Viva Libertad

[CodyChaos]

Good news from Costa Rica. These people are really making progress, send them a few bucks if you can, it goes a lot farther to affect change there than it does in the U.S.

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March 15, 2002

MOVIMIENTO LIBERTARIO NEWSLETTER

IT’S NOW CERTAIN: 10% OF COSTA RICAN CONGRESS WILL BE LIBERTARIAN!

A month ago we reported that we were confident we had won 4 of the 57
national Congressional seats in the February 3 elections, were leading by a
small margin in a fifth race, and trailing by 9 votes in a sixth one; and
that vote recounts would determine the final winners by about now. Well, all
recounts are in, and after we won a Court battle this week, results are
final, and we won all 6 races! Thus, 6 of the 57 Congressmen who will take
office on May 1 will be Libertarians!!!

The pictures and resumés of these 6 Congressmen are in the English section
of our website: www.libertario.org (which will soon be updated). They are:
Federico Malavassi and Ronaldo Alfaro from San José province, Carlos Salazar
from Alajuela province, Carlos Herrera from Cartago province, José Francisco
Salas from Heredia province, and Peter Guevara from Puntarenas province.
Thus, Libertarians will represent 5 of Costa Rica’s 7 provinces.

In the last month we were all very busy attending vote recounts and fighting
a Court battle that threatened our Puntarenas victory. The losing party (one
of the two that have ruled this country for many years), was seeking a third
count. But by a 3 to 2 verdict, the Court ruled in our favor. Our final
victory margin was 9 votes, which makes Bush’s win over Gore in Florida a
landslide!

Nationwide we received over 140,000 votes for Congress, which represents
9.33% of the total, and more than tripled the vote we got in 1998. We are
pleased with these results given that our realistic goal was to increase our
Congressional seats to a minimum of 6.

A happy result of all this is that statist intellectuals, specially college
professors from State-owned colleges, are in a daze. In several articles
they have even resorted to insulting those who voted for us, calling them
irrational or ignorant. These authoritarians (mostly leftists here) still
don’t know what hit them! They were among many “experts” who snickered
whenever we announced our electoral goals. Now they are in complete denial,
not accepting that their days are numbered, that the fresh breath of freedom
is rapidly spreading in Costa Rica!

As we also wrote previously, another good result of the past elections was
that for the first time in history, all the “minor” parties together stopped
either of the traditional parties’ Presidential candidates from obtaining
the required 40% to avoid a runoff, which will be on April 7. This not only
rocked the bipartisan monopoly that has ruled this country for many years,
but it’s likely that the April 7 “winner” will not be perceived as a
legitimized government, since it may not get the support of even a third of
the electorate, considering a very high expected voter abstention.

The upcoming Congressional composition shows that no party even came close
to getting a majority of seats (the leader only got 19, a third). Further,
56 of the 57 seats are split among 4 parties, and we are one of them! In
fact the top two, the traditional parties, only have 36 seats among them,
and to set the agenda of Congress, 38 votes are needed. Thus, unless all
other parties ally against Libertarians, which is very unlikely given the
current political situation in the country, OUR agenda will have to be
included in the agenda of Congress.

Just think about what that means: national media coverage of Congressional
floor debates on taxation as theft, on inflation as robbery, on State
monopolies as arrogant tyranny imposed by “know-it-alls”, on Big Brother as
a Big Bully who tramples over individual rights. And the names of Ayn Rand,
von Mises, Bastiat, Hayek and other great Libertarian heroes being invoked
daily by our 6 Congressmen, which will awaken interest in the works of those
great thinkers, who are virtually unknown in the Spanish-speaking world’s 20
nations.

But most importantly, there will be an increased discussion of libertarian
ideas in Costa Rica. Now, with only one Congressman, libertarianism is a
topic of study for high school and college students, who often visit our
Congressional office to learn more about us. And the news media gives
libertarian positions a prominent place. Further, our website includes
current Congressional topics, our positions and proposals, our book, and the
test to find out if one is a libertarian. If that was true with just one
Congressman, imagine the increased interest there will be with 6 of them!

We are very excited by the great support we receive from young people,
including high school and college students who will first vote in 2006. They
represent the core of what will help us achieve our next goal: a Libertarian
government for Costa Rica –hopefully in 2006- as a means to the end we seek
everywhere: a libertarian society, a real Galt’s Gulch, in our lifetime!

Before parting, we wish to once again thank those of you who supported us
financially. You were a key part of the worldwide can-do team that made our
victories possible. And in this, we specially send a big, big thank you to
B. B., who modestly seeks anonymity, but is a hero to us.

Our readers reside in various nations. If there is no Libertarian party in
your country, we urge you to take the plunge and start one. It has been a
very rewarding intellectual experience for us in the Movimiento Libertario,
which is living proof that with a can-do attitude a principled, morally
centered defense of libertarianism can attract many voters in a relatively
short time. If you still doubt whether that effort would be worthwhile,
think of Frank Chodorov’s question in his classic work, Out Of Step: “What
in life is more worth while than the pursuit of an ideal?”


For liberty in our lifetime,

Raúl Costales and Mario Vedova, Editors.


P.S. #1: For those of you who participated in the drawing for the trip to
Costa Rica, the winning number was 171, which was one of the many unsold
numbers we had. But please know that we really appreciate your financial
support.

P.S. #2: We also won many municipal offices in the country’s 81 counties,
although only temporary information is available at this time. We will
detail these in our next Newsletter, as well as our next 4-year strategy
towards liberty in our lifetime.