The Other Guevara

Reason interviews Costa Rica's Libertarian revolutionary

Julian Sanchez | August 12, 2003

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It helped that we got an incredible amount of press coverage. When we held our first press conference, before that election, almost nobody showed up. The moment of my election, we became a sort of obligatory font of information for journalists. We averaged about four mentions daily in the major papers. The ability to obstruct new legislation allowed me to permeate the public political debate. We have a constitutional provision that allows legislators to appeal to the constitutional court if they can muster ten of their colleagues for a petition. I've been to the court more times—and had them rule in my favor more times—than any other legislator.

I leveraged that media exposure in the 2002 election with my presidential candidacy. The main purpose of that run was to get a platform from which to encourage people to vote for our diputados. And that allowed us to garner about 10 percent of the vote that year.

How do you account for that level of exposure, that level of popularity, in a country where, by your own account, the political mainstream is so socialistic?

The first year was key. It was the year in which I had to win the respect of journalists and the general public. So I was studying like a madman, from 7:30 in the morning until 10 at night, 6 days a week. Since I was the only representative of my party, I really had to know about everything that was going on, every issue being debated, whereas in the other parties there was a certain amount of division of labor. This made things difficult for me, but it also made me a kind of one-stop-shop for people in media who wanted someone to quote on almost any issue.

Also, it's a norm in journalism that reporters are obligated to tell "both sides of the story." Well, in a country where the two major parties were typically in favor of more government control, one side was always mine. Finally, I generated a lot of polemic in a society accustomed to paternalism. The church has a large role in Latin American politics, and the message they were putting out is that rich people are all misers, that you have to be ashamed of making money. You know the famous line about the camel and the eye of the needle. Anyway, these polemics would get headlines, and so that was on the top of a lot of people's minds. When it came time to do the polls and they asked people to name their favorite diputado, the first name a lot of people thought of was "Otto Guevara." Even if they didn't agree with everything I said, they knew I was very active, that I was bringing refreshing ideas to the table.

The real benefit of having a political party is as a force for getting libertarian ideas into the public debate. It's a standard school assignment in Costa Rica for students to research and do reports on the parties and presidential candidates. So we have teachers all over the country sending their kids to study our platform, to research the ideas of people like Mises and Hayek. And the effect of that has been to confront a lot of political prejudices and assumptions, a lot of the complacency with the traditional way of doing things. People start to ask: "Why should the state alone sell insurance? Why should the state sell telecommunications services?"

One of the things that's impressive about the campaigns you've run is that you reject government funds for the party. Can you talk about what lies behind that decision?

When money is given to you as a gift, there's a tendency to dissipate it. We've seen enormous corruption in Costa Rica as a result. For instance, we could sign a contract whereby we have a consulting deal and put that down as a campaign expense. I claim to be paying you, in essence, for some conversations I say we've had. It's like a piñata, but it's very difficult to prove a candidate or a party has done anything wrong. Still, people know it happens, and they're sick of it.

You've had some problems on the way, including, I believe, the defection of one of the diputados you elected.

Yes, three weeks after the elections, one of them resigned. It was a blow to us, we took a fall, but we got up and brushed ourselves off. In that case, we were tricked by someone who passed himself off as a libertarian in every detail. But he had another agenda. I expect that next time we'll be a bit more careful about who runs under our banner. One thing we want to do is ask candidates to submit resignation letters in advance, as part of a contract that would allow the party to recall legislators who don't adhere to the principles they profess during the campaign. One year ago, I presented this idea to the courts as a hypothetical, and I'm still waiting for their reply.

Many people are convinced that, at present anyway, libertarians need to do outreach and education, to change the political culture, before they can expect real electoral success. How do you respond to that?

I'm convinced that political participation is a much more effective way of promoting freedom than any 10 books you could write, for some of the reasons I just mentioned. But we've begun to explore new ways of spreading our ideas. Few people read papers; fewer still read books. So since October, we've been airing a weekly prime time TV show, La Hora de la Libertad (The Hour of Liberty) from 8 to 9 on a channel with national coverage.

This is a pure program of political indoctrination. Like St. Thomas, I doubt the ratings I see, but I'm told we have 100 thousand people watching, and we get about 400 calls per hour from all corners of the country. We're preparing the mental terrain, fertilizing Costa Rican minds with libertarian ideas. The traditional policy maker in the legislature doesn't attempt to lead, to form public opinion. We do. Atlas, Cato, a huge number of thinkers and scholars of liberty are out there creating intellectual ammunitition. What we have is the powder to create an explosion.

Where have you found your constituency? Where do you get your support?

Well, one place is from industries where regulation and taxation were really hurting the workers. So, just as an example, we lowered taxes on sports betting. There are some 7,000 people working in that industry, and there were conservative forces who really wanted to wipe it out. A tax hike they'd proposed would have done just that. So there are lots of people now who realize that they essentially owe us their jobs, and that motivates people to get politically involved.