CHAPTER FIVE
THE BIRTH OF CODECE:
COMMITTEE FOR THE DEFENSE OF THE MOUNTAINS OF ESCAZU
Introduction
Along with the adoption of the concept of sustainable development in the 1980s, there was a burgeoning of non-government organizations (NGOs) in Costa Rica. These were equally held by the international official sectors (WCED 1987; UNCED 1992), as well as by those sectors critical of the "establishment" (PAE 1993), to be among the most important actors in the implementation of sustainable development. Because of their privileged position as intermediaries between local communities and international development aid, NGOs were considered to be an efficient alternative to public agencies in the delivery of programs and projects. Moreover, NGOs and community organizations were not only seen as entities to be consulted by the State and by development assistance agencies, but were also considered to have the right to participate in decision making activities aimed at sustainable development.
This chapter begins a case study with the birth of CODECE, Committee for the Defense of the Mountains of Escazú (today Association for the Conservation and Development of the Mountains of Escazú), a community organization and later an NGO that emerged in the county of Escazú in the 1980s in response to the vulnerability of a large sector of the local rural community when faced by an environmental threat. While originally not concerned with sustainable development as such, CODECE eventually appropriated the concept, chiseling it to a critical perspective, where local empowerment stood at the center of its efforts. This perspective implicitly assumed a concept of "value" that was not determined solely by economic terms, but rather acknowledged the value of diverse forms of "capital" (Bourdieu 1986), which were differentially available to social actors, to be appropriated and manipulated by them in exercising power. I point out that the empowerment of local social actors, as the centerpiece of CODECE's praxis towards sustainable development, involved taking hold of and manipulating available economic capital, such as international development aid, as well as less tangible forms of capital, such as social capital and cultural capital, as the means of exercising power to transform the lived context, in order for it to become more sustainable in social, environmental and economic terms.
This chapter traces the creation of CODECE which represented an initial process of local actor empowerment, leading the organization to embark on a prolonged struggle for what soon came to be conceived of as sustainable development. The empowerment of local actors, as the driving concept of social sustainability within the critical perspective, was achieved in the case of CODECE when some able individuals took on a situation threatening to the local environment and transformed it into an opportunity to ignite a sense of collective identity and solidarity among local residents. This strengthening of social capital became a means of empowerment in combating this and other environmental threats. Romano Sancho, a campesino-raised political activist and charismatic leader, Paulina Chaverri, a city-bred member of the academic intelligentsia, Francisco Mejía, a local teacher and son of an immigrant shoe-mender, Rodolfo León, a local farmer proud of his rough campesino heritage, were some of the individuals who played an important role in the creation of CODECE as a means of local empowerment.
Access to economic resources played a relatively minor part in this process. In contrast, these actors made strategic use of social and cultural capital collectively accessible to them as a means of empowerment. Discourse, as one of the primary means of exchange used to "endlessly reproduce" social capital (Bourdieu 1986:250), was employed not only to transmit pertinent information, but to generate a collective sense of outrage, to highlight collective interests, and to create a collective identity as means to collective action. In the process that lead to the creation of CODECE there was a clearly defined antagonist against which a collective identity was erected. Social capital then, in the form of networks of family, friends and acquaintances, as much among local farmers, as among academics and professionals, was made use of not only as an efficient means of gathering and distributing information, but also as a source of the constituents of a new collective social actor, CODECE, which then concentrated a greater density of social capital as a means of exercising power. Cultural capital, "embodied" as capacities and "dispositions of the mind and body" (Bourdieu 1986:243) of the individuals in these social networks, provided a reservoir of accumulated years of education, technical know-how, and academic prestige that crossed class lines, which was also accessed and wielded strategically as a means to further empowerment.
The Setting
In the 1970s conservationist thought began to take root in various sectors of the nation. Students fought mining concessions that implied large scale destruction of natural resources, and the State firmly established the National Park System. The higher elevations of the Mountains of Escazú, which still had patches of forest and which served as micro-watersheds for the aqueducts of the surrounding counties, were declared a Protection Zone in 1976.
During this period Escazú began to achieve a certain international renown, not for its Protection Zone, but rather for being the destination for retirement, or a "resting place", as its original name signified, for figures of international notoriety, such as fugitive financier Robert Vesco during the late seventies, and Sandinista Comandante Cero, Eden Pastora of the Nicaraguan Revolution during the early eighties.
The turn of the decade was a time of high expectations among the Left in Costa Rica, impelled mostly by the Nicaraguan Revolution and the victory of the Sandinistas. Not by chance, this was also a period of heavy United States intervention in the country. The United States support for the Nicaraguan Contras concentrated its military structure in Honduras. However, in Costa Rica it also imposed strong controls of the mass media, generating a Cold War fear of the "red threat". This, in turn, justified the United States to militarize the Costa Rican national police forces, as well as set up semi-clandestine military camps and air strips in the northern border regions of the country (Berry 1989). These pressures, along with State persecutory measures and a relatively weak base of support contributed to the eventual demise of the organized Left in Costa Rica.
