CIA Accidentally Overthrows Costa Rica

I’ve been trying to figure out how to react to this. Am I supposed to be mad, glad, scared or sad about this event that happened forty-eight years ago, the year I graduated from high school?

As a matter of fact, maravilla, I have read [u]Legacy of Asses[/u] (oops! “[u]Ashes[/u]”) and I am appropriately appalled. I just wonder why, of all the misdeeds and screwups the CIA has committed in the distant and recent past, the original poster chose to single out this one. Certainly the overthrow of the government of Costa Rica in 1963 pales in comparison to the CIA’s part in the Bay of Pigs and Viet Nam debacles, among others, but this we focus on.

But isn’t that clip a parody????????? Or did they REALLY do it! I always assumed it was black humor. jejejeje but nothing surprises me with those dimwits.

I can’t believe that much of this is true. Sounds like 1960s humor, except that we were overthrowing governments in the 50s. When the speaker placed Cambodia in Central America, it definitely seemed like a staged report. Also there were only 4-5 reporters in the audience. Usually press conferences attract many more–all waiting for something big to happen.

Perhaps if this same group were to “accidentally” travel up to Washington D.C. and perform the same “service” for America. I believe that this type of thing would solve the astonishingly bad financial decisions that have been made over the last few years.

While this video is parody these things WERE going on as late as the Reagan years with the “guns for drugs” IRAN/CONTRA scandal that Ollie North took the hit for. Otherwise it would have been Reagan being overthrown. The situation is such in Nicaragua that in much of the country it is still not safe to be a “gringo”. You may also remember the news from just a few years ago where the Northern border of Costa Rica along the San Juan River and Lake Nicaragua was declared one of the first “mine free” zones in the world as a part of an International clean up program. Due to distrust by the government the same cannot be said of the Nicaragua side of the border.

The U.S. did its best to try to drag Costa Rica into that quagmire. There are numerous military steel bridges in the North of Costa Rica that were put in by U.S. “engineers” working for the CIA. These were part of the supply line from the Juan Santamaría International Airport. The people of Nicaragua remember Costa Rica’s complicity with the CIA in supplying the Contras.

This was just one more place in the world where the U.S. was on the wrong side in the name of “anti-communism” supporting the like of Idi Amin, Noriega, Pol Pot, Ferdinan Marcos and more than a dozen others.

Today we are back to largely Banana Republic politics where big U.S. (now multi-national) Corps (many of the same old fruit companies) can dictate agricultural export prices making or breaking the economies in Central America. . The same forces could easily destabilize a government.

The politics of paradise are very fragile.

I think the CIA SHOULD overthrow Costa Rica and make them speak the internationally recognized english language. I was in a grocery store in Alajuela, buying a couple of cerveza negras when the checkout clerk asked ME how much the beer cost. I answered “yo no comprende” because I’d forgotten the price by the time I got to the checkout stand. If she had been able to understand english, I could have told her to look at the bar code thingy.

I agree with rluikaart but I can’t imagine a store clerk in Costa Rica that can’t speak merican…
……and not only that, english can be understood anywhere in the world if it is spoken loud enough……

[quote=”jthomas1139″]I think CIA stands for: Certainly Interesting Accumulations. Most of us would be stunned to know what really happens.[/quote]