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Chapter 1
The Commerce of Sex in Costa Rica
Costa Rica has a long history of being defined as “exceptional” in Central America, and the representation of the country as a peaceful, democratic, and white “Switzerland of Central America” is “one of the most attractive and widely disseminated national mythologies of any Latin American nation” (Paige 1997, 219–20). If Costa Rica is so exceptional, how can we explain the emergence of a booming sex tourism industry? This chapter sets the scene for the rest of the book by exploring the political economy of Costa Rican tourism and by making links between the growth and promotion of ecotourism and the burgeoning sex tourism sector. I draw comparisons to other established and emerging sex tourism destinations, including the Dominican Republic (Brennan 2004a; Cabezas 2008) and Thailand (Jeffrey 2002; Leheny 1995), in order to draw out the similarities and differences between various locations as well as to situate the sex trade firmly within the tourism industry, not as a social problem but rather as a phenomenon intimately tied up with the broader story of the political economy of tourism in Costa Rica. In particular, I suggest that the connections made by other authors who link the sex industry to the domination of transnational capital and call instead for the encouragement of more small- and medium-scale local businesses do not hold up when we consider the case of Costa Rica, where sex tourism thrives in a tourism industry that is still relatively balanced between small local businesses and corporate ownership. This chapter also provides a description of the contexts in which sex is sold in San José, arguing that while at first glance there appears to be a strict spatial distinction between the local and the tourist sex markets, with younger sex workers concentrated in the latter, in fact there is a great deal of crossover: most women have experience in both and some continue to move between the two, depending on how much money they are making. Rather than a progression from premodern, modern-industrial, to postindustrial paradigms (Bernstein 2007b), I argue that what we are seeing in Costa Rica is a series of overlapping services and markets that sex workers, and some clients, are able to negotiate with relative ease.
Exceptionalism, Tourism, and Sex Tourism
Costa Rica’s supposed exceptionalism in Central America is based on three interconnected myths: colonial isolation, racial homogeneity, and the geographical reduction of the country to the Central Valley region (Giglioli 1996).1 The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the key period of consolidating national identity, with the reinvention (and whitening) of Juan Santamaría as national hero and the establishment of institutions such as the national archive, theater, and library. National mythology was buttressed under the hegemony of the coffee oligarchy in an attempt to co-opt popular classes (Palmer 1993). Costa Rican intellectuals writing about national identity have rarely engaged with broader debates on the conditions and cultural history of the region as a whole, instead focusing on defining “the national soul,” “the national essence,” and Costa Rican “idiosyncrasies” (Jiménez Matarrita 1997).
Costa Rican exceptionalism in Latin America, defined especially via claims to white origins, continued in nationalist literature through the 1970s and 1980s. Xenophobia has been ubiquitous, as whiteness was used to explain social, economic, political, and cultural rationality and order. In contrast, mestizaje, or racial mixing, was associated with conflict in the rest of Central America (Jiménez Matarrita 2005). As such, Costa Rica distanced itself from the discourses of mestizaje found to varying degrees throughout Latin America and instead emphasized the nation’s privileged position on what Wade (2001, 849) aptly calls “a global scale of whiteness.” These ideas were reinforced by academic accounts of the country as unique, relying on colonial isolation from the Spanish empire and the rest of Central America and racial homogeneity to explain Costa Rica’s comparative prosperity (Booth and Walker 1999; Skidmore and Smith 1997).
More recently, this position has been thoroughly questioned by scholars who recognize some variations in Costa Rica’s trajectory but also many continuities with the rest of Latin America (Molina Jiménez and Palmer 2006; Paige 1997; Palmer 1993; Sandoval García 2003), and studies have shown significant disparities in regions outside the Central Valley (Edelman 1999; Hayes 2006; Putnam 2002). Though Costa Rica’s high literacy, stable electoral democracy, and mildly reformist state are all rare in regional history, “the essential ingredients of the Latin American polity” can easily be found in the country’s past, including factors such as ethnic strife, agro-export enclave economies, and periods of military dictatorship (Palmer 2003).
