Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

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spared the fate of the other Central American countries, largely because
it has no professional army to occupy the country in the interests of the
generals, the oligarchs, and their foreign overseer, but the Reagan
administration is working hard to overcome this defect while laboring to
restore the traditional system in Nicaragua. Lester Langley observes that
“Costa Ricans, who have suffered no American military penetration and
only isolated cases of Washington’s political chastisement, are the only
truly pro-American people in Central America” (elite groups aside). 93
With a little help from their friends in Washington, this should soon
change as Costa Rica goes the way of the rest of Central America.
The current pro-American mood in Costa Rica derives not only from
the lack of US intervention and the sensible rejection, until recently, of
substantial US-trained domestic armed forces, but also from the fact
that the Costa Rican economy is in a shambles, with one of the highest
per capita debts in the world and ¾ of its exports used to cover debts to
foreign (primarily US) banks, so that the economy remains viable only
because it is “rolling in aid from Uncle Sam,” receiving the highest per
capita aid of any country apart from Israel (a case to itself). “This year’s
aid of $198 million equals the total of U.S. support for Costa Rica in the
18 years before the Nicaraguan revolution,” the Wall St. Journal
comments, quoting a leading Costa Rican figure who says that “Our best
industry is the Sandinistas,” as the US works to shore up its anti-
Nicaraguan alliance. “We’re recycling money from the U.S. government
and paying it out to U.S. banks,” the president of the central bank of
Costa Rica observes; in other words, the US taxpayer is paying US
banks via the aid program, permitting Costa Rica to “combine
bankruptcy with relative prosperity”—as long as it toes the line. 94
A secret State Department report of May 1984 urges military aid to
Costa Rica “to prevent any backsliding into neutralism” and to “push it
more explicitly and publicly into the anti-Sandinista camp.” The report
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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