Word: costas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...furnish the stage on which his strange cast converge, Stone takes his cue from Joseph Conrad, who set Nostromo in an imaginary South American republic called Costa-guana. Stone squeezes Tecan and its more progressive neighbor Compostela into a fictional space between Nicaragua and Costa Rica, and then provides topography and politics. The land here is racked periodically by earthquakes; when Holliwell arrives in Tecan, he senses the tremors of revolution as well. The local dictator, propped up by U.S. support and sadistic National Guardsmen wearing reflecting sunglasses, may have finally pushed his brutalized subjects too far. He is driving...
Moreover, Costa Rica has a tradition of spending beyond its means. For three decades the government rolled over its debts from one year to the next, confident that the steadily rising price for coffee, which accounts for one-third of its trade, would bail it out. But gradually, even as it continued to launch more public-works projects and import more luxury goods, Costa Rica got snared in the same dilemma that is afflicting countries throughout the Third World: the price of its exports dwindled, while those of its imports soared. In 1977 an 85-lb. sack of coffee produced...
When Carazo asked the IMF to lend Costa Rica money for the third time last January, he immediately began to sell dollars on the open market in order to bolster the sinking colón and thereby impress the IMF staff negotiating in San José. The cost: $45 million. As soon as the IMF team left town, the colón dropped again. In May he sold the country's $41 million in gold reserves stored at Fort Knox to pay short-term debts, further demonstrating that his government was, as a local journalist puts it, "like...
...Liberation Party, however, is a socialist group with a a tradition of high spending in previous administrations. This time around, it will have to be more tight-fisted than ever before. According to a new government-commissioned report by the New York investment house of Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb, Costa Rica's credit requirements will rise over the next five years to more than $4 billion, a gigantic sum for so small a country. The report, which in effect asks Costa Rica's many creditors to demonstrate as much mercy as possible, concludes that the country faces "aprolonged...
...Reagan Administration, which has been working through its embassy to aid Costa Rica with the IMF, hopes to get some money from Congress to help out. This week Carazo's government will meet with some of its international bank creditors and try again to avert the day of reckoning. &151;By William E. Smith. Reported by James Willwerth...