Word: ricas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Fugitive Financier Robert Vesco has been facing some rough weather in the sunny Caribbean. Charged with embezzling $224 million from the now defunct I.O.S. Ltd. mutual fund empire, Vesco fled from the U.S. to Costa Rica in 1972. He is now ensconced as a gentleman farmer on a 4,000-acre country estate with his wife and children. Threatened with deportation once Costa Rica's President-elect, Rodrigo Carazo, takes office in May, Vesco applied for citizenship, listing his nationality as Italian (he was born in Detroit but claimed the nationality of his father). Trouble is, Italy and Costa...
...party has dominated Costa Rica's political life since 1948, when Party Founder José ("Pepe") Figueres beat back an attempted Communist coup that was launched on the issue of a fraudulent election. Subsequently, Figueres and Successor Oduber pushed through laws that have made Costa Rica what Ticos believe to be an almost tamper-proof democracy...
Besides all this carefully tended electoral machinery, Costa Rica has some advantages that help it maintain its allegiance to democracy. For one thing, political divisions are not sharp in a country that has achieved broad literacy (90%) and an average per capita income ($ 1,100) that is the highest in Central America. Costa Rica also benefits from a productive influx of European immigrants and a vigorous middle class...
...same advantages could be applied to Chile, Argentina or Uruguay, of course. What sets Costa Rica apart is the fact that, outside of a McHale's Navy consisting of three gunboats, it maintains no armed forces beyond the civil and rural guards. That largely precludes the possibility of any man on horseback seizing power by force. With no external enemies or guerrilla problem to deal with, Costa Ricans feel no need for armed muscle. Shrugs Foreign Minister Gonzalo Facio: "If we spent money on arms, we would probably have a smaller per capita income...
...political predicament is equally difficult in the three other tiny nations that, with Costa Rica, Nicaragua and the British crown colony of Belize, comprise Central America...