by Rod Hughes

According to the newspaper Al Dia, few thought that Costa Rican congressmen would return from the holidays on time, but they did. However, they did not get much work done yesterday, confining themselves to jocular speeches, greeting each other effusively and doing a bit of housekeeping on various amendments to pending bills.

Certainly they have enough on their plates, what with a Feb. 29 deadline staring at them to pass the remaining bills to implement the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) passed in the nation’s first referendum last October. Most of those bills have yet to be reported outside of committee.

A good indication of the reason these bills take so long to approve is demonstrated by Peter Krupa’s analytical report in the Dec. 14 edition of the English-language weekly, The Tico Times. An orphan amendment to the controversial telecommunications bill caused a minor explosion.

The amendment would have made the opening of the government’s communications monopoly apply not only to electronics such as cell phones and the Internet as CAFTA specifies, but to land lines as well. Even pro-CAFTA deputies reacted with horror.

In the end, ruffled feathers were smoothed but no one would own up to having submitted the offending amendment. But this was only one of the disputes these CAFTA implementation bills have sparked. The newspaper reported in the same edition that the law protecting trademarks and copyrights also caused a minor explosion with its four- to six-year sentence proposed for violators—way too harsh, said critics.

So far, only two of the 11 CAFTA bills have made it past scrutiny. The Arias Administration has a bare 38 pro-CAFTA votes and if only one of those deputies is absent, they do not dare put the bills up for a vote. That is why no CAFTA implementation was done yesterday—three members of the majority were absent.