Positive changes
A 'Greener' Costa Rica
Costa Rica used to be the country with the highest deforestation rate in the year 1989 due to the focus of agricultural growth and cattle ranching. However, ever since tourism started in the past 20 years, many people have moved from the rural region to the urban region, stopping their agricultural and cattle ranching activities for other jobs. This has helped in improving the forest cover significantly over the years. Also, due to the focus of Eco-Tourism in Costa Rica, many of the local have come to realize the importance of the environment and the effort it takes to help preserve them. There is an increase in nature parks and also the usage of clean energy. Their willingness in doing so has helped changed the attitude of Costa Rican's in general to become a more environmentally friendly society.
Capital City, San Jose, has become more colourful
Before tourism started, San Jose was the victim of unplanned and rapid urbanized growth, causing it to look messy and chaotic. There was little priority given to integrating and protecting the environment, creating common spaces, waste management, transportation, architecture and public arts, and housing, which made San Jose look really pathetic. However, since the start of tourism, significant changes has been made to the capital city. Changes such as improving traffic flow, infrastructure and even reforestation plans made San Jose a much better place to live in.
Increase in Government vigilance
"Over the years, the country’s human capital has been growing by leaps and bounds, and in many fields Costa Rican professionals are as good as any. One of the ways this is reflected is in better public administration. While pockets of serious inefficiency remain, government incompetence is steadily giving way to professionalism and effectiveness. One need look no farther than the management of the economy in these times of crisis. While many banks and other financial institutions in the U.S. were discovered – too late – to have been grossly mismanaged, it appears that in Costa Rica public and private financial institutions are weathering the crisis in relatively good shape, mainly thanks to serious and sober management and effective regulation."
Negative changes
Costa Rica has become increasingly dangerous
With the increase in locals moving from their rural areas to the urban areas, breaking up of ties within families, the proliferation of firearms and drugs, it is hard to keep the place safe. The rise of gangs is also one of the main reason locals and tourist alike feel threatened about living in Costa Rica. It came to a point whereby tourist have to bring their valuables along with them even if they are staying in a hotel as the rate of pickpocketing and stealing is relatively high.
Coasta areas has lost its natural beauty
As mentioned before in the "Disneyfication" post, the coastal areas has been trashed and swamped with tourist activities, giving rise to a whole bunch of hotels, motels and infrastructure. This destroyed the natural beauty of the coast line and threatens wildlife and locals alike.
Increase in Sex Tourism/Child Exploitation
This article in on Child Sex Tourism in Costa Rica. It is posted in 20th February 2000.
"SAN JOSE, Costa Rica -- The two little girls, arms folded across their chests to
ward off the unseasonable chill of the night, eyed the pair of tall gringo men
speculatively, then offered tentative smiles. ``So, what's up?'' the older of the girls,
barely 13, asked.
``Nothing much,'' replied one of the men. ``What's up with you?''
``Well, I don't know,'' the girl answered, her smile bolder. ``You look like you might
be looking for something. You look like you might want to buy something.''
``Buy something?'' the man asked, glancing around the deserted downtown
street. ``Like what?''
``Like us,'' the girl said. ``Like us.'' Both kids dissolved in giggles, but when the
older one looked up again, her face was solemn. ``Thirty dollars for my little
sister, 15 for me.''
Meet Stephanie, 12, and Ivette, 13, two members of a fast-growing Costa Rican
workforce: child prostitutes. The country that prides itself as Latin America's most
stable democracy and the inventor of ecotourism is becoming the hemisphere's
best-known playground for pedophiles.
Every night, as many as 2,000 underage prostitutes walk the streets of San Jose
or cater to more affluent clients behind the walls of stately homes converted into
brothels in the city's best neighborhoods, according to an estimate by an
organization that deals with the problem at an international level. Other children
take off their clothes to pose for lewd pictures that will be passed around the
Internet -- which, until last year, wasn't even a crime in Costa Rica.
The problem has been developing for years. In 1996, the World Congress Against
Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, held in Stockholm, issued a report
noting that Costa Rica was becoming an important center for child prostitution,
but the government's failure to act has generated increased international scrutiny.
