Costa Rica.
Back from a day spent in the Coto Brus canton, the county in which our Las
Cruces Biological Station is located. We sit in the dinning hall of our
field station discussing the insights and ramifications of what we saw and experienced
today. The small group I am with
consists of several board and staff members and most of us are amazed and
somewhat surprised by what we learned.
Our focus has been and continues to be on tropical biology, but the “real
world” issues presented today are suddenly vividly before us, no longer world
away but rather just a few kilometers down the road within the canton.
Earlier that morning. We drive past the upscale regional hospital
and into the hustling streets of San Vito, the judicial seat of the Coto Brus
canton. On a side street we stop at an
open garage/warehouse and get out of the small bus we call a coaster. We stand on the edge of the street, and I
look for a medical facility or even a doctor’s sign, but nothing catches my
eye. Instead, I see my host leading our
small group into the garage/warehouse tight against other storefronts and
warehouses lining the street. I realize,
then, in following the group down the cracked cement drive and into the open
room in front of us that this garage has been converted into a medical
clinic. The room in which we gather
together, as the sounds and fumes of cars pass by out on the street, is a waiting room with cheap
plastic chairs in a semi-circle off to the side; it is also a loading area for
the clinic’s activities with boxes and paraphernalia scattered on the
floor. Posters on the wall are in
Spanish and another language I don’t recognize (the language of the Ngobe Bugle Indians, I am told), but I don’t linger to study the
words and instead join our group who I can see are feeling very much like
outsiders clustered together while our host talks to a receptionist behind a
small desk near the plastic chairs. Heavy
set women, Indians in long colorful but well-worn dresses, men in tired
t-shirts and faded blue jeans are staring at us as we stand in the room; the
men appear to be smaller than most Costa Ricans, but have a look of having
lived several lifetimes. The women with
their long black braided hair and dull lifeless stares, sitting in the chairs
or standing to the side, provide no sense of hospitality or friendliness, and,
when we are led by an assistant further into the warehouse, past several makeshift
offices to a conference room in a back corner of the building, the Indian women
follow us with their humorless eyes, neither questioning why we were there nor
embarrassed to be openly watching us.
The conference room is defined easily by the old
cement blocks of the building’s two outer walls and the thin timber framing of
the two inner walls, which, within the room, are covered with maps of the Coto
Brus canton. The room itself has one
long table surrounded by more plastic chairs. On the table is a power point projector facing a screen on one of the inner walls. The overhead
lighting is not that bright, but strong enough for us to study the maps after
the assistant departs. One map, in particular, depicts the mountainous county, or canton, of
Coto Brus with numerous coffee plantations identified with gray squares. It is clear from the map there are not many
roads leading to the plantations and the towns and villages are somewhat isolated
from the regional hub of San Vito, the largest town in the canton. I count sixteen different Red Cross markings
mostly in the towns but some near the more-distant coffee farms too.
A rustle outside the door takes my attention, and
it opens with two Costa Rican men entering the room. The one who is clearly in
charge, steps up and introduces himself as Dr. Pablo Ortiz: he is the head doctor of
the region and the man we have come to see.
Dr. Ortiz is likely in his early sixties, he is not a tall man, slightly
overweight, but not obese; he is wearing an open, short-sleeved shirt with a
red-checkered print that appears both lightweight and comfortable; he has a
close, reddish-beard and a friendly face; his eyes are alight with laughter
from, I suspect, many well-told stories. Fortunately, he has an excellent
command of English, and he is both charming and gracious as he introduces
himself to each of us in our party.
The second man, Dr. Ortiz explains is the number
two doctor in charge of the clinic, but he tells us his English is
limited. This man appears to be about
ten years younger and, though we are told his name as each of us shakes his
hand, I quickly forget what he said and focus instead on Dr. Ortiz who is looking
at the map we were studying. The second
doctor moves over to the projector and begins connecting it to his laptop.
