<strong>by Rod Hughes</strong>

A special commission from Costa Rica is scheduled meet next week with the Venezuelan government to try to reach an agreement that would ease Costa Rica’s purchase of petroleum. Before the rapid increase in oil prices, the government turned a cold shoulder to President Hugo Chavez’s overtures but President Oscar Arias, showing his colors as an astute political pragmatist, has softened his position lately.

Early in the second Arias Administration, Chavez and Arias exchanged barbs from afar, Arias calling the Venezuelan chief of state a dictator-in-the-making and Chavez urging Costa Rican voters to reject the Central American free trade pact in a referendum last October. Relations remained frigid when the two countries rejected each others’ ambassador appointees.

But, in an unexpected but politically creative stroke, Arias responded by appointing leftist history professor and expresidential candidate Vladimir de la Cruz as ambassador to Venezuela. As the weekly <em>The Tico Times</em> noted, de la Cruz is a former Communist party member far to the left of Arias but friendly to Chavez’s point of view. Arias, with his free-market neo-liberalism, was not expected to do this. In fact, he has dragged his party, some members kicking and screaming, to the right on many issues, co-opting the already weakened Social Christian Unity party at times.

For some months the leftist public employees’ union ANEP and deputy Jose Merino have been urging, probably without much hope, to at least reach an accord with Chavez about petroleum. Their hope is to get longer term, softer payment conditions and to obtain security that the country would receive fuel regardless of world market conditions. Energy Minister Roberto Dobles admitted that he hoped to get the same breaks as do members of the Chavez-sponsored Pertrcaribe group, a membership in which Costa Rica rejected earlier.

The daily newspaper<em> La Nacion</em> noted that Petrocaribe member nations pay 50% of their fuel purchases within 90 days and the rest over a 25 year period at a bare 1% interest. As Jose Leon Desanti, president of the national refinery (RECOPE) observed, until three months ago, the Venezuelan petroeum company Pedrovesa allowed this country three months to pay for its oil but after a restructuring of the company it is all but cash on the barrelhead, a mere week, which forces RECOPE to resort to costly loans. Since the country gets 90% of its fossil fuel from Venezuela, this puts an economic crimp in the budget.

Meanwhile, Chavez plays Lady Bountiful to countries unblessed with petroleum reserves. <em>The Tico Times</em> reported last Friday that Chavez is offering to pay all expenses for Costa Ricans to have eye operations in Venezuela—transport, accommodations, surgery and all. This underscores a deficiency in the socialized medicine here where residents must wait up to a year for catarract surgery and this offer must rankle the Arias Administration but there is little that can be done to offset the offer.

It is wonderful what public relations miracles one can accomplish if one is sitting on a comfortable petroleum reserve…

by Rod Hughes

The source of the funds belonging to the Colombian narco-terrorist guerillas (FARC) that were confiscated by police in a Santa Barbara de Heredia home came from the kidnapping of two pharacuetical firm, according to two newspapers in Colombia. The $480,000 was found moldering in a safe at the home.

The police were acting on tips from the Colombian armed forces after they had raided a FARC camp and captured several laptops containing correspondence between top officials of the Marxist guerrillas. The discovery set off a domino effect leading nowhere—a special congressional investigation that turned up plenty of implications but no solid evidence and the ouster of Costa Rica’s Security Minister for incautious remarks he had made in the aftermath.

Although FARC began its existence three decades ago as a Marxist group, it later dabbled in private enterprise, if one can call kidnapping and cocaine-smuggling a business. This year it deteriorated further with the deaths of three top leaders, one in the raid into Ecuador that netted the computer files. References to Costa Rica are mostly limited to 2001 and it appears that, after the Costa Rican government rejected an attempt to establish a FARC office here, the group lost interest in this country.

The articles in the Colombian newspapers El Tiempo and El Espectador revived the subject this week, but revealed little new data. The stories revived mention of former Security Minister Rogelio Ramos as being a FARC contact but Ramos had only met with FARC representatives briefly on instructions by then-President Jose Figueres who hoped to broker a peace in civil war-torn Colombia. When it became obvious that FARC was interested only in establishing a safe office here, the Figueres administration dropped the subject abruptly.

(Cursed are the peacemakers, for their names will forever pop up in old e-mails.)