The gradual dismantling of Costa Rica’s welfare state since the 1980s and recent revelations of widespread political corruption over decades (Molina Jiménez and Palmer 2006) have further called into question just how exceptional Costa Rica is. However, the myths of whiteness and peace have long been used internationally by elites promoting the image of a healthy, hardworking, orderly, and patriotic population (Jiménez Matarrita 2005), and Costa Rican exceptionalism continues to play an important role in official tourism marketing, representing the country as simultaneously exotic and safe, making it especially welcoming for US tourists (Rivers-Moore 2007).
Following the United Nations’ “Year of the Tourist” in 1967 (featuring the slogan “Tourism, passport to peace”), the World Bank became involved in tourism promotion and began to finance tourism projects starting in 1970 (Truong 1990). The United Nations’ World Tourism Organization (WTO), founded in Madrid in 1975, continues to promote tourism as a strategy for increasing local economic development and reducing poverty. Tourism is already one of the top-five “exports” for 83 percent of developing countries, and the principal export for fully one-third of the developing world (WTO 2002). The continued optimism about tourism’s potential for development undoubtedly is based in part on the industry’s staggering figures: in 2011, there were 983 million international tourist arrivals, and worldwide receipts from international tourism are estimated to have been $1,030 billion (WTO 2012).
Studies have traced the ways in which countries’ dependency on tourism revenues has come to replace earlier colonial and postcolonial dependency on single commodities such as sugar or coffee. Consequently, many countries in Latin America that were once described as “banana republics” have become “playground republics” (Mowforth, Charlton, and Munt 2008). The Instituto Costarricense de Turismo (ICT, Costa Rican Tourism Institute) was formed in 1955, but most tourism during the 1960s and 1970s was academic travel by foreign biologists (Evans 1999). Tourism arrivals increased significantly during this period, from 20,225 in 1950 to 121,939 in 1969, and most tourism remained concentrated in the Central Valley, with 47 percent of hotel rooms, 82 percent of restaurants, and 90 percent of travel agencies located in the capital city of San José at that time (Vargas Ulate 2006). The importance of tourism increased dramatically through the 1980s and 1990s and became the country’s leading source of foreign exchange between 1994 and 1998, contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to Costa Rica’s economy annually (Brockett and Gottfried 2002).2 In 2011, a total of 2,192,059 tourists visited Costa Rica, 40 percent of them from the United States (ICT 2012). In the same year, tourism accounted for 4.8 percent of Costa Rica’s gross national product, 19 percent of export earnings, and brought in $1.985 billion (ICT 2012).3
The growth in tourism and its importance in Costa Rica’s economy are intricately linked to a broader context of neoliberal structural adjustment policies enacted during the 1980s and 1990s.4 There was nothing “natural” about the emergence of tourism, but rather it was the result of intervention on the part of the WTO, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Tourism promotion went hand in hand with a general restructuring of Costa Rica’s economy, and was focused around tax, import, exchange, and credit incentives that encouraged investment in tourism (W. Robinson 2003). While the yearly average for foreign direct investment (FDI) between 1984 and 1989 was $87.1 million, the yearly average between 1990 and 1994 had risen to $222.3 million (Castro 1998). FDI was over $1 billion for the first time in 2006, and FDI in tourism alone was $328.8 million by 2007, the third most important source of FDI after industry and real estate (COMEX 2008). The 1985 Tourism Development Incentive Law (Ley de incentivos para el desarrollo turístico) allowed a twelve-year income and property tax exemption, no tariffs or surcharges on imported or local goods, and loans at preferred interest rates for hotels, car rental, and air and water transport companies (Coffey 1993; J. Sánchez, J. Barahona, and R. Artavia 1996). The law was amended in 1992, though significant tax exemptions remain in place. The 1971 Retired Residents Law (Ley de residentes pensionados) facilitated migration by retirees, primarily North American, via tax exemptions and loosened residency requirements. According to the most recent census, there are 10,568 US citizens residing in Costa Rica, with 136 men for every 100 women (Calderón and Bonilla 2007).5
Tourism became a major contributor to Costa Rica’s economy in the 1990s, but ecotourism in particular was, and is, the country’s niche market.6 Various studies by the ICT throughout the 1990s showed that the vast majority of tourists to Costa Rica visited the beaches (80.8 percent), but 60 percent also visited national parks, and many claimed to have had a “natural history experience” (41.3 percent) or a “tropical adventure” (39.9 percent) (Campbell 2002). Market research has shown that most tourists think of Costa Rica as peace-loving, friendly, idealistic, beautiful, and full of natural treasures (L. Pratt and N. Olson 1997), the kind of staged authenticity commonly described by tourism studies scholars (Crang 1997; MacCannell 1973; Jackiewicz 2004). Advertising campaigns by the ICT have attempted to capitalize on the connection between safety and difference (Rivers-Moore 2007).
