Candidacy good news for Costa Rica

Carlos Alberto Montaner

Oscar Arias is apparently returning to power in Costa Rica. The announcement that the former president, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, is about to take center stage again comes from Borge and Associates, one of the best pollsters in Central America. According to the latest survey, Arias has 45.8 percent of the intended presidential vote in an elected scheduled for Feb. 5.

In second place, with 17.9 percent, is economist Ottón Solís, a good man but also a low-intensity populist trapped in the old statist rhetoric, an adversary of the Central American Free Trade Agreement and a supporter of absurdities such as ''alimentary sovereignty'' and maintaining telecommunications and other ''strategic'' industries and services under the control of the government.

Third in the contest is, in a way, the great revelation of this campaign: young lawyer Otto Guevara, the charismatic leader of the Libertarian Movement, who began with barely 3 percent of the voters' support and now has 12 percent. Some analysts believe that it is even possible that between now and election day, Guevara will elbow out Solís and become the country's second electoral force. It could happen; during Guevara's stints in Congress the people always selected him as the most efficient and valuable legislator.

It was exactly 20 years ago that Arias assumed the presidency for the first time. It fell upon him to govern between 1986 and 1990 -- during the difficult and thrilling finale of the Cold War -- and he did so with consummate skill, helping to evict the Soviet and Cuban satellites from his neighborhood.

With great diplomatic instinct, and against Washington's policy, he managed to rally the other Central American presidents behind his efforts for peace in the region, shrewdly leading the Sandinistas to the electoral slaughterhouse in 1990, when Violeta Chamorro and Virgilio Godoy gave the coup de grce to Daniel Ortega's dictatorship. In 1987, the Swedes awarded Arias the Nobel Peace Prize, making him the most prominent political figure in Latin America at the time.

In those years, after the end of the dictatorships of Noriega in Panama and Ortega in Nicaragua, and after the defeat of the Salvadoran guerrillas, the isthmus appeared to enter into a period of maturity and consolidation of democracy, but things didn't turn out that way. Manipulated by the Castro-Chávez axis, now joined by Evo Morales of Bolivia, the zone can enter a new period of crisis.

In Nicaragua, it is possible that, with the liberals fragmented, Daniel Ortega might return to power. And in El Salvador we cannot rule out that, despite the good successive administrations of four presidents from the ARENA party and despite the enormous popularity of current President Antonio Elías Saca, Chávez's petrodollars will buy victory for Shafik Handal, an unrepentant communist in the toughest Stalinist mold.

This landscape could darken even more if Andrés Manuel López Obrador wins the presidential election in Mexico and installs a government mired in the antique collectivist revolutionary discourse of the 1930s and '40s.

This means that Arias will not enjoy a quiet second term. He will govern amid a rough neopopulist groundswell that's dominated internationally by authoritarian tendencies; he'll face enemies abroad who will stir his compatriots to try to prevent -- through social disorder -- the opening and changes that the Costa Rican state needs to finally become a developed nation.

I suppose that Arias' objective at this new stage is precisely the objective the enemies of common sense want to deny him: the modernization of Costa Rica within the formula the Chileans have tried out with growing success. That is to say, to achieve prosperity by encouraging savings, attracting foreign investments and transfers of leading technologies, stimulating the market and education, designing sensible public policies, establishing clear rules, guaranteeing macroeconomic stability and maintaining good relations with the First World, particularly with the United States, Costa Rica's principal trade partner.

Following Chile's path

In reality, Costa Rica has a paved road for its passage into the First World. It is a deeply democratic and educated society with tolerable levels of inequality and a political class that's open to the quest for consensus. What does it need to take the first step? Undoubtedly, a better understanding of how wealth is created or wasted and a clearer comprehension of the role assigned to the state and of the best role for the civilian society.

If Arias manages the miracle of starting the trek in that direction -- following the path of the Chileans -- he will deserve a second Nobel Prize.

Enero 10, 2006

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