President Reagan: $1 million a day in foreign aid if Monge helped America secretly fight the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. When Oscar Arias was elected president in 1986, he refused to accommodate the U.S., and all aid stopped. (Costa Rica was still a small, unknown country.) Arias won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1988 and thus put his country on the map. The word “peace”(not bombs) wooed world travelers to “discover” this small mecca. A glut of tourism in the ’90s saved the economic day. That glut is one million tourists per year. The government passed a law to help: no duties on any imported article needed for tourism – equipment for the hundreds of newly-built hotels, river rafting, “eco” tours, “jungle” tours, deep-sea fishing, international airports. This law seemed to pass on to private homes, food imports, et cetera. Then came the hotel chains – Marriott, Best Western, Camino Real, restaurants – McDonald’s, Pizza Hut. With them came the giant neon advertisements dotting the mountainous green countryside. With the bonanza came the Nicaraguans, flooding over the borders any way they could, running from their poverty. Nicaraguans now make up 25 percent of the total population. And with them came corruption, crime, violence (murders by machete or old machine guns provided by the Reagan group to the “Contras” in the ’80s), sickness and illiteracy, all the negatives that go along with abject poverty, the end product of the brutal Somosa regime,
over 20 years ago. Costa Ricans bear the brunt of vaccinating these poor neighbors and building new schools to educate their children. Cultural change? Costa Ricans seem to have more “things” now – cars (20 times more cars than in 1970), TVs with cable, American movies with their porn and violence. McDonald’s hamburgers have more prestige than the native dish of rice and beans. Make no mistake. As Bush would say, I am a fanatical, obnoxious U.S. flag waver. No one, but no one, especially my husband, can say anything about my country – sacrosanct land of the free and helper of every nation on this planet. Only I can tell you, my fellow gringos, what I think. And that is that Quepos and its beaches are in danger, overloaded with garbage, sewers, water. Monte Verde, with its howler monkeys in the clouds, has its own way of coping. It refuses to build a decent road to the mountain. Only the brave souls willing to spend two hours rumbling along a stony path, breathing hot dust as they go, might be rewarded with a distant glimpse on high of the Splendid Quetzal, elusive, disdainful of our earthly struggles.
Costa Ricans sympathize with our U.S. plight after September 11, our new fears, our changed lives, and they feel gladdened by our new mellowness, our shift in values and priorities, our reaching out to help our neighbors. (My daughter, who just had a baby in North Carolina, had 20 different, previously-unknown neighbors bring her dinner for two for 20 consecutive nights.) Does one really want to jump into “globalization” with its fast-food culture, hotel chains and destruction of beaches, ecosystems, rainforests? Do we want to join the commercial world of mediocrity? My brain says YES – if it feeds the starving immigrants and boosts the living standard of the Costa Ricans. My heart says NO. Give me the small, idyllic jewel of an underdeveloped country where no one starves, all go to school, and the purple mountains are free of giant billboards calling us to progress.
Globalization for the future in Costa Rica is linked to tourism – synonymous with it, really. It has slowed a bit since September 11. There are fewer planes and more hotel vacancies. But Costa Rica is still a refuge from worries, tensions, nightmares about letters laced with anthrax. Tourists will always come to this land of Oz to escape. The future is secure. Roberta Hayes Macaya-Ortiz ’56
20 Milton Magazine