Costa Rica

The Boil-down: Costa Rica is a Central American country about twice the size of Maryland, with a population of five million. Bordered by Nicaragua to the north, and Panama to the south, its eastern shore faces the Caribbean Sea, and its western shore, the Pacific Ocean. With an average elevation of 2300 feet, Costa Rica is lush with mountain rain forests, and it exports coffee and pineapples to the rest of the world. It is home to the motto pura vida, or "pure life." There is cultural emphasis on living simply, close to the earth, and increasingly, independent from government control. There are also pervasive masculine values and an emphasis on traditional gender roles. A crisis of official corruption has renewed populist zeal for political reform. Varying sources suggest Costa Rica initially lost between half and two thirds of its rain forest before implementing world-renowned protection programs which may still have holes in them. Moreover, Costa Rica has gained 450,000 ex-pats from the United States, and 329,000 from neighboring Nicaragua. Infant mortality is elevated due to HIV, and twenty percent of its citizens live in poverty--a problem that grows the farther from urban areas people live. Applying previous concepts such as narcissistic gravity, this blog entry will focus on four of Costa Rica's problems: mental health, corruption, unfair labor, and human trafficking.

The Details: Humans in Costa Rica are currently affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in ways unsurprisingly familiar to the rest of the world. This includes their mental health. The Costa Rica News quotes a study by Cenat et al (2021):

..anxiety, stress associated with the risk of being infected, the death of loved ones, the infection of loved ones, containment and isolation measures, loneliness, physical and emotional fatigue, job loss, financial insecurity, poverty, excessive consumption of information, and the vulnerability of certain disadvantaged groups are potential risk factors that can contribute to developing mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, insomnia, somatization, social phobia, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, self-harm, suicidal ideas and inappropriate behaviors.

In studies prior to the pandemic, Costa Rica showed up statistically as a nation with some "first-world" problems; for instance, the greatest causes of combined death and disability include diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. Similar to other Latin and Caribbean countries, Costa Rica scores lower in depression and domestic violence than mean comparison groups. However, given their traditional gender roles and mistrust of institutional systems, it seems fair to question whether Costa Ricans might underreport to authorities of their own country, not to mention representatives from the World Health Organization. Our own observations led us (non-scientifically) to make our own inquiries while in Costa Rica earlier this year. Consistent responses indicated that people are worried about what the COVID-19 pandemic is doing/will do to the economy and their health; they are also deeply concerned about government corruption with an election on the horizon.

Statistics about the mental health of Costa Ricans, when given by agencies considered world authorities, seem to largely focus on money allocation and the number of available clinics and hospitals, and who tends to occupy inpatient beds. Nothing jumped out at us screaming quantitative effects of psychological trauma or the treatment of related posttraumatic symptoms and syndromes. And as stated above, why would citizens who mistrust officials and value their privacy report their symptoms and the antecedent events contributing to them?

Why would they, that is, until their rights are violated to the point of violence against large groups of citizens. As recently as within the past three years, Costa Ricans have witnessed the power of narcissistic gravity to suck resources and punish non-conformity. I'm referring to non-indigenous peoples stealing land out from under the feet of the indigenous Bribri and Teribre peoples. (Sound familiar?) When these indigenous cultural groups spoke out in protest, they were met with violence. Multiple assassination attempts eventually took the life of Bribri community leader Sergio Rojas in 2019. It comes down to narcissistic gravity powered by the greed and entitlement of non-indigenous people who outnumber and/or are abetted against their victims. The message is: Stay quiet about what we are doing to your resources, and we will let you live nearby--however, do make sure you stay away from the land we illegally claimed. Documentation of this land theft began in the 1960s, and even though the Indigenous Law was passed by the government in 1977, Costa Rica's official response appears to be far more talk than action--which at its best is indecisive, and at its worst, implies corruption. Indigenous people in this crisis have been attacked; they have been violently punished for fighting back, which results in immobilization with fear. This is Stephen Porges' definition of psychological trauma, and it is the direct result of narcissistic gravity within the PVR triangle (for a refresher on these concepts, please read the earliest blog entries.) Myriad corruption of the government by drug traffickers, other crime groups, and powerful individuals and corporations is an ongoing deep concern for many Costa Ricans since it has better come to light in the past decade or so.

