Costa Rica II: Free of military costs, threatened by economic pressures

Costa Rica has no army, navy or air force. Strange, I felt perfectly secure during a week’s tour there that spanned the old and new year.

No one I met in the defenseless country seemed particularly nervous about invasion. Nor about a military coup for that matter. It’s no coincidence that without a military, Costa Rica is one of the most politically stable countries in Latin America.

Which isn’t to say there isn’t violence. Costa Rica’s gun laws are lax, and drug-related murders are common, some would say rampant. Between Christmas and New Years there were five, and that’s normal.

Last year, Costa Rica, with a population of 4.25 million, had 311 reported murders. The general director of the National Police calls them “Colombia-style crime,” often stemming from drug deal debts.

For comparison, Oregon, with 3.8 million residents, had 86 murders in 2006.

So while Costa Rica has no army, the government wants to increase the size of the police force by 4,000 to 11,000. It’s still a lot cheaper than having an armed-to-the-teeth military on land, air and sea.

With the money Costa Rica saves, it has universal health insurance for its citizens and a conspicuous lack of insurance company lobbyists. With education available to all, its literacy rate is 96 percent.

The greatest threat of ”invasion” is economic, stemming from the so-called “free trade” of the proposed Central American Free-Trade Agreement. CAFTA is attracting strong opposition in Costa Rica. Many fear that heavily government-subsidized US crops will flood the Costa Rican market, destroying local agriculture, as has happened in other poor countries. Critics also worry that nationalized utilities will be forced to privatize by foreigners.

And then there is the matter of environmental “black mail” of the kind the Ethyl Corporation perpetrated on Canada over for the nation’s ban on an Ethyl produced fuel additive.

Such threats aren’t idle speculation in Costa Rica. For three years Costa Rica has lived with the threat of a $57 billion (that’s right, billion, with a “B”) international lawsuit brought against it by George W. Bush’s old oil-patch company, Harken Energy. Harken claims Costa Rica reneged on its off-shore oil drilling rights in the Caribbean. The suit stemmed from a Costa Rican national board’s ruling that Harken’s drilling plans violated Costa Rica’s environmental laws.

To put the size of the suit in perspective, in 2006 Costa Rica’s annual Gross Domestic Product was $51 billion. In short, George Bush and Dick Cheney’s buddies are willing to bankrupt an entire country for the right to put the fragile Costa Rican Caribbean coast at environmental risk.

Five hundred years ago, Columbus dubbed this same coast, “Costa Rica,” a place of riches. Its treasures remain, and new ones such as the country’s rich biodiversity, have been discovered. Now new “discoverers” threaten to exploit Costa Rica’s energy riches at the expense of its irreplaceable environmental ones.

Certainly the people of Costa Rica must decide how their nation’s riches are used or preserved.

Costa Rica I: Paradise on the brink

I recently spent seven days in Costa Rica on a largely encapsulated tour that took nine of us by mini-bus to a volcano (Arenal), a cloud forest (Monteverde) , a butterfly garden, a placid Pacific beach (Manuel Antonio) and a transitional forest (Carrara National Park) linking ocean to mountains.

Along the way, we encountered Howler and Spider monkeys, small wild pigs (peccory), nesting macaw, an andolescent boa constrictor, crocodiles, a tree sloth, a Toucan, a Quaker and tourists, lots of tourists.

I should start with our guide and host Sergio Volio, who worked for years in Costa Rica’s parks and was a walking encyclopedia about native flora and fauna. Traipsing along a forest trail, his powerful telescope over his shoulder, he’d scan the forest canopy for signs of life. Blobs of fur, flashes of plumage, a floral burst. We too craned out necks for discovery, but compared to Sergio, we were blind.

“Look!” he’d say. “A King Vulture! Do you realize how fortunate we are to see that. The King is legendary.” And he would share the legend.

Between hikes, on the long bus rides between destinations, Sergio doled out the history of his country, the struggle to preserve its stunning and fragile ecosystem, and warnings of the ravishes of booming, unmonitored growth that threatens to overwhelm Costa Rica.

We passed garish condominium enclaves for expatriates, mostly Americans. Century 21 Realty signs dot the coastal road skirting the languid Pacific beaches. The rococo gated entry to one sprawling development was festooned with in-your-face American flags.

One of the best sources of information about the country is the English-Language “Tico Times.” It’s first issue of the new year carried a story headlined “’08 will not be a good time for Flora, Fauna” Among the problems: “Tourism development itself is eating up open space and encroaching on the country’s wildlife, and rivers have been converted to open sewers. Laws are lax and enforcement even more so.”

Statements like that didn’t make looking in the hotel mirror each morning any easier. Our little band of visitors was a part of the problem. For two nights in Monteverde, we stayed in a massive hotel complex of 900 rooms. It was built up a hill so steep that you had to take a shuttle bus to get to your room.

Some efforts have been made to slow growth. Monteverde, high in the mountains, straddling the continental divide, is a good example. A settlement of Quakers, conscientious objectors to the Korean War, put down roots in 1951 and soon nurtured a conservation movement (and opened a cheese factory that is still thriving) To slow growth, the Monteverde Quakers persuaded the government to leave the roads to community and its surrounding forests unpaved. The hoteliers liked the idea too because the roads discouraged day tripping. Tourists, arriving after hours of rutted dirt roads, stayed overnight.

But the corrugated roads haven’t stopped the flood. Monteverde has the allure of forbidden fruit. While many, perhaps most, visitors seek out the forests for study, spiritual sanctuary and enlightenment, hordes of thrill seekers come for the adrenaline rush of the zip lines that course above the canopy. The forest silence is punctured by howls and screams of zip liners streaking above the trees and beneath the intrusive cables.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that Costa Rica, with its 500,000 species, nearly 4 percent of the world’s total, is no secret to environmentalists like Sergio, who are fighting to expand its parks and preserves. Today, one-fourth of the country is protected. Indeed the country has a larger percentage of its land set aside for parks and preserves than any other country.

Because it has been so closely studied Costa Rica, is where one of the early warning signs of Global warming’s devastation was discovered. Tree frogs and other amphibians, sensing the change in climate, were forced higher and higher into the mountains until there was no place higher to go. There they face extinction. The tiny, colorful Costa Rican frogs were the canaries in our planetary mine shaft.

But so much more needs to be done, as the Tico Times and Sergio point out. The fragility of life in the face of global climate change is no more apparent than here, in this richly diverse, interdependent community of life.

Those who have visited Costa Rica and have been shown its endangered treasure may leave, but they can never turn their backs on it.

Costa Rica speaks

Many of you know where we've been for the past nine days so I won’t play the “Guess where” game with photos.

Costa Rica has a way of leaving visitors at a loss for words anyway. And after a long day of flying home from San Jose, via Atlanta, I’m happy to let Costa Rica speak for itself as only it can.