WORLD POLICY JOURNAL Vol. 3, No. 2 (Spring 1986), 301-315 Democratic Model in Jeopardy

By Andrew Reding

From its inception as an independent state in 1838, Costa Rica has stood out from its neighbors. Though originally the poorest of the five Central American provinces of the Captaincy-General of , it has evolved into the country with the highest, and best distributed, standard of living in the region. What is most remarkable is that this has occurred without the discovery of valuable natural resources, such as the oil windfall that has transformed many Persian Gulf economies. In fact, Costa Rica remains a country of very limited means—with a per capita income of $1,730 in 1983—yet its population enjoys a life expectancy comparable to that in the United States, access to higher education equal to that in France or Norway, and the benefits of one of the world’s most long-standing and genuinely representative democracies. How has Costa Rica achieved this distinction in one of the world’s poorest and most conflict-ridden regions? The key to Costa Rica’s success is the high priority its leaders have historically given to social and economic development. Primary education was made free and compulsory as early as 1869, and capital punishment was banned in 1882. In addition, the relative weakness of its armed forces has contributed to the strength of Costa Rica’s democratic processes. Except for two brief interludes, Costa Rica has been governed by an elected president and national legislature since 1889. Labor unions emerged during the economic crisis of the 1930s, and the Communist party, which organized them, was allowed to seek and obtain representation in the legislature. That representation played a crucial role in the passage of New Deal-style social legislation in the 1940s. By 1949, the government felt secure enough from domestic rebellion to abolish its small standing army, leaving only a modest police force. The contrast with is particularly striking. There, impoverished peasants and communists were barred from political participation during the 1930s. When they rebelled, at least 30,000 were slaughtered by the troops of General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, foreboding the grisly work of today’s death squads. The result of such policies has been a regime in a permanent state of civil war—a regime that, even with massive U.S. military assistance, spent 12 percent of its 1982 budget on its armed forces, while spending only 7 percent on the health of its people. Costa Rica, on the other hand, spent 33 percent on health and only 3 percent on armed forces.1 With its resources thus dissipated in carnage, El Salvador has become the second poorest country in the hemisphere, after Haiti. A parallel can be drawn between Costa Rican economic development and the familiar story of the Japanese and German economic recoveries following the devastation of World War II. Barred by the victors from investing in military reconstruction, Japan and Germany channeled their investment toward economic objectives, thereby attaining a comparative advantage over their conquerors. Though lacking the formidable economic and organizational resources of these advanced industrial states, Costa Rica has nonetheless managed to carry out a similar “miracle” in Central America by favoring investment in human development over investment in human repression. For the past six years, however, the current U.S. administration has been collaborating with segments of the Costa Rican upper classes in trying to undermine the four main pillars of Costa Rica’s social peace: the social democratic welfare state created by the National Liberation party (PLN) between 1948 and 1978; the right of workers to organize in unions of their own choosing; the representation of leftists in the national legislature; and the absence of armed forces. In pursuing this course, Washington’s objectives seem to be twofold: first, to reshape Costa Rica in the image of Ronald Reagan’s United States by slashing social spending in favor of new military spending and by giving carte blanche to domestic and foreign private enterprise; and second, to obtain Costa Rican cooperation in more firmly encircling with a strengthened southern front. These are not easy objectives to achieve in Costa Rica, a country with a long history of self-government and a relatively well-educated population. Yet the Reagan administration’s greatest strength lies in its ability to exploit Costa Rica’s greatest weakness: its mass media. The press is the one institution that was left virtually untouched in the social transformations of the past half-century, and has remained the preserve of the Costa Rica upper classes. It was their newspaper, La Información, whose agitation led to the military dictatorship of 1917-19 after President González Flores tried to establish an income tax. A popular movement eventually restored democratic rule, burning down La Información in the process. But the families that had owned it regrouped to found La Nacíon, the newspaper that has dominated the country’s