Democracy in a Very Small Place
LEVTNSON, MARC
COSTA RICA GOES TO THE POLLS Democracy in aVery Small Place By Marc Levinson San Jose To the north, Nicaraguans look toward their scheduled February 25 elections with trepidation. To the...
...The government is very corrupt, including people who are very high up in the party...
...The young woman joined in the talk, bringing out diplomas, letters, references...
...Marc Levinson, a frequent contributor to The New Leader, is editorial director of the Journal of Commerce, a national business daily based in New York...
...the November 7 celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Costa Rican democracy...
...Serious points of dispute, however, were hard to find...
...Never, both candidates agreed...
...Under Costa Rican law, members of the government are not permitted even to endorse their own party's nominee...
...Issues-oriented it is not, yet Costa Rican politics can be intense nonetheless...
...Castillo's less telegenic personality wins higher marks for honesty, but he has no way to assuage fears that a third term for Liberation will be one too many...
...Ticos, well aware that their democracy is a rarity in Central America, wonder whether another Liberation victory would endanger the precious stability of their remarkable political system...
...When she finished and turned around, she was not particularly surprised to see the presidential candidate standing on her doorstep, waiting to shake her hand...
...Until the last few years, there were families in which onepersondidn't talk to another because of 1948," a civil servanttoldme...
...When he does, the chances are that he will hear less about Nicaragua, government spending or overcrowded busses than about voters' personal problems...
...His questions to Calderón were long and querulous...
...Inacountry where politics is a family affair, Calderón's family ties have becomeamajorissue...
...Guided by a local organizer, Castillo knocked on the door of José Sanchez...
...In between, in an exercise so routine it receives little attention abroad, Costa Ricans are preparing for their quadrennial trek to the polls February 4 to continue Latin America's oldest unbroken democratic tradition...
...He and his wife were living off of odd jobs and the earnings of their children and their spouses, who shared the house...
...I think Castillo is making a big mistake...
...Sanchez, in his 50s, was in the midst of painting...
...He can't decide whether he's a conservative or a Christian Democrat," Castillo told me, observing that Calderón's party belongs to the international organization of British-style conservative parties as well as the union of Christian Democratic parties...
...This government has been an excellent government," says a Castillo supporter...
...Exasperated, I finally asked him to outline the differences between his platform and Castillo's...
...Castillo's secretary took notes and promised to call in a few days...
...Posters, billboards and bumper stickers are everywhere...
...The aversion to risk dominates the campaign...
...At length, Sanchez related his troubles...
...He inherited the leadership of the Social Christian Party from his father, a former President, and was its unsuccessful standard bearer in 1982 and '86...
...Polls reporting voter sentiment toward their respective candidates, Carlos Manuel Castillo and Rafael Angel Calderón Fournier, fill the newspapers...
...Asked whythereisn'tarole for private enterprise in running the nationalhealth system, heresponds: "Wecan't afford risks...
...This has cost Liberation some of its once-solid support among the urban working class...
...The President's popularity remains high, and his Nobel Peace Prize is a source of immense pride to the 2.8 million Ticos...
...Tall, slim and aristocratic, he looks straight at the viewer, times his gestures perfectly and keeps his comments short...
...They promised to build 80,000 housing units, and they built 80,000 housing units...
...Just suggest tinkering with Costa Rica's welfare state, which has brought schools, clinics and electricity to the smallest villages, and you will set off an explosion...
...But I'm afraid of what will happen if the Liberacionistas get another four years...
...The youthful-looking Calderón is hardly an American-style conservative...
...It was Liberation, he said, that defended the constitution in 1948, that defended Costa Rican democracy, that made it possible to celebrate the centennial of democracy...
...That's the thing that bothers many people...
...Castillo rarely misses an opportunity to counter by reminding voters that the father and his Social Christian friends attempted to subvert democracy in 1948, plunging the country into civil war...
...Yet many Liberacionistas are uneasy with the issue...
...Both in San Jose and in the countryside, every house seems to sport either the green-and-white-striped banner of the ruling LiberaciónNacionalPartyorthe blue-and-red of the opposition Social Christian Party...
...Castillo: "These are anachronistic forms of punishment...
...Nobodywantstogoback to that...