The specific emphasis on ecotourism has ties to international conservation organizations, bilateral aid, and the environmental funds of various international financial institutions. For example, the foundation of the country’s extensive national parks system (which covers 25 percent of Costa Rica’s territory) depended on funding from international cooperation agencies, the Global Environmental Facility of the World Bank, loans from international development banks, and international conservation NGOs. Much of the early staffing was done by US Peace Corps volunteers (Boza 1993). USAID in particular has played a key role, both in terms of neoliberal economic restructuring and in encouraging private tourism investment (Brockett and Gottfried 2002; Honey 1999; W. Robinson 2003). These processes have been referred to as “eco structural adjustment,” because the shift in the 1980s toward promoting national parks and ecotourism was encouraged by debt-for-nature swaps, whereby some of Costa Rica’s debt was forgiven in exchange for environmental conservation (Barton 2002). The growing popularity of environmentalism and conservation along with a global move toward free-market economics both became conditions upon which Costa Rica’s foreign loans and aid were based, and defined the context in which the tourism industry emerged.
Much of the literature on Costa Rican tourism reflects the way the country has been marketed, constructing ecotourism as invariably positive with little interest in the social or political history or consequences of the industry (Budowski 1992). Relationships between tourists and the toured are rarely considered, with a few notable exceptions.7 One report (Segura and Inman 1998), while critical of the lack of genuine environmental consciousness in the industry and the use of “eco” language without any fundamental change in conservation practices, still concludes that “what is good for tourism is good for Costa Rica.” This demonstrates one of the most basic assumptions at the heart of so many studies of Costa Rican tourism, but the question remains: is tourism good for Costa Ricans? We know very little about the impact, positive or negative, of tourism on Costa Ricans themselves. According to a report by CEPAL (2007), the number of people directly employed in tourism as of 2004 was estimated to be 4.8 percent of the country’s labor force; if combined with the number of people indirectly employed in tourism, the total rises to 12.1 percent of the total labor force (17–18). The tourism industry is characterized by higher levels of informality than the rest of the economy, and average monthly incomes are lower for tourism employees than average earnings overall (20, 26). Women’s participation in the tourism labor force in Costa Rica is notably higher at 52 percent, compared with 35 percent in the labor force as a whole (32). However, women benefit from tourism less than men. Poverty among employed women is significantly higher than among employed men in general in Costa Rica (11.2 percent for women but 4.7 percent for men), yet among tourism employees, only 2 percent of men but 5.3 percent of women are still defined as poor (earning incomes that are less than the amount required to purchase a basic basket of goods) (33). This indicates significant variations in the kinds of jobs available to men and to women within the tourism sector and gendered pay differentials, but there is as yet no study that explores this question in detail.8
If tourism workers are rarely the focus of attention, sex workers are even more neglected in the literature. The contribution of sex workers in the tourism sector is difficult to measure, not least because the Costa Rican state, and in particular the tourism sector, has been careful to distance itself from sex tourism. While there is already a lack of quantitative and especially qualitative research about tourism employment in Costa Rica in general, this studied lack of attention to the sex tourism industry makes it impossible to assess the origins and scope of this particular sector with certainty. However, as the analysis in the chapters that follow will show, the sex industry occupies a significant place within the tourism trade, employing Costa Ricans directly and indirectly and attracting foreign tourists and the money they spend. As such, the story of tourism in Costa Rica is also the ...