Last year, the United Nations Human Rights Committee issued a report saying it
was ``deeply concerned at the high incidence of commercial sexual exploitation of
children in Costa Rica.''
Now, the Inter American Commission on Human Rights is scheduled to hear a
formal complaint from Casa Alianza, a Costa Rican organization designed to help
the child victims of sexual exploitation, charging that Costa Rica has failed to
take action to stop ``the increase in the commercial sexual exploitation of boys
and girls.''
Costa Rican diplomats have been frantically maneuvering to get the March 3
hearing canceled, thus far with no success.
The boom in child sex is being fed from outside, by tough new laws in the United
States that target pedophiles; a crackdown in Asia, the traditional child-sex
capital of the world; and the Internet, which has made it easier for pedophiles to
swap information.
It is the ugliest corner of a much larger sex-tourism industry that, authorities
acknowledge, is bolstered not only by bit players like taxi drivers and travel
agencies, but pillars of the Costa Rican economy, like large hotels owned by U.S.
chains.
And it has exposed what some social workers say is an embarrassing secret:
that children have long been sexual playthings here, and not just for foreigners.
Eighteenth-century documents show that complaints of sexual abuse of children
reached the Spanish Inquisition. And a 1999 U.N. report on child prostitution
noted: ``The sexual exploitation of children has a long history in Costa Rica.''
For much too long, social workers say, this society has looked the other way as
children are victimized by the adults who are supposed to protect them.
``I know, I know, the image of Costa Rica is that we're very well-educated, very
refined, with close-knit families, little poverty, hardly any illiteracy, no crime, the
Switzerland of Central America,'' says a bitter Magda Ramirez de Castro, a
counselor who works with child prostitutes. ``All that is a myth. Maybe it was true
10 years ago, but it's not now.''
As the world's purse strings tighten in the wake of the Cold War, Costa Rica is
finding it hard to support the welfare state it built when foreign aid rolled in as
regularly as the tide. The result is increasing poverty (over 27 percent of the
population, according to the United Nations) and disintegrating families -- 41
percent of all children are born to single mothers.
ECONOMIC FACTOR
The tough times have driven many women to prostitution, which is legal here. And
although the minimum age for prostitution is 18 (and sexual contact of any kind
with a child under 15 is illegal), underage boys and girls have inevitably come
under the sway of a booming sex industry that some officials believe has become
a vital sector of the economy.
Snaps Lilliam Gomez, Costa Rica's chief sex-crimes prosecutor: ``It's not just
that the government is not trying hard enough to solve this problem. Parts of the
government are actually promoting this. We have advertisements for escort
services in our own tourist brochures. Escort services! For God's sake! What are
we doing here?''
Costa Rica is by no means the only Central American country with a child
prostitution problem. The length of the isthmus, children can be found selling sex
to escape extreme poverty and dysfunctional families:
In Nicaragua, hundreds of teenage girls line the shiny new Masaya Highway
commercial corridor on Managua's south side every night, sometimes yanking
their blouses over their heads to lure customers from the passing traffic.
In Honduras, a Philadelphia special-education teacher, David Gary Rounds, was
arrested in a hotel room in La Ceiba, on the country's north coast, with two
12-year-old boys in his bed. Police found a diary in which Rounds described a
long string of sexual encounters with Honduran kids as young as 8. Wrote
Rounds: ``How many times I have shook my head and said, this is heaven! So
many boys.''
In Guatemala, a survey of street children aged 8 to 14 found that 56 percent didn't
know the name of the first person with whom they had sex.
But in Costa Rica, child prostitution seems to be out of control. When word got
out last September that Casa Alianza -- the Latin American affiliate of the New
York-based Covenant House, a private organization that works with street children
-- would investigate reports of child prostitution, the group fielded 130 complaints
in just three weeks.
``The complaints get more horrifying the more you look into them,'' says Bruce
Harris, Casa Alianza's British-born executive director. ``We've got a case of a
12-year-old girl being prostituted by her aunt, $120 for three hours. But she only
works until 1 p.m. After that, she has to go to her sixth-grade classes.''
