Costa Rican President Oscar Arias said yesterday the U.S. financial crisis will cause increased poverty in Latin America.
“If such a big, powerful economy has difficulties, that is clearly going to affect Latin America, which is very dependent on the United States,” Arias said in an interview on San José's Radio Monumental. “If the United States is poorer, it will buy fewer products from us, the companies will invest less, and fewer tourists will come here.”
The effects of the crisis are already being felt in Costa Rica because Lehman Brothers investment bank, which has declared bankruptcy, was financing an $800 million tourist project that will no longer be carried out.
The U.S. House of Representatives yesterday voted down a plan for a $700 billion bailout of troubled Wall Street firms, though legislative leaders said they will keep trying to pass some kind of rescue for the financial sector.
While agreeing that the U.S. government should help the financial sector, Arias criticized the ease with which such huge sums are available for the financial crisis yet “how difficult it is to increase aid for the development” of poor countries.
He noted the $700 billion, added to $300 billion the U.S. has already given some companies to save them from bankruptcy, represents 10 times more aid than the world gives to developing countries populated by some 1.4 billion people.
Arias said leftist-ruled Venezuela provides “four or five times” more aid to Latin America than Washington does.
“That's the truth, and I'm not making any value judgment,” Arias said a day after U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica Peter Cianchette was quoted in the daily La Nación as being “surprised” at Arias' recent praise for Venezuela's Hugo Chávez.
“(Chávez) has put into practice projects to finance petroleum sales to countries that buy oil from Venezuela and, for better or for worse, if that is an advantage for the people of Costa Rica, I'm going to join PetroCaribe because I was elected to protect Costa Rican interests,” Arias said.
PetroCaribe is an initiative under which Caracas supplies crude on generous terms to 17 developing nations in the Caribbean and Central America.
Cianchette also said he hoped Costa Rican membership in PetroCaribe “would not lead to other situations.”
“Membership in PetroCaribe means nothing more than that. It does not mean joining ALBA,” Arias told Radio Monumental, referring to the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, Chávez's regional alliance. |
MANAGUA, Nicaragua – Evoking former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, Managua mayoral hopeful Eduardo Montealegre spoke before a crowd of some 15,000 supporters Sunday to launch his campaign, calling on all voters to unite in their opposition to President Daniel Ortega.
“President Ortega, tear down these billboards,” Montealegre said, referring to the monstrous pink Sandinista billboards covering the capital city, and remembering that Reagan called on former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall 21 years ago.
Representing the Liberal Constitutional Party, Montealegre, a former banker, finance minister and presidential runner-up to Ortega in 2006, is taking on Sandinista mayoral candidate and former three-time boxing champion Alexis Argüello, whom Montealegre claims is unfit for the job.
“The mayor's office is not a boxing ring. We need a qualified person with experience to administer resources,” Montealegre told the crowd gathered in the Plaza de la Fe.
The rally was originally scheduled to be held in Managua's Plaza de la Revolución, but the Ortega-controlled Supreme Electoral Council (CSE) denied permission without explanation, even though Argüello's campaign is scheduled to hold a similar rally there next Saturday.
Montealegre urged all anti-Ortega sectors of society, which together represent a clear majority, to unite with him against the Sandinista leader on Election Day, Nov. 9.
Yet not all of the opposition is on board. The Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS), which had its party status canceled two months ago by the CSE, has not endorsed Montealegre because they say that would be legitimizing an election they claim is a sham due to the “illegal” ban preventing them from participating – something they have been challenging before the national courts.
Some in the MRS have already called upon their supporters to vote null in the upcoming vote – a situation that some analysts claim could favor Argüello. The MRS has already announced it is going to take its case before the Inter-American Court on Human Rights since Nicaragua's Supreme Court did not rule on its case before the Sept. 28 official start date to the campaign.
The U.S. Department of State, which has called on the Nicaraguan government to allow international observers for the elections – a request that was denied – acknowledged the official beginning of the campaign and urged the government to “ensure that all Nicaraguans are provided the opportunity to participate in free, fair and transparent elections.”
The State Department also renewed its call for independent observers.
Sandinista candidate Argüello is the only candidate who has come out against international observers, echoing Ortega's position.
Argüello told The Nica Times in a recent interview that he plans to win the mayor's office with “60 percent” of the vote and will immediately start to implement an “aggressive new model” of government that he calls “socialist.”
“If you like it or not, we're going to develop a new model,” Argüello said.
See the Oct. 10 issue of The Nica Times for the full, exclusive interview of Argüello. |
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Every day that week, after classes, the school doors fly open and eject flocks of galloping children. “¡Los gringos! ¡Los gringos!” they shout, as they race to the ramshackle kitchen. Never has the center of this small village been so full of life.
A dedicated group of nine U.S. adults with a Catholic group from New Jersey's Our Lady of the Presentation has come to our village to do community service. During their stay here, they build a bus stop, help paint the interior of the church, participate in the teaching of English classes and perform a hilarious skit during a Sunday fair. These, at least, are their material achievements. And despite the fact that they are all terrific, these things are not the group's greatest gift.
Picture a tiny village in the foothills of Cerro de la Muerte, some 25 kilometers from Cartago, southeast of San José. There is the traditional pulpería, often filled with men smoking and talking, a gem of a small metallic church, an elementary school, a small variety store, a lumberyard and charcoal factory, and a large community building with an attached kitchen.