Dr. Ortiz invites us to sit in the yellow
plastic chairs around the table and says his clinic is charged with providing
health-care services for the undocumented, migrant Ngobe Bugle Indians crossing
out of Panama to pick coffee in the region’s surrounding plantations. The number of migrants entering Costa Rica for
the harvest season starting in late October is substantial, likely, nearly
200,000 people, and during the coffee season, which typically runs through
March, the canton swells to a population doubled in size. In truth, his doctors don’t know exactly how
many Indians come into Costa Rica, he tells us, as the border between the two
countries is fairly open, and the Gnobe Indians not crossing at the three points-of-entry
between the two countries, can walk into Costa Rica without any official papers anytime
on trails through the farms abutting the boundary or through the unexplored
forest protecting the upper watersheds of the Talamanca Mountains. This reserve is an international park Costa
Rica shares with Panama, known as La Amistad, and is the largest protected area
in Central America.
As a result of the relatively open border, Dr.
Ortiz says simply, providing health care services for the migrant Indians is a
significant challenge.
Dr. Ortiz proceeds to narrate a power-point
presentation his colleague has prepared for us. It isn’t long before we realize
that the slides are showing us the horrific working and living conditions of the
Ggobe Bugle people, with the laws of Costa Rica overseeing their welfare frequently
ignored: children in the field by six-years-of-age, adults working
seven-days-a-week from sunrise-to-sunset, no social services provided for the
children by the farmers or any governmental agencies, pregnant teenage mothers
picking coffee until they go into labor, and everyone living in horrid shacks,
called “batches.” Dr. Ortiz says the
sanitary issues on these farms is appalling, yet often the Indians cross the
border not just to earn their annual income picking coffee but also to take
advantage of Costa Rica’s national health care system. Even so, his doctors are seeing a 50% child
mortality rate with average families consisting of 4.6 children. Between unmarried mothers, alcoholism, child
and wife abuse, tuberculosis, HIV, and parasitic-diseases of one sort or
another, it is difficult to reach the Indians with the health care services
available to them and, when they do, often the Indians don’t trust what his
doctors and nurses have told them. The
simple medicines and training that might prolong their lives or allow them to
live easier lives, though now available to them in the canton, such as through
his clinics, are out of reach both physically and psychologically through
distance and distrust.
Soon we are engaged in a vivid two-hour
discussion with Dr. Ortiz and his colleague pointing to county maps,
highlighting recent statistics, and describing in detail what their doctors,
nurses, and aides are doing to combat the very real problems facing the Gnobe
Bugle. The doctors, paid by the
government of Costa Rica, are brutally honest with us and end their presentation
with a request for our organization help them work with the Indians. “Even such simple matters,” says Dr. Ortiz, “as
teaching the Indians how to use condoms or why they should wash their hands
coming out of the fields would make a difference.”
“- Let
alone,” he says, “helping the Indians look for the symptoms of malaria, dengue
fever, Tuberculosis, and ringworm within their families.”
Dr. Ortiz ends his presentation with a statement
about the black rubber boots we have seen Costa Rican farmers wear throughout the
country; the same rubber boots our own researchers and their field hands employ
in the forest at our research station: “If only we can provide Indians with
rubber boots,” he laments, “it would be better than them wearing their thin
sandals and having their children go barefoot.”
“Why,” I ask.
“Parasites,” he responds, shaking his head,
“from the soil in the fields.”
Afterwards, before leaving the conference room, the
small group with whom I am traveling take up an impromptu monetary collection between
us for the doctors, and though somewhat embarrassed at how little money we are
able to raise between us, we give Dr. Ortiz about $120 dollars to continue the
clinic’s work, promising him we will do more when we get back to the States. He is gracious in accepting our unexpected
gift and says he will give it to his colleague who will put it to good use.
Back on the street after walking past the openly
staring Indians in the waiting area, we marvel at how little we knew about the
canton and the ongoing health care crisis being fought on a daily basis from
farm to farm. Our research station over
the years has focused, rather, on biodiversity issues and restoration ecology; after
all, we are a conservation organization that has spent more than thirty years
in Coto Brus establishing a permanent station for scientists and students to
conduct research on the impact of the fragmented forests of the region – fragmented
due to the county’s two historic activities: growing coffee and raising cattle.
