To desperate Nicaraguans, the prosperity of neighbouring Costa Rica makes it seem an accessible El Dorado. They can enter its labour market just by boarding a bus. But Costa Rica can barely cope with the influx.
They waited at the intersection of two alleyways, as they do late every Monday afternoon. The entire population of the village of Santa Rosa del Peñon, in northern Nicaragua — the old, along with women and children — hoped for news from Costa Rica. When the post office truck raced up in a cloud of dust, there was a rush to grab a letter, an envelope containing banknotes, even perhaps a small refrigerator.
Santa Rosa’s émigrés help their families from across the border. The village survives on remesas (remittances), between $10 and $100 a month to buy food, schoolbooks and medicine, or to repay loans. Since Nicaragua cut its public services, the costs of education and health have weighed heavily on a population unable to afford them. Despite a steady inflow of dollars, Santa Rosa just about survives and is grateful to do so.
Although traditionally dependent on agriculture, the region now produces almost nothing. “We grow enough to feed ourselves,” said Julio Antonio Niño, standing at the centre of his weed-infested fields. “What’s the point of doing any more? I can’t afford to build a well or an irrigation system: credit is too expensive at 40% interest and the banks will only lend to major landowners with solid collateral.” Nicaragua’s small farmers all say the same. The crisis that followed the collapse in 2000 of coffee prices on the international market has made the situation worse.
Half the population lives in rural areas, so the previous government’s official line was that it cared about farmers. In practice its economic policies concentrated on opening frontiers, competing internationally on the agricultural export market and attracting foreign investment in the free zones; outgoing president Enrique Bolaños claimed these created thousands of jobs. Niño’s response to this programme was to say: “Sure, some women from the village went off to work in the textile maquilas [factories carrying out subcontracted work]. It’s better than nothing, but the wages are half what you can earn in Costa Rica.”
It is estimated that one in five from Santa Rosa has emigrated to Costa Rica. Half a million Nicaraguans are thought to be living on the other side of the San Juan, the river that marks the frontier, and another 300,000 are scattered elsewhere, in total some 14% of the population. For destitute campesinos (farmers), Costa Rica is the obvious destination, just a few hours away by bus. Until recently no visa at all was required and even now it costs only $10 to enter the country legally.
Many Nicaraguans have abandoned their original trades to work as peons on Costa Rica’s banana, coffee, pineapple, sugar and orange plantations: Costa Rica has been successful in diversifying its labour-intensive agricultural industry. “Starting in January I pick coffee, then I move on to other crops,” explained Niño who, exhausted by the difficulty of working the land at Santa Rosa, crosses the border illegally every year. “Then, like other people around here, I come back to sow frijol (beans). I make at least twice what I could hope to earn in Nicaragua.”
Historically, Nicaraguans have always used their southern neighbour as a refuge during periods of violence, such as the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza or the war of the 1980s. But since the 1990s migration has been driven by the struggle for economic survival. After the fighting ended, demobilisation left thousands of soldiers and counter-revolutionaries on the loose, with no resources or future, in a country whose economy was unable to integrate them. At the time, the Nicaraguan government’s priority was to privatise and reduce public spending. Costa Rica, which has impressive economic growth and a remarkably well-developed welfare state for Central America, seemed an accessible El Dorado.
“Emigration served the government’s interests,” said Martha Cranshaw of RNSCM, an NGO supporting migrants and their families. “It relieves the pressure created by unemployment. But we are beginning to understand its real impact upon our country.” This analysis is not always popular.
The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations are banking on remittances to relaunch growth; but investigations on the ground in Nicaragua show that the $900m sent home every year by émigrés, which is more than the country exports, mostly serve to make the day-to-day existence of an exhausted population just bearable.
As Cranshaw pointed out, the RNSCM has also noticed another, less immediately quantifiable, story: “We are becoming aware of the thousands of individual tragedies represented by the emigration of a family’s father or mother. Collectively, this phenomenon is having a huge impact upon Nicaraguan society.” Fragmented families, children brought up by sometimes-absent grandparents, missing father and mother figures, children dropping out of school: what sort of society is Nicaragua creating?
In Santa Rosa, a grandfather whose son and daughter-in-law have left but did not take their children said: “My wife and I are bringing our grandchildren up, but there’s often a lot of tension with them and we worry a great deal about our son, who is in Costa Rica illegally. Sometimes I think there has to be another way. It’s too risky, for us and for them.”
It is easy to spot the Nicaraguans in the Costa Rican capital, San José. Their skin and hair seem darker and they always carry a rucksack containing overalls or a change of clothes. The men work in construction or as security guards, the women as domestic servants. Most of the seasonal workers, and many of those who have been here for several years, have no papers. Only half the “Nicas” in Costa Rica are there legally. Almost all have experienced the harsh working conditions on plantations. Most of the 4.3 million “Ticas” (Costa Ricans) regard the Nicas primarily as an unwanted 10% of the population.
“Costa Ricans see Nicaraguans as a negative value,” said Carlos Sandoval, a sociologist at San José university. He argued that Costa Ricans construct their identity around powerful ideas: the paleness of their skin, which is unusual in Central America (and is the result of the fact that there were only a few indigenous inhabitants when the conquistadores arrived); the stability of a democracy that has experienced little violence; and the success of an economy and a welfare state unique in the region. Costa Rica and its neighbours describe it as “the Switzerland of Central America”. Its ecotourist-friendly beaches and jungles, its relaxed way of life attract prosperous foreign tourists in numbers its neighbours can only dream about.
From this perspective, Nicaragua, with its wars and chronic instability, seems an immature country condemned to poverty. In Costa Rica, the dark-skinned immigrants are often described as violent, ignorant and untrustworthy, as thieves and alcoholics. “No seas Nica” (“don’t be an idiot”) is a common insult. This latent xenophobia, and correspondingly strong anti-Costa Rican feelings in Nicaragua, rises to the surface each time the perennial conflict over navigation rights on the San Juan river turns nasty. But the countries manage to get along, or at least they used to.
