Costa Rica 2018

In 2018, Costa Rica had a population of approximately 5 million people. The economy is largely based on services, which accounts for nearly 80% of the GDP. Exports such as coffee and bananas are the main exports, while electronic components and medical devices are also important exports. Spanish is the official language although other languages such as English and indigenous languages are also spoken. According to extrareference, Costa Rica is a presidential republic with an executive branch headed by the President who is elected for a four year term. The legislative branch consists of a unicameral parliament (the Legislative Assembly). In terms of foreign relations, Costa Rica maintains diplomatic ties with over 100 countries around the world and has close ties with its neighbors in Central America such as Nicaragua, El Salvador and Panama. The government also works closely with international organizations such as the United Nations, Organization of American States (OAS), World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Trade Organization (WTO) and Central American Integration System (SICA).

Yearbook 2018

Costa Rica. It became a landslide victory in the second round of the presidential election April 1 for Carlos Alvarado from the ruling party Citizens Action (PAC). For the sake of rarity, it was not the first round of victories on February 4, Fabricio Alvarado Muñoz of the small conservative National Restoration Party (PRN), who won the final victory. Alvarado convincingly received over 60% of the votes cast and became Costa Rica’s youngest president ever at the age of 38. Voter turnout in the second round was also unusually high – 66.5% of those eligible to vote – and this was the first time it was higher than in the first round of a presidential election. The reason was judged to be that Alvarado devoted much of his election campaign just to urge voters to go and vote, and that Alvarado Muñoz was considered a polarizing figure in politics. Some homophobic statements by his co-workers and his own stated opposition to same-sex marriage were also contributing causes. After a decision in the Constitutional Court in November, Costa Rica became the first country in the generally conservative Central America to allow same-sex marriage.

• According to Abbreviationfinder: CRI is an three letter acronym for Costa Rica.

According to Countryaah.com, San Jose is the capital city of Costa Rica, a country located in North America. Another breakthrough in Costa Rica’s presidential election was that Epsy Campbell became the first black woman to hold the post of vice president.

In early October, Congress approved the newly elected President Alvarado’s reform package to address the state’s growing budget deficit. The proposal must first be sent to various referral bodies and then go through the congress again, but the prospects of success seemed good. The Conservatives in Congress voted against the proposal, which included both tax increases and extensions and intended to reduce the budget deficit by 3.5% of GDP in four years.

Literature. – The poetic renewal initiated by A. Cardona Peña (b.1917) and IF Azofeifa (b.1912), who published their first works respectively between the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s, and who had acquired further new tones with the poets M. Picado (b.1928), Costa Rica Duverrán (b.1935) and J. Charpentier (b.1933), on a line of avant-garde experience, the old poetic tradition is condensed and overcome through the solution of a conflict that separated poetry understood as a verbal artifice and conquest of language from that considered as an expression of contingent historical reality. In the second half of the Sixties, the literary activity of the Costa Rica poets is dominated by the concern to preserve the analogical value of the poem as well as its symbolic charge, without thereby failing in the fidelity of realistic representation. The poetics of this generation is also characterized by the constant anxiety towards the achievement of an effective and clear expression, indispensable for bringing poetry out of the narrow circle of aprivileged elite.

In this sense we can understand the writing of J. Debravo (b. 1938, who died tragically in 1967), author of the poems Canciones cotidianas published in the year of his death. His fruitful work is collected in nine books published in his lifetime and thirteen unpublished, among which Los despiertos (1972), Antología Mayor (1974) and Vórtices (1975) have been published up to now. Other exponents of the same generation are A. Chase (b. 1945) and L. Albán (b. 1942), who try to promote a new idea of ​​poetry in the reader. Albán, together with Debravo and other poets, founded the Círculo de Escritores Costarricenses, promoter of the Transcendentalist Movement with the publication of a poetic manifesto (1974) which can be considered the starting point for authors such as R. Bonilla (n. 1951) and CF Monge (n. 1951).

The narrative production that had seen its maximum flowering in the 1950s does not correspond with the same intensity to the poetic ferment. However, one cannot ignore some isolated figures of writers – belonging to the generation of those years – such as C. Naranjo (b.1931), who after a first experience that includes both denunciation and disappointment in the face of a historical-political reality marked by corruption (Los perros no ladraron, 1966), she reaches full maturity with the novel Diario de una multitud (1976), in which the formal and thematic aspects are completely detached from the previous testimonial tradition.

Other names of some importance are: S. Rowinski (b. 1932), whose latest novel, Ceremonia de castas (1976), effectively reproduces the boredom and contradictions of the provincial world; Q. Duncan (b. 1940), with the short stories Bronce, una canción en la madrugada (1970), La rebelión pocomia y otros relatos (1976) and the novels Los cuatro espejos (1973) and La paz del pueblo (1978); GC Hurtado (b.1949), author among other things of Irazú (1972), Los parques (1976) and Así en la vida como en la muerte (1976).

As in most Latin American countries, the often national character of Costa Rican theater did not allow authors like A. Cañas (b. 1920) to earn the fame it deserved. Together with Cañas can be included the names of the playwrights D. Gallegos, S. Rowinski and A. Iglesias.

Cinema. – The film industry had a late development in Costa Rica: just think that it was only in 1973 that the first organization for the promotion of cinema in the country was established. Most of the documentaries shot in the early seventies, which deal with the social reality of the Costa Rica and the traditions of ethnic minorities, are owed to the Ministry of Culture and the Cinema Department. Another important institution commissioned by the government has been operating since 1978, the Centro Costarricense de producción cinematográfica, which also includes the Cinemateca National. The Center enjoys complete decision-making autonomy and is therefore not subject to any censorship or political interference. The purpose of this opening is twofold: to provide maximum incentives for the production of feature films and documentaries and to attract those private capital that could be discouraged by censorship. The history of cinema has already appeared as a subject of teaching in many universities in the country.