres horas' is a completed fact.
'Llevo tres horas esperando' transmite que todavía estás dentro de esa experiencia, que aún no ha terminado.
'Llevo tres horas esperando' conveys that you're still inside that experience, that it hasn't finished yet.
La diferencia es sutil pero muy real para un hablante nativo.
The difference is subtle but very real for a native speaker.
That's actually a beautiful distinction for a story like this one.
Syria 'lleva quince años' in that situation, still inside it, not past it.
I'm going to attempt to use that construction at the next family dinner and we'll see how it goes.
Confío plenamente en que llevarás años usando 'llevar' de forma incorrecta antes de que te salga bien.
I have complete confidence that you'll spend years using 'llevar' incorrectly before you get it right.
Pero oye, ese proceso también tiene nombre: se llama aprender.
But hey, that process also has a name: it's called learning.