CENTRAL AMERICA: Costa Rica Shows How, Again

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One way to defend democracy: get rid of the army

"What is this? Carnival?" marveled an American tourist in Costa Rica's flag-bedecked capital, San José. It sure sounded that way. All day long, happy motorists jammed the main drag, Central Avenue, while tapping out beep-beep-beep, beep-beep-beep on their horns.

Thousands of other Ticos, as Costa Ricans call themselves, danced joyously in the streets. It was not Carnival, however, but a bash celebrating another honest election in a part of the world where political honesty and elections are all too rare.

In Costa Rica's seventh peaceful presidential race in the past 25 years, an underdog candidate scored a stunning upset against the dominant party. San Jose Economist Rodrigo Carazo, 51, running under the banner of the center-left Unity Party, managed to snare a shade more than 50% of the 755,000 votes cast; he edged out Luis Alberto Monge, the candi date of the long-ruling National Liberation Party, who got just under 49%.

Carazo said that the results confirmed an "enormous desire for change" in the mountainous, West Virginia-size republic. Indeed, the election proved that Costa Ricans not only wanted a change but were assured of getting it at the ballot box—something voters in other Latin American countries cannot always count on.

During the campaign, Carazo at tacked the ills that had accumulated during eight years of National Liberation rule, including proliferating bureaucracy, reckless government spending and creeping socialism. Another issue was outgoing President Daniel Oduber's connections with Robert L. Vesco, the expatriate U.S. financier who fled to Costa Rica in 1972 to avoid facing U.S. charges of embezzling $224 million from a Geneva-based mutual fund he controlled. Carazo vowed to have Vesco expelled "for the nation's health." But Carazo's victory mostly reflected the voters' concern about the danger of continuismo, the permanent entrenchment in power of the Liberation Party if it was not turned out for a spell.

The party has dominated Costa Rica's political life since 1948, when Party Founder José ("Pepe") Figueres beat back an attempted Communist coup that was launched on the issue of a fraudulent election. Subsequently, Figueres and Successor Oduber pushed through laws that have made Costa Rica what Ticos believe to be an almost tamper-proof democracy.

Institutionally, the key to the Costa Rican electoral system is a five-member group of independent jurists known as the Tribunal Supremo de Elecciones, or T.S.E. Six months before voting day, and after the parties have made their nominations, the T.S.E. takes over the election machinery and assumes operational control of the country's 6,000 civil and rural guards; on election day, it dispatches some of the guards to the polls to maintain order but confines the rest to their barracks. The tribunal also oversees a highly refined campaign-financing system. Before the campaigning begins, the treasury distributes funds to the parties according to a formula based on the number of votes they got in the previous election; one of Carazo's triumphs was the fact that his Unity Party managed to win even though, at $353,000, its campaign kitty was one-seventh as large as the Liberation Party's.