A local man told us that people are increasingly mistrusting of their government there, and fear their protected rain forests will face destruction as a result. Central American history bears these fears out as reasonable. Speaking of mistrust of the government, although the press has described various ongoing processes by the government to supplant corruption, and although that government has made high-profile references to investigations, arrests and convictions, many crimes have gone unsolved and suspected perpetrators have remained unapprehended. One manifestation of Costa Rica's U.S-supported efforts to fight crime is the SVA, which we saw in action, up close. Costa Rica's Air Vigilance Service (aka Air Surveillance Agency) of the Ministry of Public Security acts in lieu of a military branch of service like the Air Force, which the country does not have. Now, the SVA has aided Drug Control Police (PCD) and the Costa Rican Coast Guard in seizing record numbers in illegal drugs (35 tons of cocaine alone in 2019;) at locations such as OSA beach, held in massive shipping containers. So what would possess them to bother with our flight gate at the Daniel Oduber International Airport in Liberia, on the "clean" side of TSA? Some monumental drug busts have been documented as occurring near Costa Rican airports...anyway, there Lori and I were waiting for boarding to be announced, when an SVA officer encouraged a young, unwieldy German Shepherd to molest our persons (along with everyone else's) and upset the contents of our bags as we sat like fish in a barrel, instructed not to move. This was clearly a training exercise for the exuberant young dog; had they asked, I'd have advised sticking to the use of PCD officers as confederate "bad guys" for training purposes, far away from the public. The experience was re-traumatizing for both Lori and myself, and affected every person waiting at our air terminal. The above example embodies groupthink, and serves as another example of narcissistic gravity through the abuse of power. Drug trafficking demands that something be done to stop it. The same corrupt government institutions whose officials secretly make deals with drug cartels to profit from drug trafficking also posture themselves in the papers as heroes in the "war on drugs." SVA command, run by men who were socialized and trained to control situations rather than connect to humans, decide to conduct a training exercise on the passengers at our flight gate--paying customers who had already given dues by going through routine security via TSA. All were intimidated, some terrorized into silent compliance. As one fifty year-old woman was ushered into a side room, only to be returned to her seat in a rather ruffled, disheveled condition, Lori very quietly but stringently pointed out that anyone who protests or resists them could be charged with a crime without grounds and without recourse (but with planted physical evidence--Drug Control Police would be the officials most capable of possessing and manipulating controlled substances with complete immunity), and unjustly detained or imprisoned. The very narcissistic government plagued by corrupt dual standards was using military force on innocent passengers from many nations, abusing power to frighten humans into submissive conformity. Are the drug cartels "scared straight" by these operations? (Keep an eye out for a future Eyes Wide Open entry on sociopathy.) While supporters of PCD efforts, such as the Guardian Angels' tweet about a guy in an airport with cocaine strapped to his chest suggest that operations like the one carried out at our gate by the SVA are vital to the war on drugs, I doubt that the PCD found even 16 pounds of the touted 116-ton drug prize post-security at Oduber. With futility, I might advise them to keep checking the cargo holds of planes and shipping containers, and stop harassing the public with these chest-thumping displays. Let's shift our attention from drug trafficking to human trafficking. According to the Borgen Project, through the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the U.S. government has provided other nations with standard implements to "monitor and combat" sex trafficking. This initiative employs a tier system which uses incentives or cost response to motivate participating nations to meet standard requirements. As of 2020, Costa Rica was evaluated below the most desired Tier 1, at Tier 2, with a reported risk of falling to Tier 3. If it does not do things like identify more trafficking victims, investigate and convict more traffickers, and use more of its allocated anti-trafficking budget, Costa Rica could face losing foreign assistance and fall into "international disrepute." They are encouraged to thoroughly train officials and take more steps to convict child sex tourists. Scarce resources, masculine gender roles, and tourists looking to exploit sex trafficking victims are factors driving a Costa Rican industry that commits ongoing, very serious human rights violations, not just against Costa Rican residents. Busts of sex trafficking operations have not uncommonly freed groups of women almost exclusively from nations such as Nicaragua or the Dominican Republic. The Eyes Wide Open blog makes a priority of illustrating the way previously described concepts such as narcissistic gravity and groupthink contribute to ill phenomena which the public does not want to believe exist to the pervasive extent that these phenomena do. This includes the corruption of government offices to facilitate atrocious violations of human rights against citizens of other countries and even their own nation. One unfortunately relevant case has just come into focus: seriously damning evidence (it generally presents as more legitimate when people on both sides of the debate do things to confirm that something bad happened) points to the reality that Fairfax Virginia police officers protected a sex trafficking ring in exchange for sexual access to the victims--a reality which higher-ups took steps to hide. One of the sex trafficking victims was from Costa Rica. Sadly, she seems to have been lured to the United States on the promise of performing occasional sex as an escort to wealthy American men for loads of money. Instead, her passport was forcibly confiscated and she was required (for low or zero pay) to perform sex for up to seventeen customers per day--more than three times the reported average coerced "work load" of sex victims trafficked in the U.S. My trauma therapy model predicts that narcissistic gravity makes it easy, and likely, for narcissists and sociopaths to rise to the top in any institution--this includes families, businesses, schools, churches, and police departments. The very police chief in Fairfax Virginia who was praised by politicians and activists for "transparency and his willingness to support criminal charges against officers accused of wrongdoing" has resigned after being accused of taking an active role in covering for two officers (the two that the department threw to the wolves? I'm not convinced there were only two cops abusing power) who helped keep the trafficking ring from being busted so they could sexually exploit imprisoned females, including the young woman from Costa Rica. To deny the existence of sex trafficking in Costa Rica--or ANY country exhibiting the symptoms of such a horrific, systemic violation of human rights--would require clinical levels of personal or social unwellness; an individual would need to use toxic intrapsychic defense mechanisms; moreover, fraternal networks of people (families, friends, communities) are quite capable of installing and maintaining the group delusions they would need to pretend this problem isn't there. But it's there. Thanks to an impressively healthy journalistic freedom in that country, Costa Rica's press has covered myriad examples of law enforcement intervening on sex trafficking rings, and the stories of victims surviving the industry. One research firm asserted that the sex trafficking of teenage girls has become the main source of revenue for some Costa Rican communities. To me this indicates that the socio-familial moral fabric of those towns is woven with blind mysogynistic/codependent denial, or ravaged by the desperation of poverty. But sadly sex trafficking is not the only kind of human trafficking in the world, and Costa Rica exemplifies this difficult-to-believe reality.