Among the leadership of the dying Left, some continued working for causes of social justice creating organizations that worked for human rights, the rights of indigenous groups, the rights of women, and the rights of small farmers. Others did an about face and joined the ranks of the political establishment. Some left the country to resume their university studies, while others returned to their roots to till the soil.
The organized political Left died in Costa Rica before the Berlin Wall fell, but many of the ideals that had earlier prompted these people to organize for social justice remained, although assuming less ambitious proportions. The political project went from taking power at the State level, to carrying out concrete activities among the grass roots at the non-governmental level. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) began to have an ever greater role on the periphery of State power. At the same time worldwide, coming from a diametrically opposite current, the neoliberal hegemonic powers proclaimed and imposed a reduction in government and at the same time promoted a greater support for activities carried out by NGOs. These factors coincided, encouraging the growth of NGOs and an increase in the numbers of projects aimed at strengthening the private sector, at protecting the environment, and at filling the gaps left by the State in matters of health, rural development, and education.
It is in this national context that a number of individuals played an important role in the emergence of the community organization, CODECE, in the town of San Antonio de Escazú. During my close involvement with CODECE, which spanned a decade from 1989 to 1999, both as anthropologist doing fieldwork and as committed member, I was able to piece together part of the lives of some of the actors whose personal histories were integral to the birth of CODECE. In this sense, three persons stand out: Romano Sancho, Paulina Chaverri and Rodolfo León.
Romano Sancho
When I first met Romano at the Seminar on Environment and Community action in 1989, I found him to be an engaging speaker. A few days later at one of CODECE's meetings, Romano quickly involved me in the work of the organization making me feel a welcome participant. These were some of the traits that I felt made him a charismatic leader. Romano Sancho was born of campesino parents in 1948 in the rural town of Buenos Aires de Palmares about 40 miles north of San José. The second to last son of a family of 19 children, of whom 11 were women, Romano was designated by his father to be the one son who should study and become a professional. Romano entered the University of Costa Rica in 1968, a year marked by heated student protests worldwide. As a student of Political Science, Romano joined the Palmareño University Student Association where he was quickly elected president. This opened the way in Romano's life for a prolonged period of intense social and political involvement, to the extent that he abandoned his university studies in favor of his activism.
In 1971 Romano helped form the Costa Rican Socialist Party. From his leadership position in the Party, Romano organized banana plantation workers unions and campesino syndicates to fight for their rights. During his work with the campesino grassroots, Romano eventually started to become concerned with the vanguard and elitist tendency within the Party, and critical of signs of corruption and abuse of power among some of the leadership. In 1978 Romano was expelled from the Party, along with half of the membership. Subsequently, Romano and some fellow comrades created the Movimiento de Trabajadores 11 de Abril (MT), in honor of the spirit of the national hero Juan Santamaría, who gave his life the 11th of April of 1856 to fight against the subjugation of Costa Rica by the invading American fortune seeker William Walker.
Believing in the power of the proletarian working class to initiate a class struggle, after soaking up literature by Rosa Luxembourg and Gramsci, Romano and other members of the MT in 1980 opted to find work in factories in order to be shoulder to shoulder with the proletarian workers and start the revolution from the grassroots. But only one year later, disillusioned by the lack of class consciousness and revolutionary spirit among the factory workers, the MT was dissolved by its members, all of whom went their own way as each saw fit to best serve their revolutionary ideals.
During one of our walks together in the Mountains of Escazú in November of 1992, some twenty years after Romano helped create the Costa Rican Socialist Party, when I asked him about that period of his life, Romano recalled how in the early 1970s members of the Party had "grandiose ideals of sparking a proletarian revolution to transform Costa Rica into a socialist nation where the ideals of solidarity, justice and equal opportunity for all would reign, overthrowing a Capitalist system that spawned greed, exploitation, poverty, dependence, injustice and a throng of other social ills." He explained that the revolutionary movements in the sister countries of Central America further inflamed the Left in Costa Rica. The victory of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1979 raised the hopes of idealists and activists fighting for social change. Romano recalled smiling, that "in the closed circles of the leftist vanguard, the possibility of taking State power seemed to be just around the corner". But in his estimation, the virtual nonexistence of a popular Leftist base in Costa Rica, along with the overwhelming anti-Communist propaganda machinery deployed by the United States, and internal repression against the Left, made the Leftist movements of Costa Rica falter. Moreover, internal strife and corruption disillusioned many who became cynical.
