Costa Rica
Eight months before the next elections, is the country really “Pura vida”?
US President Barack Obama’s recent visit to Costa Rica
to attend the meeting of Central America’s Presidents
gave rise to some reflections about the administration
of Laura Chinchilla, whose term ends next February.
With eight months to go before Costa Rica’s general elections
could we really say to Obama: “Welcome to ‘Pura Vida’ Country?”
Karina Fonseca Vindas
A sizable group of Costa Ricans lined the General Cañas freeway on May 3, waving little flags and applauding the imposing US presidential caravan as it went by. Barack Obama’s face wasn’t visible to those who came out to welcome him so enthusiastically. All they could see was the black Cadillac limousine with its sophisticated security system and dark windows that carried him from the airport to the Ministry of Foreign Relations.
Paradoxically, “The Beast,” as the US Secret Service has dubbed the presidential limo, is a term also often used to refer to the cargo trains on which thousands of Central Americans make the dangerous trip through Mexico to the country Obama governs. Many of the estimated 400,000 migrants forced to make that run suffer abuses on those trains and some even lose their life.
Hundreds of local security officials and special US forces paralyzed the capital to protect President Obama during the 20 hours he was in Costa Rica. This is the fifth official visit to our country by a US President. The first was by John F. Kennedy half a century ago on March 18, 1963, eight months before he was assassinated.
Not so “pura vida”Just like any tourist visiting Costa Rica, Obama couldn’t resist using Costa Rica’s favorite expression: “pura vida,” a ubiquitous phrase that serves as an enthusiastic thumbs-up response to anything from “Hi, how are you?” or “See you tomorrow” to someone raising a glass in a toast or enviously admiring the sleek, slick “Beast.” In contrast, the highly publicized, grandiose visit of a US President inspired some to consider the most worrying features of Costa Rica today, as their own President, Laura Chinchilla, moves toward the end of her administration. The general consensus is that what we have here isn’t pura vida...
One of these features is the treatment of immigrant workers and the evident contradictions in the measures promoted by the authorities. Although presented as exemplary practices, they don’t stand up well against any empirical test of their alleged scope and accomplishments.
In a press conference in San José, Obama expressed confidence about the migratory reform being cooked up in the United States right now: “…we’ve got a pathway so that the 11 million or so undocumented workers inside the United States are able to pursue a tough, long, difficult, but fair path to legal status and citizenship.” The Costa Rican State didn’t feel challenged by his declaration because it’s convinced that real progress is being made in providing opportunities for foreigners living and working on Costa Rican soil to regularize their migratory status.
A second worrying feature is the increasing lack of governance and the string of terrible decisions and irregularities involving political actors during Chinchilla’s presidential term. Three of the many regrettable political actions are the corruption scandals and environmental impact of the construction of a border highway just 50 meters from the bank of the Río San Juan; the government’s inability to forge consensus over the tax reform promoted ever since her election campaign; and the shameful political deal that permitted evangelical legislator Justo Orozco to be appointed president of the Legislative Assembly’s Human Rights Commission last year.
Will Araya be Chinchilla’s successor?Laura Chinchilla has the lowest popularity rating of any President in Latin America. It is thus hard to understand how, with such generalized dissatisfaction in many sectors of Costa Rican Society, Johnny Araya Monge, presidential candidate of the governing National Liberation party (PLN) for the February 2014 elections, currently heads the polls.
Araya has been mayor of the central canton of San José for the past 20 years and has ably magnified his few real achievements with very visible events. The massive December “Festival of Light” and the very dubious embellishment of the capital are his only two strong cards as candidate.
Araya is the nephew of former President Luis Alberto Monge, who in the early eighties opened up the country to the International Monetary Fund’s Structural Adjustment Program. Monge’s campaign publicity in 1982 predicted “a new dawn” for the country, but he in fact created the conditions for “a new nightfall” by ushering in the neoliberal era characterized by a gradually increasing gap between rich and poor, growing labor precariousness and cuts in state social investment.
A comprehensive migratory reform is urgently neededCosta Rica isn’t the happiest country in the world, particularly for the immigrants who suffer from constant restrictions and violations of their rights as well as the overlapping hardening of the migratory control mechanisms. Mario Zamora Cordero, Costa Rica’s director general of Migration and Alien Affairs in mid-2009 when the migratory law was approved, is now the public security minister and as such oversees the Immigration Division. He has been questioned for a series of repressive actions last year against protestors in San José demanding an immediate intervention to rescue the Costa Rican Social Security, the country’s emblem institution.