Let us consider child labor (which does not require human trafficking, but may be achieved by such means), defined by the Oxford English dictionary as "the use of children in business or industry, especially when illegal or considered inhumane." As Lori and I were returning from a guided tour of natural attractions like the Rio Celeste waterfall, a large farm truck pulled out onto the narrow winding road ahead of us. We asked our tour guide, a local named Brian, about the truck and the young people crammed like sardines into its high, boarded cargo bed. Brian explained that they were field workers for a major pineapple plantation. "They are Nicaraguan," he said. We looked closer; many of these were children no older than Lori's ten year-old son. I've spent summers performing unskilled labor for blue-collar bosses. There are some rough personalities tossed into the mix of every such work environment, the bosses are uncouth, and company policies (to include workers' rights) are treated like naive suggestions from front office sissies. How could these Nicaraguan children, displaced from their homes to the north, be guaranteed labor rights, or even general safety? Highly organized, official examination of Costa Rica reveals that the legal framework there has gaps that interfere with adequately protecting individuals under age fourteen from the worst forms of labor, including recruitment to the military. The sex industry, coffee production, pineapple farming and military forces all exploit children within the borders of Costa Rica. The nation's government lacks proficiency in protecting workers of various ages, not just children. Dole, a company already charged by the populace of environmental abuses, has been accused of violating the rights of its laborers in the areas of low wages, extreme working conditions and problems in the health services provided by the company; the issues have been considered more egregious given the pandemic. Costa Rica is a nation with a rich cultural heritage, a broad climatic palate boasting frosty mountain tops and lush tropical rain forests, and world-class coffee beans harvested by exploited children. The same country offering tantalizing local cuisine unfortunately also offers up its women and children for victimization through sex trafficking. This land is home to eight indigenous peoples as well as nine thousand varieties of flowering plants, eight hundred different ferns... and resource-raping government corruption. Its citizens have fought hard for decades to preserve the land and their right to exist on it...and still stand to lose both of these to unscrupulous power-brokers. What You Can Do: Even in support of a nation three thousand miles away from the U.S., you can get on board to pressure, assist, and or support movements already in existence. The government has increased its inertia in chasing corruption. Actively support Costa Rican citizens with your own voice for government reform in that nation. Visit, financially support, emulate and spread the word about environmental efforts such as the PachaMama Ecovillage. Raise public awareness of human trafficking in any effective way that occurs to you. Before doing any of that, you and your friends (aided by earlier blog entries) may need to take another healthy step forward by confronting your own denial. If you are willing to believe all the evidence of harm against humans in Costa Rica, perhaps you will then accept the stomach-turning reality of what horrible things men in power are doing to people within your country's borders...in your own community.