As you may or may not know, Toni and I are shopping for a new country. This week we are in Costa Rica, pinching the fruit and examining the wildlife. Compared to Mexico and Guatemala, Costa Rica is what can only be described as mellow, so much so that the Donovan song from the last century is running through my mind. We are not, of course, high, nor did anyone ever become high from smoking banana peels, at least that I know of. The damn things wouldn’t light.
Costa Rica does not the violence of Mexico, which is not merely a facet of the recent drug cartels, but a characteristic that stretches back through the Revolution and the Conquest to thousands of years ago when hearts where ripped from ribcages to feed the gods and make it rain. When we visited Michoacán earlier this year, we saw machine gun carrying soldiers on every major street corner, a fact that still did not keep the local drug cartel (la Familia) from lobbing hand grenades in the Independence celebrations last year, nor did it keep the Familia from delivering the severed heads of policemen to a local mayor. Horse heads are nothing in comparison.
When we visited Guatemala, it was celebrating ten years of peace from a bloody civil war that lasted over 20 years, where Mayan farmers were slaughtered by the army and the paramilitary forces trained and funded by the U.S. Peace was nice, but there were far too many unemployed men with machine guns making a living by robbing and kidnapping people. Plus, there was a sharp dividing line between the poor and the rich, i.e. Indians and the mestizos in the cities versus the white elite. People have described it as a parfait, with brown at the bottom, chocolate in the middle, and white on top.
So coming to Costa Rica seemed like a perfect thing to do. They disbanded their army in 1948, have a robust national health service, great doctors, a good educational system and a better economic balance than most of Latin America. It is stunningly beautiful. It is warm and green with birds, lizards and orchids. It is also the cleanest Latin country that we have yet to visit. Unlike Mexico, they don’t throw the garbage into the ravine behind the house. One quarter of the country is set aside in national parks and reserves, and the country as a whole takes conservation very seriously. And you can drink the water.
We are staying at a bed and breakfast in Alajuela, a town in the country’s central plateau. It is about 82° and as it is at the end of the rainy season, cloudy with an occasional rain. The green is almost hallucinogenic, and lizards the size of squirrels bask in the sun, slouching away only when the cars threatens to flatten them into a Balinese shadow puppet. I hope that Toni will take some pictures of the flowers tomorrow to send with this letter.
The country is stunning, but at the same time, Costa Rica seems very bland, more interested in “la pura vida,” which literally means “pure life,” or the good life, than anything more serious. There are no poets or writers of note. The one painter that the Costa Ricans can claim, Francisco Zuñiga fled the country to Mexico to really become an artist. There is, perhaps, more of a relationship between violence and art that we do not wish to admit.
In some ways, Costa Rica is a country without a past, as earthquakes have destroyed many of the old churches and buildings. One Tico (what Costa Ricans call themselves) told that the people just aren’t interested in the past. Costa Rica is also without the rich indigenous cultures of Mexico and Guatemala. There are only a few small tribes of Indians on the Pacific coast. Evidently, there were fewer Natives when the Spanish arrived, and most of those were killed by European diseases rather than by the sword or slavery. There are none of the magnificent ruins of either Guatemala or Mexico.
Of course, being in a country for three whole days makes me an expert. The people are very nice and very helpful. One feels very safe. Everyone, it seems, speaks English. Perhaps at our age, this is what we need in our dotage.
¡Pura Vida!