The setting of the village is green and beautiful, but it can also be rather sad. It rains a lot, it is often cold, and most of the people are poor. By day, nearly all of the men and a good number of the women are out working. Many of them must scrounge work from one week or day to the next to put food on the table. Lately, some of the men have been making charcoal out of scrap wood, thus contaminating the air, putting at risk everyone's health and spoiling the beauty of the surroundings. For those who must work outside, the bus leaves at 5:30 in the morning and doesn't return until 6 at night. This is as true for the high school students as it is for the factory workers, so everybody gets home exhausted.
The children in the limited elementary school are exuberant, intelligent and beautiful, but they don't have much to do. Periodically, the school or community sponsors an event, or I put on a play with them. They now have English classes with a WorldTeach volunteer. Most of the time, however, when they get out of school, they scatter or go hang around the smoke-filled pulpería.
Then, los gringos arrive.
Far from being a group of solemn genuflectors, they are young big-city dwellers, vibrant, motivated, hip and, above all, loving; they are people who will spend hours playing with the children, who fill the village everywhere with fervor, laughter, pura alegría. The children fall absolutely and irrevocably in love with them.
The tumbledown kitchen attached to the community building is where the volunteers eat, but it also becomes the place where they hang out together. One by one, village people begin to arrive, first children, then adolescents, finally adults. First, they stand outside the door and timidly watch, and I beckon them in. Soon, they all feel welcome, and the kitchen fills with jump-rope challenges, storytelling, ball playing, dancing and, most of all, laughter.
During the day, as they work, people initially watch timidly, afraid to offer help, afraid it is not their place. When it becomes clear that the Gringos want them to participate, they begin to pitch in. Never has work in the village been so joyous, so free of the fetters of obligation. I arrive one afternoon at the church to find a whole gaggle of women squealing and washing the paint out of each other's hair with turpentine.
The two village women hired as cooks at first are terrified. How are they going to cook for these strange creatures? When Thomas, the leader of the group, shows them the peanut butter and explains that they are to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for their lunch, they stare in wonder. They have never seen peanut butter before.
I am there day and night, reassuring them and giving instructions. They have never cooked brown rice before, and I show them how. One day, to vary the daily round of peanut butter, I show them how to make egg salad for sandwiches. When I return later, they both look downcast and tell me that the Gringos didn't seem to like the sandwiches. I am puzzled. Later, I learned from the volunteers that the ladies had spread the bread with peanut butter before putting in the egg salad. They thought that peanut butter was an ingredient in all Gringo sandwiches.
The volunteers' last day here, we take them and all the children to a local waterfall, where one and all plunge gleefully in the freezing water, clothes, boots, shoes – it's not important. I stand on the bank and watch, sorry that I am no longer young enough to be that crazy.
On the afternoon the volunteers must leave, our two cooks once again look downcast. It soon becomes apparent why. At the moment of the adiós, they break down helplessly crying. In fact, at the moment of adiós, it seems that the whole village is crying. The Gringos promise to come back next year and do some more work, but this is not enough. Small groups of children sit at the new bus stop, sobbing. All of the volunteers seem to have two or three children hanging on them. Watching the grief of the children, I wonder if it is worth it. But yes, it is. Yes, yes, yes.
The village is quiet again now, the old kitchen locked and cheerless under the rain. But there is the new bus stop, a permanent testimony to the Gringos' presence. The children tend it, carefully picking up any trash.
Their black eyes gaze longingly into the rain.
Please come back again next year, please, please, oh please.
‘Voluntourists' in Costa Rica |
Thomas Farley, senior editor of Town & Country Magazine, appears here with Wendy McSwain, former casting director for MTV in New York. Farley came to Costa Rica as part of a group of nine young Catholics from Our Lady of the Presentation in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, to carry out community service in the small village of La Estrella de El Guarco, about 25 kilometers from Cartago. He has been an editor for Town & Country for eight years and is editor of the book, “Modern Manners: The Thinking Person's Guide to Social Graces,” an anthology of essays from his column, “Social Graces.” He was also founding editor of the magazine The World of Hibernia, no longer in publication, and finds the mountains of Costa Rica reminiscent of his beloved Ireland. Farley, for whom helping others is imperative, also had a hand in establishing the annual philanthropic edition of Town & Country. His Catholic youth group spent seven years making yearly trips to Mexico to build houses. This year he was ready for a new adventure, and, together with his friend, Wendy McSwain, hatched the idea of bringing a hand-picked group to La Estrella. Farley speaks fluent Spanish, loves Latin culture and prefers “voluntourism” any day to a regular vacation. |
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Kate Galante | Tico Times |
Wendy McSwain began her career in television communications in 1988 and spent five years as head of East Coast casting for MTV in New York City. She is spending this year in La Estrella de El Guarco as a WorldTeach volunteer. Like Farley, McSwain loves travel and volunteering – always with children. She worked for a year as an au pair in France and once participated in a program with orphans in Romania. She has loved her time in the small school in La Estrella because the program helps both the children and the host families where volunteers are housed, and it gave her the opportunity to bring Farley's group to Costa Rica. She sought a new challenge in volunteer teaching and is now looking toward a career that will allow her to work with children while employing her media skills and pop culture sensibilities.
–Kate Galante |
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