A confidential report prepared by the Costa Rican government and obtained by
The Herald makes it clear that the child-sex trade here has become blatant to the
point of fearlessness:
Recruiters from one brothel routinely work right in front of the U.S. embassy,
using a limousine as bait for kids walking home from elementary school.
Neighbors report that a woman in San Jose's Paso Ancho neighborhood is
running a brothel for teenage prostitutes -- including her own daughter -- in her
house. But police haven't tried to enter the home because of ``threats'' from the
woman. The report notes that hers is an ``aggressive family.''
Parents who answered an American man's classified ad in Costa Rica's
English-language weekly Tico Times, seeking writers and illustrators for children's
books, were instead offered $8.50 an hour to bring their kids by for nude photo
sessions. Some did.
But it's hardly necessary to read secret government reports to learn the details of
Costa Rica's commerce in juvenile sex. Anyone with eyes can see it -- from the
teenage hookers who scurry around the lobby of the downtown Holiday Inn,
conferring with bellboys about likely customers, to the taxi drivers who seemingly
know the address of every brothel in town.
``Taxi drivers know everything, because they form an important part of the
network,'' explains cabbie Juan Carlos Rojas, who says he's never taken
customers to brothels but nonetheless was able to point out several on a drive
through San Jose. ``The taxi driver carries the customer to the pimp, the
customer pays the pimp $100, and the pimp gives the driver $40. Everybody
makes a buck. This country is as corrupt as it comes.''
BOYS INVOLVED TOO
Not every child works in a brothel. Stephanie and Ivette, the two little girls who
propositioned a Herald reporter, are part of a group of about two dozen kids -- half
of them boys -- who can be found on a downtown street corner almost every night.
Ivette was bundled up in a jacket against the low-60s temperatures, but her
younger sister Stephanie was dressed like a tiny doll version of a hooker, in red
hot pants and a tightly cut halter top that left her small midriff bare.
The two girls said they've been working as prostitutes for a year, since they were
aged 11 and 12. Even then, they weren't the youngest on the corner; that would
be 9-year-old Iliana, who left home after being repeatedly sexually molested by an
uncle and now lives in a nearby hotel on her prostitution earnings. (Iliana came
racing over when she saw a foreign man on the corner, but backed away quickly
when she discovered he was a reporter.)
Ivette and Stephanie view their work matter-of-factly. Ivette says she's been with
``a ton'' of men over the past year. ``Am I happy? Well, the men are happy
afterwards. Me, I just do it for the money, to help my parents.'' Asked what kind of
jobs her parents have, she replies softly: ``Me.''
Both of them still live at home. In other Latin American countries, child
prostitution is practiced mainly by street kids. In Costa Rica, however, the
overwhelming majority of the children go home to their families, according to a
U.N. study in 1999.
ABUSED AT HOME
Ivette, Stephanie and Iliana are in no way unusual. Most child prostitutes begin
before their 12th birthday, and 82 percent of them were sexually abused at home
before turning to prostitution, according to at least one U.N. study.
``I go over and talk to those girls a lot,'' says an American who operates a
business near downtown San Jose's Morazan Park, where scores of underage
prostitutes line up on Saturday nights to await customers from nearby bars. ``And
every single one of them tells the same story: She decided to come to the park
so she could get paid for what she was having to give away free at home. There's
something wrong in this country.''
Many Costa Ricans psychologists and social workers agree. ``There's a vast
amount of incest in the Costa Rican nuclear family,'' says Marta Montel, who
works at an outreach program for street children. ``People are only just starting to
see it as a problem. People have always known it's not exactly normal -- they
know in their hearts that there's something wrong with it -- but it was always seen
as something traditional, not something to worry about.''
Concurs psychologist Jorge Sanabria of the Child Welfare Institute: ``The idea
that foreigners created this problem is wrong. What has happened is that there is
a culture of sexual abuse of children in this country, and foreigners have taken
advantage of it.''
