Costa Rica: Urgent need to unify sectors in struggle to confront Chaves’ government and his business mafia

By Bandera Roja Editorial Team

While the details of this statement were being carefully elaborated, there was an important and successful national protest of the Housing Block, a space in which we participate in support of several shantytowns in the Metropolitan Area. The mobilization against the government has deepened due to the unprecedented massive protest movement of the police base against the increase of the working day. They demand in roadblocks or blockades about labor and equipment demands and for the resignation of the Minister of Security. We did not want to delay the publication of this call, which we consider urgent. However, it is essential to consider these two important political events in the analysis of the current situation. We will refer to both of them soon in future issues.

A global context of colossal crisis and war winds

The world situation is becoming more and more heated. On the one hand, a deep economic crisis that has been worsening since 2008 and shows no signs of improving; on the other, there’s the increasingly likely prospect of a third world war. Over the last year the Russian invasion of Ukraine has marked the world geopolitical scenario, exacerbating the crisis on a global scale and the contradictions between the United States, the main (although declining)  military and economic power and China, an imperialist power on the rise. The so-called “trade war” between China and the United States and the possibility of a major war generates blocs and a very complex web of alliances and repositioning of countries. The political and economic situation of Costa Rica, a small dependent country, cannot be understood without this international geopolitical framework, but the world crisis is refracted in Costa Rica, as everywhere else, in a particular way. Chaves’ government is the culmination of a long process of internal struggle to impose the agenda of the neoliberal period dictated by the international financial organizations of the world capitalist system. It is at this moment when it is most clearly evidenced that a deep inter-bourgeois crisis is unleashed, paradoxically, with little capacity of the popular sectors to take advantage of this dispute in the heights to deploy an independent program of struggle.

The imposition of the FTA

There is a strong discussion at the highest levels in Costa Rica and strong social mobilizations to oppose the application of the neoliberal model and structural austerity programs, a long and slow process that began in the eighties of the last century. However, the final sign of the times was the defeat of the workers and popular movement in 2007, when the Free Trade Agreement with the United States was imposed by means of a rigged referendum.

The approval of the FTA is an important defeat for the workers and popular movement, but a sector of the bourgeoisie is also defeated by it, they lost as soon as the application of this treaty started. It is important to characterize which sectors of the bourgeoisie are the losers and winners with the FTA in order to understand the situation we are currently experiencing.

“NO” rally on Paseo Colón one week before the referendum electoral fraud that approved the FTA with the United States.

It is clear that the bourgeoisie that wins and is strengthened in Costa Rica, as in many other countries in the world, is the fraction of the financial bourgeoisie, which manages to break banking monopoly; but with the approval of the FTA, insurance monopoly and the opening in telecommunications is also broken, which allows the entry of transactional companies that associate with local capital to manage and promote new businesses. The losing sectors are mainly the agricultural sector and, in general, the sectors that produce for local commerce. Another sector that is being strengthened is the importing bourgeoisie, due to policies that favor bringing in products from abroad that are supposedly cheaper.

The collapse of PAC

At the beginning, the Citizen Action Party (PAC) emerged as an alternative to the neoliberal project and brought together bourgeois and petty bourgeois sectors that knew they were losing out with projects such as CAFTA. PAC quickly degenerated because the ideological dispute quickly gave way to the possibility of using the state apparatus to enrich themselves, as evidenced by the large number of corruption scandals during the two PAC governments. It is obvious that previously in the governments of the bipartisan era there was more than enough corruption, but when there is general agreement among the bourgeoisie, they all cover themselves with the same blanket. That harmony is broken in periods of severe crisis that threatens with bankruptcy the capitalists who are left behind in the fierce competition. Then the different sectors of the bourgeoisie act against them, since the control of the state is fundamental to guarantee the possibility of some groups or others to use public resources to benefit their own specific interests.

In synthesis, the governments of PAC, a party that emerges as an opposition to neoliberalism, ends up doing the dirty work of the big bourgeoisie, applying policies and promoting laws that Liberación Nacional (PLN) and Unidad Socialcristiana (PUSC) never dared to because of the enormous political cost involved. During the PAC governments, the fiscal package was approved, which is now used as an excuse by the finance ministers to say that they can do whatever they want with the public budget. The defeat of the struggle against the fiscal package also dealt a tremendous blow to the popular and union movement, because after putting hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, the union leaders, instead of putting the accelerator when they could, got into the mousetrap of the supposed negotiation, which ends up wearing down the movement. The anti-strike law was also passed, which at this moment has the public sector unions by the scruff of the neck, which are almost the only ones there are, because in this country in the private sector, people who try to organize are fired the following day.