If any specific similarity could be established between Costa Rica and the United States, albeit on very different scales, it would be the urgency of a comprehensive migratory reform. But Costa Rica’s government authorities don’t share this conviction; official messages reiterate that the existing regulatory law is already very developed, when it is common knowledge that its supposed focus on social integration and human rights is contradicted by its unviable migratory regularization process and the fines and other sanctions it establishes.
As long as there’s no recognition that the migration law needs to be reformed, the positive aspects that could be listed
fade into insignificance and are even contradictory.
Gaps, limitations and contradictionsThe General Law of Migration and Aliens (Law No. 8764) went into effect in Costa Rica on March 1, 2010. The language in its guiding principles does indeed incorporate a perspective based on human rights and immigrant integration.
Article 3, for example, regulates the control of migrants and promotes their integration into the society based on the principles of respect for human life, cultural and individual diversity, solidarity, gender equity and the human rights guaranteed in both the Political Constitution and the duly signed and ratified international treaties and conventions in effect in the country.
A little over three years since that law began to be implemented, however, a series ofdifficulties and holes have been discovered that violate those principles and thus should promptly be revised.
How can “control mechanisms” and “integration” be reconciled? The fees and other costs corresponding to both immigrants and their employers, as well as the disproportionate number of requirements for obtaining and renewing residency and work permits, do not encourage immigrants to regularize their migratory status. Various organizations have insisted that it’s impossible to think about integration unless the regularization processes are genuinely within the reach of people from poor countries who come to work, not just those from first world countries who come to retire.
We have demonstrated that the number of requests for residency permits presented to the General Division of Migration and Aliens (DGME) remained stable between 2008 and 2010 but dropped nearly 50% in 2011, the first full year the law was in effect, which strongly suggests it did not favor the access to the documentation mechanisms it promised. In addition, many workers have been left unprotected by the serious limitations to accessing work permits, due to the costs and requisites involved as well as to the Ministry of Labor and Social Security’s refusal to recommend other occupations to the migratory authorities for which immigrants are typically hired. Such is the case of private security guards.
“Get your papers in order”: Transitory successes?In 2012, the DGME established a 6-to-9-month transitory period it called “Opportunity time to get your papers in order,” which offered some immigrant groups slightly simpler requisites for regularizing their migratory situation. But the lack of effective information led immigrants to interpret it as the equivalent of an amnesty, which was far from the truth. The most significant aspect was nothing more than the elimination of a couple of requirements.
At first sight it seemed a positive gesture by the government to favor documentation for immigrants. Closer analysis of the period, however, reveals that the migration law and its regulations don’t respond adequately to the country’s vital need for streamlined migratory regularization mechanisms that adequately deal with the specificities and requirements of immigrants and their relatives in correspondence with our country’s labor supply and demand.
The transitory aspects were promoted without considering the difficulties ahead. First, it sparked a process for which neither Costa Rica’s nor Nicaragua’s institutionality was prepared given that the majority of immigrants in Costa Rica are Nicaraguan—calculated at over 300,000 in the latest census. The capacity didn’t even exist to resolve requests in the 90 days established in the law before the measure was introduced, so the transitory period only made matters worse by flooding the DGME’s central and regional offices, the Police, organizations working directly with immigrants, and even the Nicaraguan consulates with more paperwork.
Second, despite efforts promoted with workers at the United Nations and the International Organization for Migrations, the outreach and information strategies for these regularization modalities were very limited and didn’t adequately reach potential beneficiaries, encouraging many people who weren’t qualified to try to use the procedures. Many others were excluded and still others entrusted sizable sums of money and ID documents to corrupt officials or supposed facilitators who were really swindlers.
Data that don’t lieFour kinds of transitory measures were offered. The first made it possible to renew out-of-date ID cards. The second regularized foreign parents of Costa Rican born minors. The third was for people under 25 years old with roots in the country, who had come in when they were minors. And the fourth gave work permits to domestic workers, unskilled construction assistants and agricultural laborers.
The migratory authorities presented the first transitory measure as a major achievement, even though there were no more than 40,735 renewals between May and October of last year, based on the DGME’s own data. Asked if these renewals corresponded to the “transitory” period or to those customarily done each year, they responded that they were all mixed together. That makes it hard to accept the figure as some huge success, since the number of renewals is not significantly above the normal growth pattern recorded in two of the three previous years—49,000 in 2009 and 56,000 in 2011 (there was actually a significant drop in 2010, to 32,000, the year the new migratory law went into effect).
