Costa Rica Shows How, Again

One way to defend democracy: get rid of the army

"What is this? Carnival?" marveled an American tourist in Costa Rica's flag-bedecked capital, San Jose. It sure sounded that way. All day long, happy motorists jammed the main drag, Central Avenue, while tapping out beep-beep-beep, beep-beep-beep on their horns.

Thousands of other Ticos, as Costa Ricans call themselves, danced joyously in the streets. It was not Carnival, however, but a bash celebrating another honest election in a part of the world where political honesty and elections are all too rare.

In Costa Rica's seventh peaceful presidential race in the past 25 years, an underdog candidate scored a stunning upset against the dominant party. San Jose Economist Rodrigo Carazo, 51, running under the banner of the center-left Unity Party, managed to snare a shade more than 50% of the 755,000 votes cast; he edged out Luis Alberto Monge, the candi date of the long-ruling National Liberation Party, who got just under 49%.

Carazo said that the results confirmed an "enormous desire for change" in the mountainous, West Virginia-size republic. Indeed, the election proved that Costa Ricans not only wanted a change but were assured of getting it at the ballot box--something voters in other Latin American countries cannot always count on.

During the campaign, Carazo at tacked the ills that had accumulated during eight years of National Liberation rule, including proliferating bureaucracy, reckless government spending and creeping socialism. Another issue was outgoing President Daniel Oduber's connections with Robert L. Vesco, the expatriate U.S. financier who fled to Costa Rica in 1972 to avoid facing U.S. charges of embezzling $224 million from a Geneva-based mutual fund he controlled. Carazo vowed to have Vesco expelled "for the nation's health." But Carazo's victory mostly reflected the voters' concern about the danger of continuismo, the permanent entrenchment in power of the Liberation Party if it was not turned out for a spell.

The party has dominated Costa Rica's political life since 1948, when Party Founder Jose ("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.

Institutionally, the key to the Costa Rican electoral system is a five-member group of independent jurists known as the Tribunal Supremo de Elecciones, or T.S.E. Six months before voting day, and after the parties have made their nominations, the T.S.E. takes over the election machinery and assumes operational control of the country's 6,000 civil and rural guards; on election day, it dispatches some of the guards to the polls to maintain order but confines the rest to their barracks. The tribunal also oversees a highly refined campaign-financing system. Before the campaigning begins, the treasury distributes funds to the parties according to a formula based on the number of votes they got in the previous election; one of Carazo's triumphs was the fact that his Unity Party managed to win even though, at $353,000, its campaign kitty was one-seventh as large as the Liberation Party's.

As for the election itself, the T.S.E. not only flashes the results on TV and radio the instant they come out of the computers --the better to prevent fraud--but also recounts the ballots afterward.

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.

The 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."

It is, of course, inconvenient not to be able to fire a 21-gun salute when a foreign chief of state visits San Jose. But the Ticos have another way to do the honors: when a distinguished guest is expected, squads of schoolchildren are dispatched to the airport to sing songs of welcome. sbsbsb

If Costa Ricans needed any reassurance about the health of their political system, they had only to look at another, much different election that occurred last week in neighboring Nicaragua. Instead of crowds dancing in the streets, there were sullen troops guarding polls from which Nicaraguans chose to stay away in droves. The election, which was for municipal offices, was the setting for a grim confrontation between President Anastasio Somoza Debayle, 52, and an odd but increasingly potent anti-Somoza coupling of radical guerrillas of the Sandinista movement and conservative Nicaraguan businessmen. Together the groups intend to bring Somoza down and end 42 years of dictatorial Somoza family rule.

Though anti-Somoza forces in Nicaragua have long been active, the agitation against the third in the line of family dictators increased dramatically last month following the still unexplained murder of La Prensa Editor Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, a longtime Somoza foe. In protest, business groups launched an employers' strike, and they and other dissidents urged voters to boycott the elections. No fewer than 52 candidates pulled out of the campaign, and only a third of Nicaragua's 700,000 voters cast ballots. Somoza's candidates won, but the extent of the boycott was one more sign that his days as President might be numbered.

The 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:

P: Guatemala, voters will go to the polls on March 5 to select a successor to General Kjell Eugenio Laugerud, 48, a take-charge officer who has run the country since 1974. The election will offer limited choices. Besides General Ricardo Peralta Mendez, who directed reconstruction after the country's savage 1976 earthquake and is the candidate of the powerful Christian Democratic Party, the field includes one other general and a colonel.

Barring an upset, probably General Romeo Lucas Garcia, a former Defense Minister, will win. In any case, Guatemalans classify their elections almost like French wines: '66 and '70 were fairly honest years, '74 was widely regarded as a fraud. On that basis, '78 is apt to be an interesting, possibly violent year.

P:In Honduras, the President, General Juan Melgar, 48, took power in a barracks coup three years ago and has since run the country by decree. Last month Melgar announced that he would convene a constituent assembly in 1979 to "reform" the constitution. This could eventually lead to the election of a civilian President. It could also lead to the constitutional ratification of what Melgar seized by force.

P: El Salvador will not choose another President until 1982, which, as many Salvadorians see it, is just as well. Before the rigged election that brought General Carlos Humberto Romero, 51, to power in 1977, more than a hundred people were slain by Romero's soldiers in campaign violence. Congressional elections are scheduled for next month, but the anti-Romero Christian Democratic Party has announced a boycott. Power, as a result, will remain in the hands of the soldiers and the few rich families that have wielded it for generations. -

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