"I worked a total of two years" Romano recalled, "in a factory that produced agricultural pesticides. I spent my days mixing chemicals in vats, inhaling poisonous fumes and temporarily losing my fingernails in the process due to the toxicity of the substances I handled. I learned about the processes involved in the production of agrochemicals used in the countryside where I grew up. I learned about the working conditions for factory workers. And I learned about class consciousness, or rather, the lack of it, in the very setting Karl Marx suggested would inflame it."
Romano's experience in the factory was "as disillusioning" he told me, "as his experience in the Party." He discovered that his fellow workers were uninterested in their condition as a class, or were unable to assess critically their interests as such, or see clearly who their class enemies were. "They were aware of being exploited, but accepted their condition as natural and inevitable. They were more concerned with football, than with the politics and economics that affected their daily wages." (Field notes, November 10, 1992).
In 1982, after two years of swallowing poisonous fumes, and finding himself disconnected from what he had envisioned would be a conscious proletariat, Romano moved to the Mountains of Escazú in the foot hills of San Antonio, where one of his sisters had inherited a piece of land from her late husband. He returned to the roots of his upbringing, to the productive activities he knew as a child and youth. In his own words, he was "like the goat that inevitably seeks the hills". Romano returned to farm the land, to eke out a living in the countryside, and where he could take time to reassess his views on society, as well as reflect on the direction of his own life.
As any other campesino might do, Romano bought a calf and fattened it for market. He also planted beans, corn, and squash for home consumption, as well as other vegetables, such as tomatoes, to sell at the local Feria, or farmer's market. Romano's affability and charm along with his spirit of cooperation and solidarity made him well liked in the community. He also came to know and befriend many of the local farmers. Soon, his organizational capabilities got the best of him, moving Romano to organize and help found the Farmer's Cooperative of San Antonio de Escazú, COOPASAE in 1983. The Cooperative, which benefited the farmers by selling tools, fertilizers and pesticides at more accessible prices, and benefited members by generating an income from the sales, would become instrumental, some years later, in the birth of CODECE.
Paulina Chaverri
I met Paulina in early August of 1989 during my first summer fieldwork in Costa Rica. Romano had invited me to visit him and his wife before I returned to New Mexico. A few days before my departure I went to their house hoping to interview Romano about the future plans of CODECE. Soon after I arrived, he became engaged in hearty conversation with a team of biologists who were carrying out a biological inventory of the Mountains of Escazú and had just returned from a week's hike in the mountains. Paulina was busy preparing coffee for the returning team, so trying not to be a bother, I offered to help her in the kitchen. Quickly she asked me the nature of my research, and I explained that it involved analyzing experiences of community environmental protection. Between sandwiches, empanadas and cups of coffee, Paulina told me much of what CODECE had done and was planning to do. She also looked among bookshelves that sagged under the weight of papers and books for several documents about CODECE that she thought would interest me. Although I learned little about Paulina's personal history during this brief visit, it became evident that she managed all the information regarding CODECE and that she played an important role in the organization.
Indeed, in the years that followed, I benefited from Paulina's written records of CODECE's history which became a key source of information for much of my research. We also ended up working side by side on many matters concerning CODECE and sustainable development, in general. During the hundreds of accumulated hours we spent working together and discussing philosophical, social, political and strategic issues, we also exchanged information on our personal lives. Paulina, born in 1961, was the second to youngest of eight children of very strict and conservative parents. While her father was a nationally respected scientist, it was her mother with only a sixth grade education, who demanded that all the children, and especially the daughters, receive a university education. All of Paulina's brothers and sisters became professionals, some of whom were professors at the university. Paulina began her university studies in history in 1978 and it was here that she and Romano met. To the chagrin and disapproval of her parents, Paulina became active in the Movimiento de Trabajadores 11 de Abril, becoming the black sheep of the family. Unheard of for girls her age and class, Paulina moved away from home to live on her own. Often Romano came and stayed with her, and at times her apartment became the temporary headquarters of the MT. Paulina graduated in 1982 and entered the Master's program the following year. When Romano moved to San Antonio de Escazú, Paulina soon joined him, giving up her graduate studies with the birth of their first son. It was Paulina's links with the university, however, that later became instrumental in the birth of CODECE.
Rodolfo León
The first time we met at a CODECE Board meeting in one of the classrooms of the public primary school in San Antonio, Rodolfo León was friendly towards me, in contrast to what I later discovered to be his generally adversarial attitude, especially towards professionals. The moment he learned that my grandfather was a local farmer whom he had known and admired, Rodolfo León granted me the benefit of any initial doubt he might harbor against a virtual outsider. But in due time Rodolfo was to continually question my integrity, as he openly did of everyone else, visibly relishing his challenges that seemed to be founded on what he considered were simple "maicero" (peasant) principles, such as hard work, willingness to dirty one's hands, frugality, shrewdness, and solidarity. During the numerous encounters I had with Rodolfo, these were virtues he would bring up as a measure of the person or issue being discussed.