The Chaves governent undertakes the biggest neoliberal offensive

Chaves comes to close the cycle of neoliberal plundering, finishing the auctioning of what is left of the public institutions and to break the institutions that cannot be sold. Chaves is a neoliberal technocrat, an agent of the World Bank. He worked for 27 years with the World Bank, his last job was as director of the WB in Indonesia, a job he assumed in 2013. He applies privatization policies and policies favoring large corporations to the letter and to the letter. After 100 days in office, Chaves unveils his intentions to sell the BCR and half of the National Insurance Institute (INS). Although he pretends to present himself as an anti-corruption champion, the scandals over the covert financing of Chaves’ electoral campaign reveal the bourgeois factions behind him: financial corporations, importers, among them a very important sector that finances his campaign are the rice importers; also different bus companies that offer public transportation services.

Chaves, as a good neoliberal technocrat, in addition to promoting privatization or de-financing by cutting public institutions, has as his goal the timely payment of the unpayable foreign and domestic debt, to the detriment of the financing of social programs for health, education, housing construction for the poorest people. At the same time, the Government does not try to recover the tax money evaded and avoided by large companies, since it is essential to continue stimulating for them the tax haven they enjoy.

At the end of January, it was reported that the Ministry of Finance referred several cases of tax evasion, one for 11 billion colones and two other cases for approximately one billion colones, and that there are currently 23 active complaints for an amount of 27,405 million colones. On February 14, the European Union blacklisted Costa Rica after it was shown that between 2015 and 2019 corporations have made profits of ¢3.7 billion -three times Costa Rica’s fiscal deficit- thanks to tax avoidance and evasion loopholes. Clearly, although the collection is announced with much bravado, it is a pittance compared to the dimension of the problem.

The inter-bourgeois contradiction is so deep that even some agro-exporting sectors participate or promote the recent mobilizations for the defense of national agriculture in the face of policies that strengthen the importing sectors. Chaves represents the interests of the importing groups, some transporters and financial sectors that dispute the control of the economy of the country and the state to favor their own interests and business. They are in confrontation with the hegemonic bourgeoisie that has ruled the country since the Civil War of 1948. However, in spite of the conflicts, they agree to continue unloading the full weight of the crisis on the backs of the working class and the people. The government of Chaves comes to make a Galician table with what is left and will continue with its policy of cuts and fiscal austerity, promoting cuts and deteriorating social services.

The Costa Rican labor and popular movement has been going from defeat to defeat since the fraud in the FTA referendum in 2007. We need at this moment to bring together all the sectors that are determined to fight against the Chaves government, to defend the right to health care, free and quality public education, the right to have a roof over our heads, the defense of wages, agrarian reform that grants land to those who want to work it, to guarantee food security for the country, instead of protecting food importers who are getting rich off the hunger of the people.

The march for the defense of the national agricultural sector took over about seven blocks of the second avenue, in San José.

A workers’ and peoples’ meeting to organize the struggle

We propose a national people’s meeting to discuss a program and a strategy of struggle to confront the Chaves government and big national and transnational capital. If we do not organize, the government will steamroll each sector separately. We propose, to begin the discussion, the following slogans:

1. Defense of the Costa Rican Social Security Fund. We demand that the government of Chaves and his Minister of Finance Nogui Acosta pay the debt of the Fund to improve health services, especially the surgical dam that causes so much suffering and avoid that the working people have to continue to choose between suffering, even dying, or paying private services that cost an arm and a leg.

2. Against the public employment law that takes away from hundreds of thousands of public sector workers the right to a decent salary and that seeks to weaken the public sector, causing, among other phenomena, ruinous services and the flight of the best professionals to the private sector or abroad. For the defense of wages in the face of the rising cost of living, both for the public sector and the private sector, stop the wage freeze, if prices rise, wages should rise in the same proportion and even more.

3. Defense of the free housing voucher for the most exploited and oppressed families of the working class, against the law that seeks to merge the BANHVI, the INVU and the MIVAH and take away the legal basis for the free housing voucher. For collective solutions to the housing problem that guarantee access to adequate conditions for the development of families, prioritizing a system of public day care centers paid for by the state with extended hours that guarantee access to work for women heads of household.

4. Agrarian reform that guarantees land for those who work it. Promotion of agriculture that guarantees food security, promoting, training and accompanying national agriculture instead of promoting food imports that put the population’s food supply at risk, especially at a time when there is an air of world war that would block international markets, the first of which would certainly be the food market.

5. Control and subsidy of bus fares, control of the service and quality of the units. Nationalization and workers control of the lines and routes that violate the regulations, including the overexploitation of the workers who drive the units. For the student ticket, students should travel for free in the buses so that the cost of the ticket does not limit the possibility of study of any child or young person.

6. Against cuts in the budget for public education, from preschool to university degrees. For the improvement of free and compulsory public quality education. Defense and promotion of public universities.

We invite all organizations determined to fight against the government to march together this May 1st, in a workers, peasants and popular column.

Struggle and create people’s power!

The people, united, will never be defeated!

Only the people save the people!

Central Committee

Revolutionary Workers’ Party

San José, April 21, 2023