by Rod Hughes

President Oscar Arias returned from his diplomatic trip to mainland China with his shopping bags bulging with cash for his country. Besides talking his hosts out of $20 million in immediate aid for victims of the disastrous September flooding, he received $27 million in longer-term projects.

But the list of goodies did not end there. Besides laying the groundwork for possible trade pacts, Arias and his host, strongman Hu Jintao also inked a contract with the Chinese Petroleum Corp. to refurbish and expand this country-s Recope Refinery at Limon. The refinery is getting long in the tooth, having been bought from Allied Chemical by president Jose “Don Pepe” Figueres decades ago in a flurry of nationalizations.

One hope for this trip was that China might buy up part of Costa Rica’s national debt, but so far no official word came from it. The morning daily La nacion has quoted Foreign Trade Minister Marco Vinicio Ruiz as saying that China might begin buying debt bonds as soon as early next year but probing by the English-language weekly The Tico Times was unable to turn up any confirmation.

For the president, the trip probably serves as sweet recompense for the wave of criticism that lapped at his feet five months ago when his government severed longtime ties with Taiwan in order to establish diplomatic relations with mainland China. “Certainly now China is going to show greater interest in Costa Rica than it showed before establishing diplomatic relations…” said the president.

China is currently Costa Rica’s second largest trading partner (behind the United States) and trade is up with that country 31% already this year, something on the order of $1 billion. Coinciding with the visit, Costa Rican companies attended the huge trade fair in Canton this week and, according to the Foreign Trade Ministry, brought back $140 million in contracts for such exports as tilapia, coffee, bananas and shrimp.

Nearly all the cabinet who have anything to do with trade and foreign policy accompanied Arias. And naturally they had a day off to play tourist, visiting such sights as the Forbidden City, the imperial tomb housing hundreds of life-size terra cotta warrior statues as well as the Great Wall. It was reported that the chief executive had to beg off on the latter junket when the Achilles tendon inflamation that plagued him during the runup to the Oct. 5 CAFTA referendum flared up.