Costa Rica for Sale
By Ruben Alberto Ortiz Vega
(Taken from La Republica newspaper)

Costa Rica is for sale and already almost completely sold. Costa Ricans, go to any beach in our country and ask who the owner of any given property is. Almost invariably the answer will be: it belongs to a gringo, a European or a foreigner.

To a lesser degree that same thing is happening in our plains and mountains. Look anywhere in the country you go and you will see the fateful and disastrous “For Sign” sign. Travel around this country and ask: Who owns that business, that plantation, that industry. You will hear that it belongs to gringos, Germans, Colombians, and each day that passes there are less Costa Ricans who own property. How much is really ours? What is left?

The generations that put up the For Sale signs around this country in the last decades, especially since the 1970s, will be remembered by future Costa Ricans as the generations that sold the country.

They sell our beaches, plains, mountains, rivers, volcanoes, forests, bodies, minds, dignity and even worse, our consciences.

If you want to make a good list of what is being sold in this country, ask a pirate taxi driver at the Juan Santamaria Airport. In less than five minutes he will tell you everything that is for sale from pieces of land to the bodies of our teenagers.

Ask what any dry rocky outcrop of land costs near the beaches (that were ours) in this country. A million dollars “Sir”; “but, do you speak English, humm...?”

Awaken Costa Ricans. We have lost so much and continue living the illusion that this country is ours. Let’s do something now. Let’s begin by recovering our national conscience, rescuing it from the sleepiness of the dollar it has fallen into. Let’s reconsider what is happening or very soon we will become true foreigners in our own country.

Meanwhile… I ask the last Costa Rican that leaves the beaches of Costa Rica to please bring the national flag with them.