...Calderón almost mocks his opponent as a political relic...
...Arias also defused Costa Rica's potentially explosive debt problem by the simple expedient of paying only about one-third of the service due, even while making all the right noises about the importanceof fulfilling the $3.8 billion foreign obligation...
...He made some vapid comments in praise of democracy, then the audience fired questions about Nicaragua, Panama, foreign debt...
...An unusually large percentage of voters claims to be undecided about the box they will mark on February 4. Calderón's family ties are worrisome, and his carefully polished image strikes a significant number of Costa Ricans as insincere...
...After Calderón lost to Arias in 1986, the two men managed not to exchange a word for 15 months...
...For the past eight years—from 1982 to '86 under Luis Albert Monge, and since under Arias—Costa Rica has been governed by Liberation National...
...A couple of blocks away, a Liberation loyalist named Emilio Leon also had a favor to ask...
...As we took seats on the new leather furniture, facing shelves holding a stereo, a television and a video cassette recorder, Castillo launched into a campaign pep talk...
...he laid his brush atop the can and extended a white-flecked arm when the presidential candidate's group walked in...
...The foreign press usually describes Liberación Nacional as "social democratic," and the Social Christian Party as "conservative...
...In return, the candidate got an abrazo and a promise of support...
...The face that had seemed so cold and distant on television now radiated warmth and enthusiasm, the voice rising and falling in the cadence of a practiced stump speaker, firing up the crowd...
...If they are allowed to stay for four more years, I'm afraid they won't be able to control it...
...I've worked as a Liberacionista for 30 years...
...His media advisers from the firm of Roger Ailes, George Bush's media expert, have prepared him perfectly, down to the red tie and blue suit...
...Should the government-run hospitals and climes be privatized...
...Arias, who cannot succeed himself, will be a tough act to follow...
...The campaign began officially on a Saturday evening in November, when the candidates faced off in the first of three televised debates...
...But it's the same party, the same people...
...The center was unwilling to let her change her schedule...
...In the end, it may well work to Calderón's advantage, for in Costa Rican eyes, Castillo poses the biggest risk of all: continualismo...
...Castillo has much better people...
...Complaints of high-level corruption are widespread, and a number of Liberación Nacional leaders, including Daniel Oduber, the nation's President from 1974 to '78, have been accused of having ties to drug traffickers...
...And that's what the voters really have to decide, whether they are willing to accept continualismo...
...The flavor of the Costa Rican campaign was perhaps best conveyed during a talk Calderón gave to some 20 journalists in New York last summer...
...Should the Constitution be amended to allow extradition of Costa Ricans indicted for drug trafficking...
...His daughter, Virginia, who sat beside him, was trying to finish up her master's degree in education administration, but her work schedule at a government day-care center often kept her from getting to class...
...Sanchez cut him short...
...He himself refers to his father incessantly ("the meritorious Rafael Angel Calderón Guardia," he calls him in speeches...
...Finally, the would-be President said he'd look into the problem...
...Calderón, 48, is a man of the television age...
...Yes, they concurred...
...In any case, Arias can be of little help to Castillo...
...In Costa Rica, a candidate who wants someone's support is supposed to show up in person...
...A television campaign can't regain those votes...
...He's not trying to reawaken the feelings of 1948," a Castillo campaign aide, surprised at my question, explained a few days later...
...In this West Virginiasized country, though, ideological distinctions have almost no importance...
...They don't want to risk what they have...
...Don Carlos Manuel," he began, taking his painter's cap in his hand, "we have some problems here...
...His small eyes seem to droop under the lights, and a shot of him wiping his weathered face with a handkerchief in an unguarded moment became a centerpiece of Social Christian newspaper ads...
...Thanks to Arias," onehears repeatedly, "nobody confuses Costa Rica with Puerto Rico any more...
...The talk is all politics...
...What about the narcotics law pending in the Legislative Assembly...
...PEOPLE WANT CHANGE, but without risk," Castillo said when I asked him about the public mood...
...At one house, a woman trying to get her key into the lock heard a voice behind her ask, "Como està Usted...
...With his term drawing to a close, Arias has cemented his place in history by presiding over a series of triumphal events: the October 25 summit of Western Hemisphere leaders...