I have been told that as late as the 1950s, much
of Coto Brus was a mountainous highlands covered in forests. The Costa Ricans who chose to live in this area
before then, like the homesteaders in the U.S., carved their niche out of the
forest and lived relying on their own resources. In fact, the stories of the incredible struggle
that people in this region would go through to get outside supplies or receive
medical care, such as for broken bones, gashes, various illnesses, or
problematic births, are oral histories of tremendous hardship, with mules and
wagons with large wooden wheels carrying the injured or the infirmed miles down
narrow mountain passes to the Pacific lowlands where bush pilots, radioed
ahead, could land their small planes and fly their sick passengers to the hospitals
in San Jose.
I am told too that many of the family-owned
coffee farms established in the Coto Brus canton between the late 1800s and the
mid-1900s was on land given to them by the Costa Rica government; land offered
to the coffee families of the central valley near San Jose simply to stop
Colombia, prior to the creation of Panama, from claiming more and more of Costa
Rica’s southern border. It was during
this period when the relationship between the plantation families and the Gnobe
Bugle Indians began. The Indians willingly
and in mass moved north each year to pick the red coffee bean
After World War II, in the mid-1900s, the
government of Costa Rica made a concerted effort to open Coto Brus beyond the
coffee farms. The United Fruit Company at
that time was exploiting Costa Rica’s southern Pacific lowlands growing banana
and palm oil for export, and with a large shipping port in Golfito coming into
its own, a labor force was needed to handle the expanding agricultural
activities of the south, and, importantly, to extract the valuable hardwood timber
of the southern highlands.
I read somewhere that giving the land to
displaced Europeans as a way to populate area (and cover up the harsh impact of
the logging) proved to be irresistible to thousands of Italians who moved into
the Coto Brus canton. However, by the
late 1960s, the logging companies were gone, the Italians had settled into an
economically depressed area, and the canton was reduced to a patchwork of
coffee fields held by a few families, degraded pastures available to all, and
the landless seasonal passing of the Gnobe Indians.
My organization’s focus beginning in the early
1970s was to study the impact of the changing ecosystems of the area. No one in our organization had ever looked into
the plight of the indigenous people of the south. Rather, we knew about the impact of landscape
changes on moths and butterflies and the role of bats as pollinators, but not about
the large and historic role the Gnobe Bugle Indians play in the canton.
Our
coaster pulls up to the sidewalk and we climb on board. Our day is not nearly done. Soon we leave the little town of San Vito and
are driving deep into the canton, well off the primary roads. I can see it is clear we are in coffee
country as acres of coffee bushes cover the hillsides on both sides of the
road. It isn’t long before I realize too
we are on private land and the coaster is taking into the heart of one
long-established coffee plantation. We
drive past the coffee production barns and up to a beautiful Swiss-style manor
with flower boxes full of blooming colorful flowers and gorgeous flower gardens
beside the vehicle on both sides of the lane.
The
plantation owner, a heavy-set man in his late 50s or early 60s has been waiting
for us: he drives up to the coaster in his green four-wheeler and jumps out of
the vehicle. He introduces himself as Roberto Montero and is very gracious in welcoming us to his farm. He has a large belly that is barely contained
within his white shirt, tucked tightly into his pants. He has a short beard and is wearing a
baseball hat promoting Peru, which he said he just visited for several weeks. His eyes too are full of fun and vigor, and
from his demeanor, it is clear he is the man in charge. Unlike Dr. Ortiz back in San Vito, Sr.
Montero is less concerned about introductions and, as we surround him, he quickly
explains that his great-grandfather established the family’s 700+ acre farm.
The farm abuts both the open border with Panama, which he points to the
forested hills southeast of us, and La Amistad, which he turns and points to
the forested hills to the north of us, but, from what I can see as I turn 360
degrees, all the hills surrounding us are forested in a thick, dark shade of
green – while immediately before us, contrasting against the lighter-green yard,
is a potpourri of birdlife and plant-life thriving within a colorful collage of
shapes and movement.
Sr.
Montero assures us he is the largest organic coffee farmer in the region and is
very proud of his exceptional, shade-grown, organic coffee currently being sold
throughout the U.S. However, with the coffee season recently completed, his
migrant pickers have moved further up into the central valley to pick the
fields there. They will return to Panama
later in the spring. His permanent
workers at the farm, rather, are producing dried fruit: bananas, mangos,
pineapple, etc. In fact, he says, he has a huge contract with the U.S.
company Costco which requires everything to go “right” in generating the necessary
fruit to meet his new obligations. He tells us he isn’t worried though,
as he loves the pressure. His workers,
he says, are very loyal and will help him meet this challenge.