INTERNET SITES
Nonetheless, there's no question that foreign pedophiles are flocking to Costa
Rica. Recent criminal cases have implicated British, Egyptian, Swiss and U.S.
nationals in child prostitution and pornography. Internet sites devoted to sexual
tourism brim with comments about Costa Rican nightclubs, hotels, and street
corners where young prostitutes can be found, complete with prices.
A typical exchange on a site called the World Sex Guide: ``The Hotel Park was
kind of interesting . . . We notice that most of the ladies sitting out in a little
courtyard were about 16 or 17.''
Costa Rican officials believe the influx of foreigners seeking underage sex is being
driven in part by the general increase in tourism here (1.25 million visitors are
expected this year, three times as many as in any other Central American
country) and partly by the increasingly difficult conditions for pedophiles in other
parts of the world.
Countries like Thailand, long notorious for child prostitution, are cracking down.
And some American pedophiles have been driven overseas by the wave of states
passing so-called Megan's Laws -- named for a little girl raped and murdered by a
neighbor -- that require anyone convicted of a sexual offense against children to
register his address as a public record.
There was only one conviction in all of Costa Rica last year related to sexual
exploitation of children. ``The statistics don't look very good,'' admitted Attorney
General Carlos Arias.
Part of the problem is that child prostitution is a difficult crime to investigate. ``It's
not like we can just look at a bunch of girls on the street and say, hey,
prostitution, let's make some arrests,'' said Jorge Rojas, acting head of the Office
of Judicial Investigations, the Costa Rican equivalent of the FBI. ``You've got to
infiltrate people and demonstrate that it's really taking place.''
INEFFICIENT JUSTICE
Police also have to deal with a creaky and inefficient judicial system. Until late
last year, possession of child pornography was not illegal and the statute used to
go after customers of underage prostitutes applied only if a child was ``virginal.''
That is, unless cops made arrests on the very first day a little girl worked as a
prostitute, they could forget it.
Even with tougher new laws, liberal judicial policies on bail make it easy for
foreigners to stay one jump ahead of the police. Cops busted a child-pornograpy
studio in December, seizing a huge quantity of photos and video and computer
equipment. But the two Americans arrested during the raid were quickly released
on $300 bail. ``They're not supposed to leave the country, but do you suppose
that will stop them?'' asks attorney general Arias.
But perhaps the toughest obstacle facing the police is that they get no
cooperation at all from the children they are trying to help. ``When I've helped the
police do a raid on a bar, the people who are the angriest are not the clients, but
the girls themselves, the prostitutes,'' Harris admits. ``The way they see it, we're
taking their livelihoods away. When they see themselves as an employee rather
than a victim, it's very difficult to help them.''
Johanna has been working as a prostitute for 18 months. She's been beaten up
three times and extorted for sex and money by rogue cops on many occasions.
Still, she kept working the streets four nights a week even through a pregnancy
and has no intention of stopping now.
FEEDING HER CHILDREN
``Everything I do is for my two little ones at home,'' she says. ``They have to eat,
they have to have milk, and I don't know what else to do.'' A few minutes later,
after the photographer left, she was back on the street, laughing and chatting with
potential clients.
It is the seeming intractability of the young prostitutes themselves that authorities
and social workers find most frustrating. ``Getting them to quit is the most difficult
part,'' says Ana Cecelia Fuentes, a social worker. ``The money is good, and even
if they don't like the work, they don't want to lose the money . . . There are no
easy answers.''
But, almost everyone agrees, the country has to come up with some. ``When we
started promoting ecotourism, we learned that we can't cut down trees and
destroy the rain forest, because then the tourists won't come,'' warns the tourism
institute's Castro. ``Can you imagine how much greater the damage is going to be
if we start destroying Costa Ricans themselves?''
The story was supplemented by reporting from Herald special correspondent
Catalina Calderon."
Conclusion
It is hard to say if tourism has been a bane or a boon in Costa Rica due to the fact that both the pros and cons brought about significant changes in the country itself. Sufficient controls over the country need to brought about if the industry is ever going to expand. The underlying problems have to be solved in order for the industry to really maximize its full potential. Without the help of the government, locals and most importantly the tourist in alleviating the problems in Costa Rica, it is hard for the country to ever see tourism as a viable source for the economy.
