Threats, Dirty Tricks, Fake Polls: Costa Rica Votes Under Duress on "Free Trade"

[marmar]

from AlterNet:



Threats, Dirty Tricks, Fake Polls: Costa Rica Votes Under Duress on "Free Trade"

By Mark Weisbrot, AlterNet. Posted October 5, 2007.


Costa Rica's citizens will soon become the first to vote on a "free trade" agreement, and the corporatocracy is pulling out all the stops to see that they vote its way.



No country has ever had a national referendum on a "free trade" agreement before - which is not surprising since most of these agreements wouldn't be approved by the citizenry. Bill Clinton couldn't even get a majority of his own party in Congress to vote for NAFTA in 1993, and it's been downhill for these types of agreements ever since.

So Costa Rica - the region's richest and most democratic country -- will be setting a precedent on Sunday with its referendum on CAFTA (the Central America Free Trade Agreement), which was negotiated in 2004. Costa Ricans might want to watch out for a repeat of presidential elections last year, where current President Oscar Arias squeezed out a narrow (1.1 percent) victory over progressive candidate Ottón Solís, who criticized CAFTA in his campaign. In that campaign, erroneous polls reported by the media showed Arias with a large lead of 11-19 percentage points. This led to a record low turnout at the polls. Costa Rica could very well have a different president, and a different trade policy, if not for the impact of this false polling.

The latest polls in Costa Rica give an advantage to the "yes" vote, but things have been moving rapidly towards "No" since an embarrassing high-level government memo was leaked a few weeks ago. The memo, as the Los Angeles Times described it, "outlined a campaign of dirty tricks intended to sway voters." This included telling mayors that their cities would "not get a penny from the government for the next three years" if they did not deliver a majority of voters for CAFTA. In the words of the memo, the government also needed to "stimulate fear" among the voters, including "fear of the loss of jobs."

The Bush Administration joined the campaign to "stimulate fear," with the U.S. Ambassador threatening that Costa Rica could lose some of it existing access to U.S. markets if the voters reject CAFTA. This led US Congresswoman Linda Sánchez to remind the Ambassador's boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, that such interference in Costa Rica's electoral politics violates US, Costa Rican, and international law. Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and House Majority leader Nancy Pelosi also weighed in with a letter stating clearly that Costa Rica's access to U.S. markets under the Caribbean Basin Initiative are not conditioned on acceptance of any trade agreement.

In fact, the threats from the US government, and repeated by the Costa Rican proponents of CAFTA, are empty. There is only a small portion of Costa Rica's trade preferences that Congress would have to renew next year. It is politically inconceivable that the Democratic majority in Congress - which voted against CAFTA when it was approved here - would move to punish Costa Rica for its voters having rejected the same agreement. Despite the intimidation, Costa Ricans brought a record 100,000 people (equivalent to seven million in the US) into the streets last weekend for a "No" vote. They have good reasons to reject CAFTA: they do not want their farmers wiped out by subsidized grains and other agricultural products from the U.S. They also have a strong environmental movement that vehemently objects to provisions in CAFTA - like NAFTA - that would give corporations new legal rights to challenge environmental laws. And Mexico's post-NAFTA economic performance - about a third of its pre-1980 growth - is less than inspiring. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/64544/

[Judi Lynn]

1. Excellent article. Should be helpful to anyone wondering about this referendum coming up tomorrow.

Isn't it beautiful learning the tricks employed to scare voters into accepting this, used by both the _Bush administration and the current Costa Rican government have possibly been thwarted?

Your article carefully explains it all. It's great. The author is always wonderful. Thanks.

[Joanne98]

2. Threats, dirty tricks, fake polls... Sounds like America!

[marmar]

3. "Threats, dirty tricks, fake polls... Sounds like America!"

True that.....

[starroute]

4. Sounds right out of the Penn, Schoen playbook

http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/americas/venezuela/4372.html

Since 2000, this smooth new strategy to influence elections and topple regimes has been implemented in many other countries. Dubbed as the "post-modern coup" by Jonathan Mowat, the same brilliant techniques were used in Belarus in 2001, in Georgia in 2003, and in the Ukraine in 2004, to name a few. Although it ultimately failed in Belarus, in Georgia the U.S. effort produced the "Rose Revolution" which overthrew President Eduard Shevardnadze. In the Ukraine it was the "Orange Revolution" that installed Victor Yushchenko in 2004. Each time, groups financed by the NED, and USAID worked inside the country to build popular support for the opposition candidate. Each time they constructed an appealing campaign image using the modern marketing tactics that they have perfected along the way. And each time, they used Penn, Schoen & Berland election "polls" to shape the public's perception.

In his article, "Coup D'etat in Disguise," Jonathan Mowat described how these "polls" work:

"Penn, Schoen and Berland (PSB) has played a pioneering role in the use of polling operations, especially "exit polls," in facilitating coups. Its primary mission is to shape the perception that the group installed into power in a targeted country has broad popular support. ""...the deployment of polling agencies' "exit polls" broadcast on international television...give the false impression of massive vote-fraud by the ruling party, to put targeted states on the defensive."

That is, the goal is to either get enough support to sway the election in their favor, or, if that isn't possible, to give the impression that the elections were fraudulent and encourage the population to overturn them. The strategy has been so successful in overthrowing regimes, or installing the regimes that the U.S. prefers, that the operation has evolved into a blueprint to be used in countries around the world.