press ever since. The other two major papers, La República and La Prensa Libre, have a similar ownership pattern, as do most of the major radio stations and all the commercial television stations. The government, on the other hand, has only one television channel, and—in order to preserve its relations with some of the country’s major businessmen— deliberately avoids offering a news program that would compete with those offered by commercial television. The result is that a class of people who have for the most part not accepted the social-democratic reforms of the past half-century have a virtual monopoly on the provision of news. Until recently, the best the right-wing business community could achieve through its control of the media was to brake the speed of social reform. The picture changed rapidly, though, after the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979 and the April 1980 resignation of businessman Alfonso Robelo from Nicaragua’s Junta of National Reconstruction. In that month, executives from Costa Rica’s major broadcast and print media began meeting together to plan common editorial strategies for dealing with Nicaragua, El Salvador, and other areas of common concern. Then, following Ronald Reagan’s 1980 electoral victory, representatives of the U.S. embassy began playing a more active role in these meetings— a sign of the natural convergence between the Costa Rican private sector’s desire to insulate itself from the possible influence of revolutionary ideas on labor and the landless peasantry, and the Reagan administration’s desire to remove the Sandinistas from power. The outcome has been a concerted propaganda and disinformation campaign. Now entering its seventh year, this campaign is designed to scare Costa Ricans into a hostile attitude toward Nicaragua, thereby increasing their receptivity to U.S. intervention, Costa Rican rearmament, and persecution of real and supposed domestic leftists. A sense of the magnitude of this effort is conveyed by an example of its methods. On July 3, 1982, a bomb went off in the offices of the Honduran national airline in San Jose. That day’s edition of La Nación reported that witnesses had said they had been warned away from the bomb site by the occupants of a car with Nicaraguan license plates—to which La Prensa Libre added that it was a red car with diplomatic plates, and that it had later been intercepted by the police. A Colombian citizen was arrested for the terrorist act on July 22. Then, on July 27, La Nación reported the detention of a Nicaraguan diplomat for involvement in the affair. Three Nicaraguan diplomats were expelled from the country on that day. The Colombian then dutifully reiterated the story of the red car, and described how the plastic explosives had been placed in the airline offices. Yet the supposed witnesses never materialized; the explosive used was determined by the Judiciary Police to have been dynamite, not plastic; and the Colombian was quietly released in April 1983. The Costa Rican press, however, failed to adequately report these findings: while it gave front-page coverage to the false accusations, it buried later revelations deep inside the papers, without indicating their significance. Thus did the press accomplish its objective of portraying the Sandinistas as terrorists.

Economic Blackmail To understand why the PLN government of President Luis Alberto Monge (1982-1986) put up with such gross distortions of events in a democratic country, one has to bear in mind what happened to his predecessor. When former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick insisted in 1981 that Costa Rica accept “security assistance” as a condition for further economic aid, President Rodrigo Carazo instead demanded an apology.2 In response, Washington let him languish in the economic crisis that had overtaken his administration as the world price of coffee, Costa Rica’s primary export, fell sharply in 1978, followed by a steep increase in the price of oil in 1979. Carazo’s refusal to accept the ensuing demands of international lending institutions (as described in the following interview) served only to further seal the U.S. verdict on his administration. U.S. Ambassador Curtin Winsor was to later describe him as “a man who should have been declared insane.” Eager to avoid a similar experience, Monge took a less confrontational approach in dealing with the United States and its Costa Rican allies. While not sharing Reagan administration views, he appointed right-wingers closely associated with the U.S. embassy to two key ministries. Fernando Volio was made foreign minister, and Alfonso Carro was made minister of the interior, in charge of the Rural Guard, a police force charged with keeping order in the hinterlands, including the northern areas where the Nicaraguan contras maintain their bases.3 To a point, Monge also heeded Ambassador Kirkpatrick’s advice. In 1985, “security assistance” for the country’s police forces rose from nothing to almost $10 million. In return, the United States has supplied about $200 million per year in