The “triumph” of the transitory measures also fails to stand up to comparison with information from the technical appraisal sub-process of the DGME’s Administration, of Aliens, according to which there were still around 25,000 unresolved dossiers for the three other transitory measures. Of those, 85% had incomplete documentation and only 15% were complete. Many people turned in their dossiers with the documents they had at hand and the DGME accepted them so the petitioners would have a foot in the door before the request period ended. How many people will be allowed to finish presenting their statements now that the window of opportunity has closed and how many will be able to do so with no errors or further omissions? It’s hard to be optimistic given the institutional saturation resulting from this initiative. A reasonable assumption is that a large number will be unable to complete their dossiers for economic reasons, failure to qualify or lack of time or information to conclude the initiative.
Obama temporarily revives President Chinchilla’s imageObama’s trip to Costa Rica couldn’t have come at a better time for President Chinchilla because it temporarily shored up her deteriorated image. Even though the reason for the visit was to get together with the region’s Presidents in the framework of the Central American Integration System (SICA) meeting in San José, her government didn’t hesitate to promote it as recognition of the country’s positive attributes and conquests.
Days before the SICA meeting, Costa Rican Foreign Relations Minister Enrique Castillo posted on his ministry’s web page that the visit was “also recognition of Costa Rica’s regional political position as a very developed country in many fields due to its trade policies and democratic model as well as its development, the environment and as a country advanced on human rights issues.”
But the resuscitation of the government’s popularity rating didn’t last. As quickly as it spiked due to Costa Ricans’ excitement about the arrival of the charismatic US President, it dropped again due to the malaise, the generalized vacuum of leadership and even a new presidential scandal.
The figures of civic malaiseIn addition to manifest dissatisfaction with the government’s terrible decisions, corruption and arbitrariness, structural disagreements are increasingly blurring the image of Costa Rica as an exemplary Central American country. A recent survey by the University of Costa Rica’s Center for Political Research and Studies published in Semanario Universidad shows deep pessimism about the country’s course and the government’s administration, with 64% of those polled believing the country is going in a bad or very bad direction and 65% judging the government’s performance in the same terms. Of all the national problems mentioned by those interviewed, corruption was highest on the list with 18%. A full 71% say they don’t belong to any party.
The stagnation or shrinkage of some indicators associated with the wellbeing of the majorities in Costa Rica also has an impact on social dissatisfaction. The 18th Report on the State of the Nation reveals that Costa Rica isn’t reducing the proportion of poor people, which continues to hover around 20%; in fact poverty was defined as affecting 21.6% of the country’s households in 2011. Based on the 2011 National Census, an estimated 1,140,435 of the 4,301,712 inhabitants are poor—a peak figure in Costa Rican history—and 336,305 of those live in conditions of extreme poverty.
Inequality is also continuing to grow. In recent years the gap between the households with the highest income levels and those with the lowest has continued to widen. In 2010, the per-capita income of the highest-income households was 16.7 times higher than that of the households with the lowest income. By the next year it was already 18.2 times higher.
In vitro fertilization On December 20 last year the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) decision ordering the legalization of in vitro fertilization (IVF) in Costa Rica caught national and international attention. It ruled that the prohibition of this method since 2000 violates the basic right to have children, whether by natural or assisted means.
Before the IACHR ruling, any one in Costa Rica who practiced this technique could be tried in court under the argument that embryos were human beings even before implantation and could not therefore be discarded. Before the court heard the case, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had intimated to the Costa Rica government that it would be best just to permit IVF, but the Legislative Assembly, under pressure from the Catholic Church, quashed the bill. That intransigence led to the case being successfully steered through the top Inter-American judicial authority.
Despite the ruling, the Catholic clergy has stuck to its position, voicing it in different media and other public arenas. The archbishop of San José, Monsignor Hugo Barrantes, said that such a procedure “goes against life, given that there is life from insemination.” There is clear agreement on this issue between the Catholic hierarchy and a good number of evangelical pastors.
Months before the court issued its ruling against the Costa Rican State, a radio campaign was broadcast on Catholic stations in which a little girl’s voice could be heard saying, “Hello, I’m Sofi, the third of three siblings, and although my parents love me with all their heart, I know that to come into the world my seven other little siblings died in a laboratory.” The announcer’s voice nailed home the message: “Who has the right to decide about the life of others? In vitro fertilization goes against life.” The campaign—a powerful manipulation mechanism—was quickly censored because its production involved children.