...Hatillo should be Castillo country...
...We were standing on a street corner in Hatillo, an enormous working-class housing complex just south of the capital, watching Carlos Castillo speak from the back of a pickup truck...
...Liberation is largely responsible for laying out its broad, well-lit streets, for turning displaced peasants into property owners, and for providing the schools that have enabled many Hatillo children to become the first in their families to attend the university...
...Then came the campaign themes: Liberation will provide more jobs, will stop the rising crime rate, will build more housing developments likeHatillo, where over 100,000people now live in owner-occupied row houses, purchased with low-interest government mortgages...
...In each case Calderón endorsed the policies of incumbent President Oscar Arias Sanchez...
...I don't think Calderón is a good candidate, and his economic team is poor," says a San Jose real estate developer...
...his answers, at times, too complicated for TV...
...He had not had steady work for many years, he explained, ever since Standard Fruit laid him off from a banana plantation...
...To the south, Panama's shaky new government, installed in December by invading United States troops, debates when and whether it should stand before the voters...
...Never in recent history has one party occupied the presidency for three consecutive terms...
...the December meeting of Central American presidents, where Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega was humiliated into promising he would not ship arms to the guerrillas in El Salvador...
...Castillo does not mask his belief that Calderón is not up to the task of running a country and lacks principle...
...But struggling to service even a portion of its foreign debt has forced Costa Rica to adopt economic policies—including curtailing social services and reducing import protection —that have led to the worsening of Latin America's most equitable distribution of income...
...Earlier that same evening, as dusk settled over Hatillo, Castillo had walked down the immaculate grass strip between two rows of houses with all the pretension of a school board candidate...
...He's reminding people that the ones who are in the opposition now, the ones who are promising to strengthen democracy, are the same ones who tried to install a dictatorship in our country back in 1948.1 suppose you can say that the son shouldn't be held responsible for the sins of the father...
...Calderón replied: "As soon as my opponent tells you what his platform is, I'll tell you mine...
...Neither of the candidates, in fact, is quite what he seems to be...
...An incessant jingle blares from the radio: "Calderón es el futuro, el futuro es Calderón...
...He shook hands with the boys playing soccer and waved to a few people sitting on their little porches behind the inevitable metal grills...
...He started his term four years ago by expelling U.S.backed contra rebels from the forests along the Nicaraguan border, and soon deftly maneuvered both the United States and the Sandinista government into accepting a peace plan—an accomplishment for which he was awarded the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize...
...Wearing a light nylon shell over his open shirt, holding a microphone in his left hand while gesturing to a hundred green-and-white flags with his right, Castillo was clearly in his element...
...But his popularity does not carry over to his party...
...It doesn't take long in Costa Rica to get campaign fever...
...Neither a single local reporter nor a security man was along...
...Castillo is no bumpkin: He holds a doctorate in economics from the University of Wisconsin, was once a leading expert on agrarian reform, and received high marks as head of the Central Bank of Costa Rica...
...Castillo, 61, is uncomfortable before the cameras...
...Castillo: "I was involved in drafting it...
...The two men could not be more different, at least in appearance and manner...
...That nonconfrontational strategy has allowed the economy to grow at an average rate of 4.5 per cent, providing nearly full employment in urban areas and buying time to develop new export industries to supplement the traditional staples—coffee, cattle and bananas...
...But as election day nears there is a sense of unease in Costa Rica's capital, as if the good times—and the good luck —might not last...
...Calderón, who profiles himself as the conservative candidate, knows this too...
...STILL, THE CANDIDATES exhibit a visceral disdain for each other...
...Could Castillo help him find a job...
...Could Castillo help...
...Most adult Costa Ricans, not only those in Hatillo, can recall the days when home was a shanty in the countryside and a university education was an impossible dream...
...But everyone knows that if a party remains in power too long, corruption becomes a growing problem...
...Calderón: "Only God can take a life...
...Calderón, endorsing the bill: "It's very important that some positive things come out of this debate...
...But when our deputy, our local leader, comes through here, he acts as if I and some of the other Liberacionistas don't exist...
...Should murderers and rapists receive life imprisonment or death sentences...
Vol. 73 • January 1990 • No. 1