direct economic aid (second in the hemisphere only to El Salvador), which has kept Costa Rica’s economy from collapsing under the weight of its almost $2,000 per capita foreign debt, among the world’s highest. Costa Rica’s abject dependence on U.S. dollars has provided the Reagan administration with an important source of leverage in its quest to bring the Costa Rican economy into line with “supply-side” policies. According to U.S. policymakers, it is the inherent inefficiency of its state enterprises that has caused Costa Rica’s economy to stagnate. Washington has therefore urged San José to implement drastic cutbacks in public controls, to limit government participation in the economy, and to turn capital and investment over to private enterprise. Yet this begs a question that is seldom asked: by what criteria is the efficiency of a state enterprise to be measured? By its monetary profitability, or by the quality and reach of the social service it performs? This is far from an academic question in Costa Rica, where the state enterprises set up by PLN governments over the past 30 yearshave played such a central role in raising the country’s standard of living. Thanks to the Costa Rican Institute of Electricity, the country produces almost all of its electricity from hydropower, and has Latin America’s most highly developed telephone system—with 99 percent automation, 12 phones per 100 inhabitants, and access by 80 percent of the population in 1983.4 The nationalized railroads feature Central America’s only electric service, complete with modern continuous welded rail and concrete ties. The Insurance Institute, Social Security Institute, and national health service ensure high quality health care to the entire population—as reflected by the 1.8 percent infant mortality rate, which ties Cuba’s for the lowest in Latin America. The PLN has also emphasized cooperatives as an important element of Costa Rica’s system of economic democracy. Between 1959 and 1963, the number of cooperatives rose from 42 to 218. Following his election to a second presidential term in 1970, José Figueres proposed the creation of an autonomous institute to promote the development of cooperatives. In 1973, with the help of Legislative Assembly President Daniel Oduber and Vice President Luis Alberto Monge, he established the National Institute for Cooperative Development (INFOCOOP) to provide credit and technical assistance to existing and new cooperatives. To ensure democratic control, four of the seven officials on INFOCOOP’s governing council are elected by the cooperatives themselves; the three remaining seats are allocated to representatives of the Central Bank and the Ministries of Agriculture and Labor. In 1982, President Monge elevated INFOCOOP Director Rafael Rojas to cabinet rank as Minister of Cooperative Development, making Costa Rica the only Latin American country besides Colombia to have given such weight to the cooperative movement. At the same time, Monge obtained passage of a law establishing cooperatives operated and controlled solely by workers. These worker cooperatives are now a policy priority at INFOCOOP. By February 1985, the number of cooperatives in Costa Rica had risen to 464, of which 83 were worker-run. The output of all these cooperatives accounts for 11 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product and 15 percent of its exports. Crucial to the success of cooperatives and other state programs is the Central Bank, which has channeled savings and scarce foreign exchange into such ventures. Government control of the Costa Rican banking system is therefore the main target of the U.S. embassy’s privatization drive. Washington’s methods have been neither subtle nor respectful of Costa Rican democratic institutions. In 1982, as U.S. economic assistance rose to $51.7 million, the United States began pressing Costa Rica to alter its banking laws to allow U.S. aid to flow directly into private financial institutions, where calculations of private profit would override public priorities in the allocation of credit. Not surprisingly, the PLN-dominated Legislative Assembly dragged its feet. By January 1983, U.S. Ambassador Winsor was warning that “the National Liberation Party should show a little willingness and pragmatism so that Costa Rica can enter the 21st century as a developed country.”5 Finally, in mid-1983, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) put the screws on the legislature, making that year’s $2l4.1- million economic assistance package contingent on prompt passage of the proposed legislation. After a marathon 20-hour session, the majority caved in to the overwhelming pressure—and took the first step toward dismantling the country’s social edifice. With the Central Bank breached, the state enterprises it supported have become vulnerable; Washington is now urging that they be sold to the private sector. The National Liberation party has countered that they should instead be cooperativized, to decentralize ownership among the people instead of concentrating it in the hands of the oligarchy.