In the midst of the debate, President Chinchilla publicly declared in January of last year that “there are no families when there are no children,” a value judgment that was strongly rejected. Families lobbying to get the Legislative Assembly to approve the IVF technique viewed her declaration as ironic. It also shook sexual diversity groups, which have insisted for years that the country has to open up to different models of family, beyond the traditional one.
The court handed down its unappealable and binding ruling despite the controversy, automatically overruling the 2000 decision of the Constitutional Bench, which had corroborated the Church’s view that the procedure is anti-life. The government has yet to enact legislation in line with the Court’s ruling, but has affirmed that it will create the domestic regulations to initiate this practice in the country and incorporate the procedure into the public health institutionality. It has already indemnified 18,000 people affected by the 13-year prohibition with a total of US$400,000: $20,000 for each of those plaintiffs plus $5,000 each for another eight who sued for material damage, demonstrating that they had to leave Costa Rica to seek the method.
Human rights or human indulgences?Another of the main decisions by the current administration that human rights defense groups, sexual diversity groups, university groups and others reject is its pact with two evangelical legislators, made to give it the minimum number of votes in the Legislative Assembly needed to push through issues considered strategic. In 2012, one of those legislators, Pastor Justo Orozco of the Costa Rican Renovation Party, was elected to head the Assembly’s Human Rights Commission with five PLN votes in favor and two against. Among the issues his commission was slated to discuss were IVF and a bill legalizing same-sex unions.
Orozco made clear his absolute opposition to both issues in declarations that go way beyond acceptable bounds and leave no doubt about his scant human rights skills and training. He has been so crass as to describe them in some cases as “human indulgences.” His infamous phrases can be seen on various web sites, including his view that the legal union of same sex couples “amputates the possibility of generational reproduction and family happiness.” On another occasion, when questioned about his “anti-gay” actions, he replied: “Who’s bothering them? If you can’t see what they’re up to, we won’t identify them unless they declare themselves. If they don’t come out, you don’t know who they are.”
The most painful part of Justo Orozco’s media visibility is that it is the result of the governing party’s decision to let him occupy such a relevant post dealing with human rights issues. He has succeeded in paralyzing human rights projects. Worse still, contrary to what most of his detractors like to think, thousands of people linked to evangelical or neo-Pentecostal groups subscribe to this pastor’s positions, which could open up an arena for new figures like him in the Legislative Assembly to be elected for a four-year period in February.
Obama on the path of discordObama came to Costa Rica only nine days after the government annulled a contract with Constructora OAS Ltd., the Brazilian company granted the job of modernizing the 58 kilometers of the San José-San Ramón Highway. President Chinchilla made the announcement on a national TV hook-up, a decision many saw as driven by fear that an already heated environment could lead to invasions of the very highway on which the US presidential procession would be traveling.
Chinchilla and Pedro Castro, her public works and transport minister, refused for months to listen to citizens’ clamor against the concession. But that intransigence only helped strengthen the Western Forum’s organizing work, which brought together local organized grassroots in the cantons of Alajuela and other areas potentially affected by the concession. “No to the concession, yes to the highway” was the motto that energized civic mobilization against the agreement between the State and that transnational company.
According to investigations of Semanario Universidad, the amount of the concession for the highway was a complete puzzle to citizens, institutions and even experts. Set at US$197 million in the 2004 contract, it had more than doubled to $523 million by the time the document was signed early this year, with little reasonable explanation for the increase.
Castro insisted on different occasions that the Costa Rican Chamber of Construction (CCC) had done a study of the increase in the concession amount, but the CCC denied it. He also said repeatedly that the new price resulted from converting the original amount nine years ago to current values, based on the Consumer Price Index, or inflation.
What Castro said very little about was that shortly before taking being brought into the Chinchilla administration’s Cabinet as transport minister and thus taking charge of this coordination, he was an adviser to the company and in fact did the technical study it used to justify increasing its control of the toll booths from 25 to 30 years. Castro was paid $10,000 for his consultancy.
According to the contract, Constructora OAS was to have collected US$523 million, the amount of the modernizing costs, in tolls over five years, which it would invest back into the highway, hence the additional five years controlling the booths. At the end of the next 25 years it would have deposited US$4.931 billion in its own account, an amount 8.35 times its initial investment. If, for example, a resident of the canton of Palmares traveled to and from his job five days a week using this highway for the 30 years of the concession, he would have been obliged to pay 4,000 colons (US$8) a day, the equivalent of $57,000.
The latest scandal?Only one day before Laura Chinchilla’s third anniversary as President a new scandal drained what little was left of her reservoir of political capital. On May 7 she and some of her family members and close collaborators traveled to Lima, Peru, in a private plane facilitated by the THX Energy company for the wedding of her Vice President’s son.
