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Real Progress: Fifty Years of USAID in Costa Rica
1945 and 1995, the United States provided USD2 billion in economic aid to Costa
Rica on average, about USD20 per year or USD1 000 for each Costa Rican. The average
American citizen paid USD40 dollars (80 cents a year) in taxes to provide for
Costa Ricans, who were among the most favoured recipients of US foreign aid during
the period. Only the citizens of Israel, Vietnam, Egypt, and Jamaica received
more per capita. What was there about the United States and about Costa Rica that
would persuade ten successive American presidents to take money from US citizens
to give to Costa Ricans?
Two basic arguments have traditionally been used to support US foreign aid:
American self-interest and American altruism. So stated, these two lines of argument
are mutually exclusive. If a course of action is justified by real benefit to the
United States, it is not, by definition, altruistic. An altruistic reason is one from
which no benefit can be expected other than the satisfaction of having done “the
right thing”. Aid proponents in the United States have sought to marry these two
purposes, asserting that US national security interests are best served by economic
aid programmes that benefit poor people in developing countries. 2
For most of the period since 1945, US foreign policy has been based on the
belief that the United States was locked in a global struggle with international communism,
a powerful force antithetical to US purposes and interests. Until the collapse
of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, US foreign policy maintained a
consistent world view-one articulated by George Kennan in the famous “X” article
in Foreign Affairs in 1947. Even though Kennan later repudiated some aspects of the
policy, ten presidents consistently followed it. US foreign policy interests believed
national security depended on “winning” this struggle, and foreign aid was seen as
one element of the programme to ensure that outcome.
An unadorned national security rationale would give no emphasis to the recipient
country’s use of the foreign aid. US foreign policy, however, saw the struggle with
the USSR also in moral terms. Buying the support of corrupt dictators was both suspect
and unlikely to be a successful long-term policy. Unless the United States were
to use its foreign policy to promote economic development, communism would
become more attractive as a force for modernisation. Thus, the sophisticated security
rationale linked the US goal of national security with economic and social progress in
the aid-receiving country. The United States would do well by doing good.
Why Costa Rica?
Costa Rica was a highly favoured recipient of US assistance. On a per capita
basis, Costa Rica received eight times as much as Latin American countries generally
from 1945 to 1993, and far more than Asian or African nations. On a world-wide
per capita basis, Costa Rica was fifth among US aid recipients. Why?
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