Labor and the Left Just as state enterprises are now coming under attack, so is the traditional bulwark of Costa Rican workers: the labor movement. Spearheading this drive is a right-wing Catholic priest who—with generous funding from dominant sectors of the Costa Rican business community, as well as from the governments of Guatemala, , Chile, and (by way of USAID) the United States—is successfully dismantling the country’s labor unions. The priest, Father Claudio Solano Cerdas, attracts this money through his own reading of the Church’s social teaching, which he claims associates labor unions with class hatreds. He instead advocates “solidarity” between labor and management, a notion that has acquired great support among anticommunists throughout Latin America.6 The achievements of this anti-labor campaign are impressive. Between 1979 and 1985, the number of labor unions in Costa Rica dropped from 325 to 191, while over the same period the number of employer-controlled “solidarity associations” increased from 98 to 649. These “solidarity associations” are joint labor-management organizations, to which the company typically contributes 5 percent of the workers’ salaries, to be matched by another 5 percent from the workers themselves. These funds are then used to offer the workers such fringe benefits as transportation and low-interest loans for housing. But despite appearances, these associations provide workers few real advantages. The 5- percent management contribution is drawn from a fund that the company is required by the constitution to set aside for payment to workers who are fired or laid off. What is more, the arrangement precludes labor unions, strikes, and attendant wage increases. Even more significant has been Father Solano’s assault on the Standard Fruit and United Fruit banana enclaves on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, longtime strongholds of communist unions. These unions have now been debilitated, and, as a result, communist representation from those areas in the Legislative Assembly has been eliminated. In the recently concluded elections, Vanguardia Popular (Costa Rica’s Communist party) lost its traditional seats from Limón and Puntarenas, leaving it with only a single seat from San José. Though welcomed by some, this drive against Costa Rica’s communists may have adverse consequences for the country’s stability. A major reason for Costa Rica’s long history of social peace in the midst of a turbulent region is that communists have gained a higher level of acceptance and inclusion there than anywhere else in Central America. Thanks to Costa Rica’s relatively open, unrepressive society, its respect for democracy, and its system of proportional representation, the Costa Rican Communist party has had a voice in the national legislature virtually since its founding in 1931. Since then, the communists have played a pivotal role in the peaceful evolution of Costa Rican society and the adoption of policies to benefit the lower classes. In the 1940s, for example, the communists joined forces with National Republican (Christian Democratic) President Rafael Angel Calderón Guardia to achieve the passage of important social legislation, including the Labor Code and Social Security. Not coincidentally, there has been no armed communist rebellion in Costa Rica, or even a serious prospect of one. Under the leadership of Manuel Mora Valverde, Vanguardia Popular has become as Costa Rican as any other party, supporting its country’s distinctive values as its own. Having been treated with the same respect accorded citizens of other political persuasions, Costa Rica’s communists have become some of the most passionate defenders of their country’s humane traditions.7 Much like the Italian communists and (at least until the military overthrow of socialist Salvador Allende) the Chilean communists, Costa Rican communists have come to respect democratic institutions in the measure that these have been open to them. It is from this perspective that former President José Figueres, in the following interview, calls the 1954 overthrow of Guatemelan President Jácobo Arbenz one of the United States’ “worst blunders.” Much like Calderón Guardia in Costa Rica, Arbenz—a former army officer and a political moderate—lacked sufficient parliamentary backing to carry out his program of socioeconomic reforms designed to build a grassroots base for the country’s newly attained political democracy. Again like Calderón, he joined his forces with those of the communists to form a working majority. The most important result of this collaboration was a land reform law that redistributed idle lands to the landless (and mostly Mayan) peasantry. It is here that the analogy ends, however, for the Eisenhower administration’s reaction to developments in Guatemala contrasted sharply with the Roosevelt administration’s earlier policies toward Costa Rica. Clearly rejecting Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy,” the Eisenhower administration denounced Arbenz’s government as “communist,” and overthrew it in a CIA coup.8 The Guatemalan Communist party was banned, its leaders slaughtered, and the country plunged into a reign of terror, in which the army and death squads have since murdered at least 50,000 citizens—forcing the communists away from legislative reform into armed insurrection. Thus, policies that drive communists underground, while perpetuating the grievances and injustices to which they respond, are a recipe for destabilization, as well as an affront to genuine democratic values. Political Neutrality The fourth, and most important, pillar of Costa Rican society has traditionally been its strong antimilitarism. But in recent years, as fighting between the Sandinistas and the U.S.