There Goes the Neighborhood
By Mike Danna
Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation Public Relations Director
If Nicaragua is the charcoal briquette of Central America, neighboring Costa Rica is Latin America’s Crown Jewel.
You can pick your friends, as they say, but you can’t pick your neighbors.
About the size of West Virginia, Costa Rica, its government and its five million residents have discovered that when you balance politics and people, you get one of the most beautiful, economically and ecologically diverse countries in the Western Hemisphere.
A free democracy which will hold national elections this coming Sunday, Costa Rica is a testament to free enterprise, (read tourism), peace and prosperity. With active volcanoes, vast rain forests and pristine beaches, Costa Rica has more in common with the Garden of Eden than a country forced to live next door to the guy who never takes down his Christmas lights.
The early 20th Century American political sociologist J. Leonard Berkowitz, who spent three decades teaching economics and poly-sci at B. LeRoy Browne University, said you could never separate people from their politics, regardless of education. That is, unless you thought you could do it through the barrel of a gun.
In Nicaragua, under the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega in the mid-1980s, the political party in power tortured, murdered and exiled thousands who dared speak out against the regime. Our tour guide in Nicaragua told us Ortega did things to people that can’t be repeated on a family-oriented blog.
Yet our guide talked about these things with less condemnation than one would have expected. Then again, it’s part of Nicaragua’s history, but it’s kind of like taking foreign tourists to Yellow Stone and telling them the area was once inhabited by Native Americans, but we killed them all.
Laura Chinchilla, the first female president of Costa Rica, is Harvard educated and very much a Democratic populist. And while she has a few political problems of her own (and what Democratic president doesn’t?) the issues are related more to infrastructural development than iron-fisted demands for political loyalty.
Thursday we saw a contrast so vivid that the phrase “night and day” miserably fails to describe the differences between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. And Costa Rica’s differences are truly breathtaking.
We arrived in the Alajuela District around lunchtime today and spent much of Thursday exploring the ecology of the country in the Arenal area, 20 kilometers from the town of La Fortuna. The Arenal Hanging Bridges is the largest eco-tourism project in all of Latin America. Although it’s part of the Arenal Volcano National Park system, its 260 hectares are privately owned and operated, but it’s one of the most amazing slices of Central American rain forest you’ll ever see.
A walk around the two-mile trail features 16 bridges, six of which are suspension bridges, the highest being 167 feet above the forest floor. During the tour class members saw tarantulas, leaf cutter ants, the venomous eyelash pit viper, parrots and other birds and mammals that call the area home. And true to its name, about half way through the tour it began to rain. No one seemed to mind. We were awe struck by waterfalls, 100-foot palm trees and the constant, cooling mist that floated over the entire area.
No matter how you feel about the environmental movement, few can dispute the need to balance economics and the ecology. Farmers do it every day. So does the Arenal Hanging Bridges.
Going green can generate lots of green. Our guide, Jenny Villalobos, who’s also a tropical biologist, said Costa Rica took in $2 billion in eco-tourism revenues in 2013. It’s the No. 1 driver of the country’s economy. As a result the median household income in Costa Rica is nearly three times what it is in Nicaragua. And though Costa Rica still has inhabited areas that resemble parts of Nicaragua, there’s a sense the people there don’t really notice. Their attitudes toward their government and the lushness and tranquility of their provinces more than make up for a lack of what we Americans would consider the necessities of life.
“We’re not just protecting these rain forests for Costa Ricans,” Jenny said. “We’re protecting them for the world. They belong to everybody who comes here to see this beautiful rain forest.” (Check out Jenny’s interview for TWILA on the Flickr site in the photo section at right)
Tomorrow we visit a sugar plantation where workers cut cane by hand. The rest of the trip will be at a more relaxed pace as we wind down our 13 days here.
Now, as promised, here’s a trivia question about Costa Rica. Which world-famous explorer sailed his last voyage by landing on Costa Rica?
Juan Ponce de Leon
Ferdinand Magellan
Christopher Columbus
The first person to post the correct answer in the comments segment of the blog site will receive a special gift from our trip to Costa Rica.
Until next time…