by Rod Hughes
The first-year congressional honeymoon between the two major parties may be on the rocks, reports the country’s leading daily newspaper, La Nacion.
The two blocs of congressmen in the unicameral Legislative Assembly were united by their fervent backing of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) with the United “States and its attending 13 bills to enable the country to bring its laws into alignment with the pact.
But, with CAFTA now awaiting a nationwide referendum vote in September, some of the urgency has faded from the political bedmates’ relationship. And strange bedmates they are—the National Liberation Party with its history of socialist leanings and Libertarians, the minimal-government far right.
Laberation’s majority party floor leader Mayi Antillon admits recent contacts between the parties has faded to “minimal.” She blames friction within the Libertarian ranks and a change of style in the opposition from one of form to a more belligerant sort.
Her Libertarian counterpart, Luis Antonio Barrantes, claims the parting of the ways stems from National Liberation’s “lack of tact in negotiations.” The Libertarian party whip cited National Liberation’s alleged lack of interest in supporting Libertarian pet projects such as the granting of land titles in marginal areas.
During the first year, hopes were raised that congress could avoid the squabbling and crippling divisions that made the life of previous President Abel Pacheco miserable by making it all but impossible to get bills passed, according to the leading English-language publication The Tico Times. (To make it worse, Pacheco, despite being a psychiatrist, was unable to unite even a coalition in an extremely splintered congress of tiny parties.)
An unusually large percentage of party leadership in congress the first year rested in women deputies, usually more amenable to compromise and placing less emphasis on party politics and more on unity, the paper noted.
But the hard-line Barrantes replaced the Libertarian’s Evita Arguedas, a woman with a commitment to helping the Arias Administration make the country more “governable” than it had been. (President Pacheco had, during his term, complained that the 2002-2006 congress was made up of deputies with their own agendas, unwilling to listen or agree.)
La Nacion said that Barrantes came into his party whip post with an attitude of exerting more “control” over the Arias Administration’s policies and even flirted with creating an opposition bloc by joining with the Citizen Action Party—ironically, the chief congressional opponent to CAFTA, making even stranger bedfellows than the Libertarian-Liberation alliance.
An even more bizarre event in the rocky Libertarian relationship with the government’s Liberation party was the re-election of Liberation’s Francisco Antonio Pacheco to the presidency of the congress, a post he held during the first year-long session. It took two ballots to accomplish, unusual in that in most years the backstage maneuvering has largely been done by the time of the vote.
The second-ballot victory was made possible by the invalidation of the votes of two Libertarian congressmen who signed their ballots but did not complete them. (A strange congressional rule in such voting is that an invalid ballot is assigned to the frontrunner in the count.)
Was this their way to vote in favor of the Administration party’s candidate without actually casting a ballot for him, thus avoiding alienating their own hard-line Libertarian party members? Some observers thought so.
During that balloting, Arias’s Liberation party gained an impressive four of the five top congressional posts, but The Tico Times reported that the seeming landslide heralded problems for Arias in the future, since he had to resort to courting and winning the Social Christian Unity Party’s four votes and had won the top congressional seat only with a struggle.
That analysis seems to be proving a prophecy.

by Rod Hughes
The Social Security Administration (Caja) estimates that some 73% of construction workers in Guanacaste province are without insurance for health, accident and death. The reason given for contractors getting away without paying compulsary insurance is a lack of inspectors.
The Caja not only administers all public hospitals but is charged with providing retirement pensions and in treating injured persons not covered by the National Insurance Institute (INS), another government agency. The Caja recently has begun cracking down but the building boom in the northwestern province, especially hotels, resorts and vacation homes, swamped the Caja’s personnel.
To cover the entire country, the Caja only had 280 inspectors but this will change as the institution adds more, according to chief financial officer Manuel Ugarte.
What this means to those who finance their own construction is that, to be safe, employers must take care that sub-contractors enroll their workers for Social Security benefits. The Caja has the power to shut down a business for non-payment.
To be fair, some contractors have obtained INS insurance against on-the-job accidents, preferring the faster service INS provides, cutting down on the time a worker must be absent from his job for medical reasons. But this provides no legal excuse not to pay into the Caja because the payment also builds retirement pensions.
The Caja found the lack by comparing its income from the province to the number of construction permits obtained from the Municipalities and estimating the number of workers needed.
But not all the new inspectors–some 50 more will be hired next year–will be dedicated to construction activities. The number of uninsured farm workers is astonomical, according to Ugarte.
To illustrate the building boom, Guanacaste’s Santa Cruz canton (county) alone accounted for 9% of the nation’s total construction in the past 12 months, increasing during that time 131% comparied with the year before. The canton’s alcalde, (the equivalent of a country judge in some U.S. states) Jorge Chavarria, is studying a plan to make worker insurance a prerequisite in granting a building permit, according to the daily newspaperm La Nacion.