by Rod Hughes

The Tico Times star columnist, Mitzi Stark, recently did a profile on the woman depicted on the 10,000 colon banknote. While most countries have the faces of founding fathers or ex-presidents on their paper currency, it is characteristic of Costa Rica to have honored Emma Gamboa, an educator and textbook writer.

If you look closely at this predominantly blue note, you will see the lady, who died in 1972, depicted with a slight pucker to her lips, as if she is slightly disgusted to see the need for currency with such a high figure on it. In her day, the highest banknote was the rarely-seen 1,000 colon red banknote and the colon itself was worth 6.80 to the dollar. The five-colon note was lavishly designed, one of the most colorful and beautiful pieces of currenty ever printed.

But that was before a series of presidents had borrowed from foreign institutions as if there were no tomorrow. Tomorrow came, crashing down in late 1980 on the head of President Rodrigo Carazo, in the form of a falling world coffee prices, the chief export. The country was bankrupt, unable to pay its debt interest. Carazo, who had been dealt a bad hand, played it badly, discarding solutions offered by his economic wizard, Leonel Barruch, in favor of selling off the gold reserve in a vain attempt to stave off devaluing the colon.

By the end of 1981, local companies with dollar debts were closing their doors. To add to the insult, local mechanics were drilling holes in the aluminum five and 10 centimo coins that had subdivided the colon, in order to use the coins as washers. (Imported washers cost more than the coins.) The official rate at the banks was still 6.80 to the dillar but the colon, exchanged illegally on the street, was 20, then 30, then 50 and finally 80 at the beginning of 1982.

It was not until President Luis Alberto Monge took office in May, 1983, that local banks raised their official exchange rates and began renegotiation of the debt with foreign lending institutions. By then, centimo coins were gone and the colon coins were basic. (Even those are collectors’ items now.) The recovery was being engineered by the International Monetary Fund, basically a U.S.-run institution. The State Department later used the debt to pressure Monge into helping the Contras fighting against Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime while Monge did his best to keep the country neutral, at a distance from Nicaragua’s civil war.

Emma Gamboa’s bill is a product of a series of mini-devaluations of the colon that wound up seeing the currency creep up to more than 500 per dollar. Thus, the rare 1,000-colon note became slightly less than $2. Today, with dollar troubles in the north, the rate is in the high 480s per dollar and so the lady’s bill is a bit more than $20.

In her day, issues were more social and less economic. Costa Rica was recognised as a poor, Third World country and few thought much about it. Cash was rare in rural areas and campesino (farm) families got most of the food they did not raise by bartering crops and livestock. Older folk were more apt to bury their savings in a hole on the farm than in a bank.

The issues that gripped Ms. Gamboa were women’s suffrage (the female vote did not come until 1948 after she and better educated sisters lobbied for it it) and improving education. Dissatisfied by the beginning readers’ primers of her day, she wrote one that became standard throughout the land, “Paco y Lola.”

The text has fallen out of favor in today’s Costa Rica, considered sexist, columnist Stark writes. The beginning sentence is quaintly antiquated, “Mama amasa la masa.” This translates to, “Mama kneads the dough,” and raises an image of mother in a smoky kitchen with an open wood-fired stove, working the corn meal she has ground, making breakfast tortillas. Gamboa’s family says they hope to update the book eliminating stereotypical, obsolete role model for women.

Personally, we cannot visualize how it can be rewritten. The phrase, “Mama buys a loaf of bread on her way to her seat in congress,” seems a bit advanced for beginning readers…