Last night I went into Puntarenas for Carnaval and shared a taxi back with the Canadian girls and Iraqi vets who are vacationing at my bed and breakfast.
On the way home, we were stopped by the police barricade. The policia are stopping cars and buses going in and out of Puntarenas to check IDs. This is mainly to sketch out those who might be trying to bring drugs into Carnaval, and also to catch those who are in the country illegally – such as tourists who have overstayed their visa and illegal immigrants from Nicaragua.
I had to explain this to my friends, because they were wasted and freaked out and they don’t speak Spanish. One of the guys kept yelling “amigo, amigo, no problema, don’t arrest me!” The cops laughed at him. We all gave them our passport photocopies (can’t carry the real thing around or you’ll lose it and really be in trouble) and they checked them out and sent us on our way.*
This explanation began a discussion in our taxi about the racism between Costa Ricans (ticos) and Nicaraguans (nicas). Nicaragua is to Costa Rica as Mexico is to the United States. There is more money and more jobs on the other side of the border, and many poor people cross that border for the opportunities they can’t get at home.
When the bed and breakfast was robbed recently (someone hopped over the back yard fence and stole everything they could reach through the window bars), the cops told us it was probably a gang of Nicaraguans who they believe have been roaming the beaches. Uh-huh, right. They sound really on top of the investigation.
Here’s a video a friend just sent me, illustrating this from the Nicaraguan point of view:
Enrique Flores habla de los ticos
I speak Spanish and I can’t follow all that he’s saying, but the basic idea is that he is he hates ticos, and thinks they are maricones, because of the way ticos believe that all nicas are stupid, slow and lazy. Here’s a nice quote, though -
“What the idiot Costa Rican doesn’t know is that if there is a war, with all the Nicaraguans that are in Costa Rica… (we will win)”
He also says that when he goes to Costa Rica, the locals can tell he is Nica and they say “go back to Nicaragua!”
The phrase “pura vida” makes him particularly angry. It reminds me of the phrase “the American dream” in the United States, and how some white people think it applies only to them.
*Sidenote: the police did not care that there were four of us crammed into the back seat without seatbelts, or that we had open containers of beer.