His
farm, he explains, is self-contained: he has his own hydro-electric plant,
school for his workers children, church, grocery store, and the mandatory soccer field and no one gets
onto his property without his approval. He is both the “mayor and
the “town planner,” and the “judge and the jury.” In fact, he assured us, government officials rarely
come to inspect his operation. A board member in our group asks him about the working conditions of the Gnobe pickers and
their children and his eyes arch upward.
He says authorities have talked to him, but
he has told them that the Gnobe children don’t work in the fields; they come
across from Panama with their families to play and vacation from school. There
is no need for inspections. His workers,
he stressed, whether local Costa Ricans, permanent Gnobe Indians who have
chosen to remain in the area year-round, or the migrants, documented or not, want as much work he can give them, and, as a result, they make more money on
his farm than they would doing almost any other job in Coto Brus, the second
poorest county, he reminds us, in Costa Rica.
With
that, he suggests we take a tour of his dried fruit factory down the hill below
the manor. The coffee season is over,
but the dried fruit business never ends.
Sr. Montero opens a door for us along the side of an old red barn, and
we enter large semi-sanitized rooms with what appears to be hosed water
covering the floor. “Walk carefully,” he
says and tells someone in Spanish to squee-gee the floor in front of us. Quickly workers appear who push away the
standing water.
We
walk past rows of Costa Rica women standing on both sides of a long assembly
line wearing white rubber boots, white surgical masks, and white hairnets. They are cleaning tray after tray of baked
bananas: removing sticks and peels from the recently cooked fruit, cleaning the
trays so that only the dried banana remained.
Men in another room, we see further on are wearing the same white-colored
masks, hairnets, and boots; they are taking hundreds of fresh bananas out of
boxes, removing their peels, and slicing the fruit into bite-size pieces. These pieces, subsequently, are spread out
onto trays and stacked into large carriers to be rolled into walk-in ovens and
baked for the women to clean.
All
of the dried bananas, once thoroughly cleaned, explained Sr. Montero, are
stored into thousands of large bags in a deep container, eight of which are
required to be filled each month to satisfy the Costco contract. The large containers, Sr. Montero said, will
be trucked to Golfito and shipped to San Francisco where they will be inspected
again before being bagged into colorful individual-sized bags and sold in
Costco stores throughout the U.S.
This
had turned into a year-round business for him, he says, and requires thousands
of boxes of bananas, pineapples and mangos to be trucked from the lowlands to
his plantation in Coto Brus, where hundreds of his workers put in twelve-hour
shifts six-days-a-week to meet the contract.
“When
coffee season is in full swing, it must be crazy here.” I comment.
Sr.
Montero laughs and says I should come back next fall when the coffee plant is operating
at capacity and the dried fruit plant will be running full as well. The number of pickers, workers, trucks, and
containers will be mind-blowing. “You
can join us!” he says enthusiastically, adding as the gracious host that he is
in opening his farm to us: “But for now, let us go enjoy the lovely lunch I have had
prepared for you in the manor.”
We
are hungry and agree. The workers watch us
as we walked past on their wet and slippery floor; their black pupils, like large
empty saucers, staring lifeless between the white hairnet and the mask.
Whether
or not Dr. Ortiz and the government-employed health-care workers can get onto the
property to talk to the undocumented Gnobe Indians, let alone the workers, is a
question I want to ask, but instead, I choose to keep this to myself. At the time we are being served a four-course
lunch looking out over a beautiful yard of bougainvillea framed against a mountainside
of dark-green, primary forest; I can smell the rich fragrance of tropical
flowers through the open windows of the manor and feel the light breeze.
Rather, with our pockets empty from our meager collection earlier that morning, an uneasiness tempers our appetite as we listen to Sr. Montero mention how much he likes
the new pope who will bring the Catholic faith back to the people, how priests
rotating through the area give mass in his church once every two weeks, how
much he prizes his four Lipizzaner Stallions he will show us later that
afternoon, and how he looks forward to his upcoming month-long trip with his
wife and friends to Easter Island.
****