One of the first times I went to interview Rodolfo in April 1992, I found him working the field around his house, along with three other workers, preparing it to plant coriander. He had forgotten me from when we met some years earlier. Before even answering my greeting, he confronted me.
"Are you an agricultural engineer?" he asked rhetorically, noticing a professional-looking spiral notebook I carried. "Because just not long ago an agricultural engineer came by to give me some professional advice, and all he left me were his foot prints all over the row I had just planted. I had to chase him away before he ruined my whole day's work!"
I reintroduced myself and Rodolfo recalled who I was. But it was only when I picked up a shovel to help out while we spoke, that his attitude changed, and he opened up, sharing his ideas with me about politics, economics and the environment.
"People talk a lot about the fall of the Soviet Union," he said, "and that it had to happen, that it had to fall because of its own weight. I don't know much about these things because I haven't studied politics, but if you ask me, I prefer Socialism. I agree with private enterprise because it's what pushes things forward, but there also have to be benefits for the poor. As long as the laws don't change, we are not going to achieve anything. If it were up to me, this whole mountain should belong to the Municipality. When the Fennis family [from The Netherlands] bought 35 hectares for 52 million colones, the Municipality should have said "We'll buy this!", and distribute it among 35 campesino families. There should be a law that only permits foreigners to buy one hectare of land, and no more. I don't have anything against foreigners, but that's a law that should exist. It would be great to organize a land invasion with some thirty squatters on the Fennis land, don't you think?"
"Do you know what's wrong," Rodolfo continued, "with those of us who are concerned about ecological matters? There's too much talk and too little action. Maybe I'm too much of a "maicero de campo" (country bumpkin) and really backwards, but for me, deeds are more important than words. Actions speak louder." (Field notes, April 1992).
This early conversation with Rodolfo was revealing about the man who despite his sixth grade education was a respected figure among local campesinos. Dedicated exclusively to farming, Rodolfo was able to provide his wife and three sons with a relatively comfortable living. At age 55 in 1992, Rodolfo León had some six hectares in San Antonio, two of which he dedicated to vegetable farming and the rest to coffee, he had a spacious house, and a pick-up truck he used to transport his vegetables to the wholesale market and the Ferias. He was active in several local and national organizations, with leadership positions in some. When I met Rodolfo León in 1989, he was vice-president of CODECE.
It was Rodolfo's confronting attitude, as well as his willingness to propose unconventional solutions to problems, and his commitment to action, as revealed in this early conversation with him, that made Rodolfo a leader among the local farmers and a key figure in the early history of CODECE.
The Birth of CODECE
As I recounted in Chapter One, I first learned about CODECE when I attended a Round Table-Seminar on Environment and Community Action in June of 1989, while I carried out preliminary field work in Costa Rica for my dissertation proposal. With notebook in hand, I tried to capture the presentations of the three panelists, the last of whom was Romano, where he recounted the story of the birth of CODECE and its work to date. Romano's presentation revealed some of the elements that made the emergence of this community organization possible. This story, which later I often heard retold, was like CODECE's "creation myth" where its ideals of community awareness and community mobilization were achieved, and successfully wielded against a threat to the local environment and well-being of the community. The story's simplicity and optimism contrasted with later experiences of CODECE which revealed an increasingly complicated context and a waning capacity for social mobilization. I quote directly from my notes on the Seminar, where Romano's presentation was also significant in that it was what initially pulled me into the bosom of CODECE.
"The creation of CODECE came about as a response to a threat to the community's well-being. For sometime late in 1984, the residents of San Antonio had been hearing the sound of loud bangs resounding in the mountains. We wondered what neighboring town might be celebrating the festivities of its patron saint with what sounded like fire-works. Finally, farmers who returned from grazing their cattle in the high mountain pastures, reported that they saw tractors on the ridge of Cerro San Miguel, and were in the process of carving a road up to the summit.
"Cerro San Miguel, also known as La Cruz (The Cross) is one of the prominent peaks of the Mountains of Escazú. On its summit, many of you have seen, is a monumental steel cross, visible from San José and across the entire Central Valley. This mountain, it turned out, had caught the fancy of a Spanish priest, Padre Revilla, who had ordered the construction of the road. Revilla's dream was to build a religious center on the summit of La Cruz, with a monument depicting Christ dominating an Aztec pyramid, as part of a larger project to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Christianity to the Americas. We later learned that Revilla had requested a construction permit from the Municipality of Escazú, but was denied it on the grounds that the geologic fragility