As it turned out, the plane belonged to Gabriel Morales Fallón, a Colombian suspected of having negotiated his protection on Costa Rican soil with the US Drug Enforcement Agency in exchange for drug trafficking and money laundering intelligence. Morales claimed Costa Rican citizenship because he had married an 18-year-old Costa Rican “by proxy.”
Once the scandal was out in the open, Francisco Chacón, President Chinchilla’s communication minister, argued during a press conference in which he presented his resignation that “the company I defended as unchallengeable turns out not to have been so.” It was a sensitive loss, given that Chacón was considered the President’s right hand. Two other members of the team close to the President also resigned.
The goal with these departures was to insist at all cost that the use of the plane was due to failures in the presidential security control, thus taking the spotlight off Chinchilla herself. Some media, however, did note that the cost of the two-day trip to Peru was calculated at US$60,000, although curiously none emphasized the trip’s essentially private nature. She was surely spared more embarrassing scrutiny because she had taken advantage of the trip to pay a courtesy visit to Peru’s President Ollanta Humala.
Chinchilla in the final stretchLaura Chinchilla and her unstable Cabinet are barely limping through the final stretch of her term. Only seven of her ministers have gone the distance so far, while fifteen have resigned voluntarily or under pressure.
The multiple scandals, questionable treatment of the migration issue and drop in indicators associated with the population’s wellbeing all show that things in Costa Rica are far from pura vida. Internationally, however, government authorities are touting key issues such as human rights, environmental protection, democratic processes, the path to development and even migration to present a purely positive face of the country.
In 2007, Costa Rica, to its population’s credit, was the only country forced to submit approval of the Central American Free Trade Agreement with the United States to a referendum. Fervently hoping for a yes vote, then-President Oscar Arias promised that “those who come on bicycles today will come on BMV motorcycles tomorrow. And those who come in a Hyundai will come in a Mercedes Benz. That is what development consists of.”
That populist promise was made at a pivotal moment in what was the only heated controversy anywhere in Central America about whether or not to engage in that agreement. It was just one example of a political class desperate enough to employ any rhetorical contrivance to perpetuate the idea that Costa Rica is irreversibly on the path of economic growth and is an “exceptional” country in Central America.
Our public universities urgently need to maintain and strengthen their commitment to unmask such contradictions between the government’s discourse and the social realities. They can also play an important role in providing dynamic educational and empowerment processes in local spheres and with groups grappling with abuses and vulnerabilities.
The missing strategyThe disillusionment with Chinchilla’s administration, especially by mobilized sectoral or community groups, must be redirected toward building lasting alternatives. The social protest needs to go beyond marches, sit-ins or disapproval campaigns in social networks, because in most cases they lack follow-up, the energies soon dissipate as a new cause crops up to compete for the indignation.
Social mobilization is very necessary and shouldn’t be undervalued, but nor should it be seen as a goal in and of itself, reduced exclusively to a calendar of demonstrations. Public protests are required, but only as one component of a larger strategy involving information and awareness-building actions on the struggles underway and the creation of communication links among the diverse social forces seeking transformations.
The political groups that will run against the governing party in next year’s elections are dispersed. While there’s talk of a coalition, all want their choice to be its presidential candidate. No progress is yet being made in drafting a proposal designed to have an impact on the majority groups of voters, because these parties never established roots with them, identified with their deepest needs or come up with agendas that provide clear responses to their demands. Efforts to create community ties and build alternatives have at best been timid actions not prioritized even by the political parties that claim to be promoting change.
The missing projectThe Citizen Action Party, which could recover the political capital harvested a little over a decade ago, is offering five pre-candidates right now. Unfortunately, this isn’t evidence of a fertile democratic process as much as internal divisions and a lack of proposals agreed upon as a political option.
Even using the age-old strategies that have always brought the same politicians to power, the governing PLN could ably exploit this absence of any project that differs from its own worn-out official one, or of new leaderships or broad social participation. Therein lies one of the obviously indispensable challenges. Will Costa Rica’s society be up to the task of insisting on the required change of course? Will the accumulated social malaise be able to generate processes of change? While it’s hardly a foregone conclusion, there’s reason for hope, as shown by some emblematic struggles in the past two decades—the one against CAFTA not least among them. We are living under the warning that the disillusionment should not be allowed to turn into indifference, but rather be channeled into viable alternatives that offer the majorities a decent life.
Karina Fonseca Vindas is the director of Costa Rica’s Jesuit Migrant Service (SJM).
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