-supported contra forces has escalated along the Costa Rican-Nicaraguan border, this pillar has been slowly eroded. Within Costa Rica, the press has waged a far-reaching media campaign against Managua in the hope of igniting anticommunist sentiments. In addition, the Reagan administration has been pressuring Costa Rica to take a more active role in the covert war against Nicaragua. A key target of both the press and the Reagan administration has been President Monge’s Proclamation of Neutrality. Issued on November 17, 1983, the proclamation formalized what had been Costa Rica’s long-standing practice. It was welcomed by 83 percent of the Costa Rican people, by the Catholic Church, and by virtually every country in the world, with the prominent —exception of the United States. U.S. Ambassador Winsor did not attend the ceremony. Though the United States issued no formal response, it appears to have had a hand in a kind of informal response. On September 28, 1983, Edén Pastora’s contra forces—then financed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency—attacked and demolished the Nicaraguan customs post at Peñas Blancas on the Pan-American Highway. In the ensuing battle, the Costa Rican customs post, which had been evacuated even before the attack began, received some slight damage. Though Pastora’s forces attacked from, and returned to, Costa Rican soil, La Nación turned the picture upside down by portraying the incident as a Nicaraguan assault on a Costa Rican border post. Perhaps revealing the major target of the attack, it asserted in a September 30 editorial that “Wednesday’s events should make President Monge reconsider the appropriateness of proclaiming a State of Neutrality…Costa Rica has never been so needful of the support of its traditional allies.”9 Failing to forestall the Proclamation of Neutrality, the groups associated with the U.S. embassy—including the Interior Ministry, the Chambers of Industry and Commerce, and the mass media—organized a witch-hunt aimed at removing the proclamation’s key supporters. The prime target was Public Security Minister Angel Edmundo Solano, whose wholehearted enforcement of neutrality was becoming a serious threat to U.S. intentions in the area as he cracked down on contra operations on Costa Rican soil, exposed as untrue media accounts of a Sandinista attack on the Costa Rican hamlet of Pocosol, and even met with Nicaraguan Interior Minister Tomás Borge to minimize the possibility of border incidents. For this, the media branded him “pro-Sandinista” and mounted a campaign to force him and other supposed Sandinista sympathizers out of the government. La Nación called for Solano’s resignation. The Chambers of Industry and Commerce went further, demanding the severance of diplomatic relations with Managua, and threatening a businessmen’s strike if action was not taken by the end of August. No doubt emboldened by the support of the U.S. embassy, Interior Minister Alfonso Carro suggested in an August 5, 1984 interview in La Nación that if Monge felt reluctant to act promptly on these recommendations, the president should step aside in favor of First Vice President Armando Aráuz. But before leaving on a trip to Europe, Monge took the highly unusual step of delegating authority to Second Vice President Alberto Fait, another neutrality advocate, instead of to Aráuz, the favorite of the U.S. embassy.10 Then in mid-August, Monge pulled off another of his masterful political maneuvers. Though succumbing to the pressure to remove Solano, he at the same time removed Carro. To diminish the pressure from the right wing, he turned over the Public Security Ministry to Benjamín Piza, a founder of the Free Costa Rica Movement, a John Birch-type organization affiliated with General John Singlaub’s World Anticommunist League. But he appointed Enrique Obregón, of the PLN’s progressive wing, to head the Interior Ministry, and Danilo Jiménez, also a neutrality advocate, to the position of Minister of the Presidency. In this way, he thwarted Washington’s intentions to bring both major police forces, to say nothing of the entire cabinet, under its direct influence. The United States retaliated when Monge’s back was turned. While the president was on a trip abroad, and without his knowledge, Public Security Minister Piza invited U.S. Special Forces instructors into the country. In open defiance of the Costa Rican constitution, 750 Civil Guards were transformed into Batallones Relámpagos (Lightning Battalions), special army units in full combat gear, trained in the use of M-16s, M-60 machine guns, M-2 and M-3 grenade launchers, mortars, and helicopters.11 But for all the suddenness with which these battalions appeared, it should be understood that the United States had been paving the way for them. Over the preceding couple of years, it had donated “police equipment” olive-drab jeeps as “police vehicles, ” marine-style combat fatigues as “police uniforms,” and M-16s as “police weapons” transforming the appearance of downtown San José, where the police not long ago patrolled unarmed, in ceremonial uniforms. Washington’s intent was crystal clear: to gradually accustom the Costa Rican people to an army they did not want. The neutrality issue played a major, and perhaps decisive, role in Costa Rica’s 1986 presidential and legislative campaign. Since the constitution limits presidents to a single four-year term, the PLN nominated Oscar Arias Sánchez, a moderate likely to pursue the popular policies of the Monge administration, to head its ticket. The opposition Social Christian Unity party (PUSC) nominated Rafael Angel Calderón Fournier, son of the former president who had annulled the presidential election of 1948 when the results favored his opponent. Calderón, a godson of former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza García, is a right-winger who attended Ronald Reagan’s renomination at the 1984 Republican National Convention. During the course of the campaign, he argued against neutrality, for a rupture of diplomatic relations with Nicaragua, for improving Costa Rica’s defense capabilities, and for close ties with the Reagan administration. At one point he went so far as to say that if war broke out between Nicaragua and , he would send Civil Guard units to fight alongside the Hondurans. Calderón’s bellicose posturing received an early boost from a border incident that was typically fanned into hysteria by the media. In March 1985, two Costa Rican border guards were killed at Las Crucitas in the aftermath of an attack by Costa Rican-based contras against Sandinista troops over the border. An Organization of American States commission was unable to affix responsibility in view of the complicated circumstances, and recommended bilateral talks to preclude further problems. But the media presented the incident as an indication of Sandinista intentions to invade Costa Rica, provoking a mob attack on the Nicaraguan embassy in San José and the withdrawal of the Costa