Category Archives: Costa Rica

Controversial resistance

How does one effectively a national campaign to change how one’s country’s deputies vote on a certain issue when there seems to be a clear parliamentary majority established already? How radical does one have to be in order to actually change the outcome of the vote? How broad does one need to be in order to have any impact?

Such considerations, people active in social movements, need to make everywhere — and the different positions in the question seem to be awfully similar as well. Or at least those activists active in CAFTA protests I met here in Costa Rica had to discuss things very similar to what we activists in Europe often do.

Grace García represents the eco movements in the national coordination committee against CAFTA.
Grace García represents the eco movements in the national coordination committee against CAFTA.

Let me try to exemplify with the activists Grace García and Marcela Aguilar. Grace from Friends of the Earth Central America, has worked in the national coordination committee against CAFTA for the past year, but also the two preceding years she has been working against CAFTA. The ecologist movement is something I personally do not know very much from the Norwegian activist scene. Marcela is from the Socialist Party of the Workers (PST), and was one of the three I talked to last time. The PST is considered one of the more radical groups that also tend to be quite small. But they do get noticed, “like the black block in Germany” a German journalist Torge Loeding from the media group Voces Nuestras tells me.

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No to CAFTA!

Students Isaac, Sofia and Marcela are working hard against Costa Rican membership in CAFTA.
Students Isaac, Sofia and Marcela are working hard against Costa Rican membership in CAFTA.

After leaving Nicaragua southward, I bumped into Katie Niemeyer for the 4th time, this time walking down a high way In Liberia, and we decided to go to the town of Santa Cruz in northern Costa Rica, where there was to be some kind of cowboy festival. But because this seemed rather posh, we decided to go on to the capital, San Jose, yesterday, and at the bus station I saw a guy with a button saying “NO TLC.” TLC stands for Tratado de Libre Comercio — or the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in English. He told me a little about the campaign to keep Costa Rica out of the agreement, and ended up giving me the button.

Today, I decided to go to the University of Costa Rica, and try to find some more information about the campaign against CAFTA.

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