Rican ambassador from Managua.12 (It was in this tense atmosphere that former President José Figueres undertook his peace mission described in the interview that follows.) With the media fanning the flames of national indignation, and with generous support from the business community and the media, Calderón took a strong lead in early opinion polls. Yet the same polls revealed that one-third of the electorate remained undecided. Further polling conducted for the Arias campaign found that the undecided were primarily from the lower classes, and that they were more interested in peace, jobs, and housing than in the media-generated issue of which candidate was more anti-Sandinista. Arias promptly shifted his campaign emphasis, backing Monge’s neutrality stance and promising 20,000 new housing units and 25,000 new jobs per year. Prohibited by law from participating in Arias’s campaign, Monge meanwhile commemorated the second anniversary of the Proclamation of Neutrality with a ceremony in which he announced his intention of having the Legislative Assembly turn the proclamation into a Law of the Republic. Clearly visible at Monge’s side was San José Archbishop Román Arrietta, while U.S. Ambassador Arthur Lewis Tambs was conspicuously absent. In an extended television interview five days earlier, Tambs had emphasized the supposed Sandinista menace to Costa Rica. Falsely accusing the Sandinistas of having said they intended a “revolution without borders,” Tambs added that they wore harboring Basque, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Colombian terrorists, and that Cuba and the Soviet Union had already intervened north of the border. Despite U.S. displeasure, the anniversary was also marked by a group of former government ministers, artists, and writers, organized as the Committee in Defense of Freedom of Information (CODELI), who bought space on television and in the newspapers to express support for neutrality, and for “conserving our democratic system, making our independence and sovereignty effective, and preserving all our national values.” Five days later, the media struck back against both CODELI and former President Figueres, representing their efforts on behalf of neutrality as having been orchestrated by “international communism.” La República, the nation’s second largest newspaper, printed a supposedly leaked copy of a letter from Nicaraguan Ambassador Leonor Argüello to Figueres. The letter purported to thank him, along with his “political and artistic compatriots” (in clear reference to CODELI), for his involvement in a so-called Swiss Plan, and concluded that his efforts “have been and continue to be highly regarded by my superiors in Managua, as well as by our Cuban compañeros, who have contributed so much to the development of the Plan.”13 Though the letter contained one obvious flaw— the Nicaraguan government was referred to as the Government of National Reconstruction, which had disappeared with the inauguration of a newly elected government in January 1985—it nonetheless became the basis of editorials, debates, and campaign ads on all the major communications media aimed at linking Figueres and CODELI to the Sandinistas, the Cubans, and “international communism.” Not until the end of the campaign period was it revealed that the Judiciary Police had determined that both the seal and the signature on the document had been forged. Characteristically, La Nación printed the news under a headline announcing the acquittal of the editor of La Republíca. (Charges had been dropped due to lack of evidence that he had known the letter was a fraud.)14 The results of the February 2 election were all the more remarkable in view of the magnitude of this disinformation campaign against neutrality: Oscar Arias took 52.3 percent of the vote to Calderón’s 45.8 percent, and the PLN secured 29 of 57 seats in the Legislative Assembly. This succession of one PLN government by another is no small accomplishment in Costa Rica, given its people’s deep-seated preference for alternating not only the people, but also the parties in power. (Presidents and legislators alike are barred from running for reelection.) On only one other occasion since 1949 has the incumbent party won: in 1974, when Daniel Oduber succeeded José Figueres. As Oscar Arias acknowledged on the night of his victory, much of the credit was due to outgoing President Monge’s enormous popularity, earned by his relative success in preserving Costa Rican neutrality, while at the same time keeping U.S. dollars flowing into the country. But the results also reflected widespread reluctance to entrust the country’s governance to a man and a party too closely identified with the policies of the current U.S. government. The message was not lost on the president-elect, who promptly delivered an unwelcome message to the contras and their backers. While reaffirming Costa Rica’s liberal policy of welcoming refugees from other countries, he insisted that all such guests must respect Costa Rican sovereignty and civil traditions by leaving their weapons behind. President Monge then seized the moment to return the Costa Rican ambassador to Managua and propose that an international team of observers keep watch on the border. Monge’s initiative was welcomed by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, who has long advocated the even stronger measure of establishing an internationally-supervised demilitarized zone along the border. On February 24, the two countries agreed to set up a bilateral “inspection and vigilance” commission, with the assistance of other Latin American countries in the Contadora group and its support group. But since such an arrangement would be disastrous for U.S. plans to develop a southern front against Nicaragua—to say nothing of U.S. efforts to portray the Nicaraguan government as belligerent and uninterested in serious negotiations—it remains to be seen how far Monge and Arias can go without serious reprisals from the Reagan administration. Attempts to undermine the new opening began as soon as it was announced, as Nicaraguan helicopters were fired upon from Costa Rican soil, and as 186 U.S. Army engineers arrived in Costa Rica to renovate airstrips along the Nicaraguan border. More recently, U.S. Ambassador Tambs was recalled to Washington the day before he was to present his credentials to the president-elect.

The Tragedy Although Costa Rican democracy has shown an amazing resiliency in the face of the Reagan administration’s concerted efforts to undermine its foundations, this small country is nonetheless suffering damage. Its government’s ability to channel scarce investment funds into vital national development projects has been hampered by the breach in its national banking system. Its channels of social communication have been poisoned with disinformation campaigns, and its government has been permeated with embassy intrigue. A small army has been established in violation of its constitution. To be sure, the United States is spending about $200 million a year on economic assistance to Costa Rica. But the vast majority of it—$160 million of the 1985 Economic Support Funds—is really a gift of interest to U.S. bankers saddled with loans Costa Rica cannot possibly repay. While this money keeps the government from sliding into bankruptcy, it in no way addresses the underlying structural economic problems—a point emphasized in the following conversations with former president Rodrigo Carazo and newly-elected legislator Javier Solís. This is another dimension of the tragedy of U.S. policy. Thus, to the extent that we in the United States truly believe our own accolades of Costa Rican democracy as the “model” in Latin America, and our own public pronouncements of respect for the self-determination of our continental neighbors, we need to begin listening to our Costa Rican friends themselves, who would have us act much differently toward them and other countries in the region. Andrew Reding is a fellow of the World Policy Institute and writes frequently on Latin American issues.

Notes

1 World Development Report 1984 (New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1984), p. 224. 2 “From Democracy to…?” Mesoamerica, Vol. 5, No. 1 January 1986), p. 3. 3 Volio later resigned after President Monge insisted on casting Costa Rica’s vote in the United Nations against the U.S. invasion of Grenada. Volio was the only Latin American foreign minister besides El Salvador’s that favored siding with the United States on that issue. 4 Luis Alberto Monge, Comunicación Para la Democracia (San José: Ministry of Information, 1984), p. 42. 5 “Administration’s Designs in Costa Rica,” Congressional Record, October 11, 1984. 6 For more on the solidarismo movement, see Gustavo Blanco and Orlando Navarro, El Solidarismo: Pensamiento y Dinámica Social de un Movimiento Obrero Patronal (San José: Editorial Costa Rica, 1984). 7 For a detailed historical account, see Jorge Mario Salazar, Política y Reforma en Costa Rica: 1914-1958 (San José: Editorial Porvenir, 1982). 8 For a detailed account, see Stephen Schlessinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982). 9 La Nación, September 30, 1983, p. 8. 10 Envío Year 4, No. 40 (October 1984), pp. 1c-13c. 11 “The Murciélago Ranch Training Center,” Mesoamerica, Vol. 4, No. 7 (July 1985), p. 6. 12 In its coverage of the attack on the Nicaraguan embassy, La Nación doctored photographs to remove the trident insignia of the Free Costa Rica Movement from the shirts of the assailants. (La Universidad). 13 “Gobierno nica agradecida par la ayuda de Figueres,” La República, November 22, 1985, p. 3.

14 “Dictan falta de mérito a favor de Vargas Gené,” La Nación, January 30, 1986, p. 4A.