Freed from the Octopus’ tentacles, a rural village leads the way to Latin American sustainability.

In the fall of 2007, at a talk at the Latin American Studies Department of the University of California at Berkeley, noted young novelist Daniel Alarcón lamented the lack of news coverage of our southern neighbors and the plethora on the wars in the Middle East and the rapid industrialization of Asia. Right beneath our eyes, he explained, is a continent in a middle point on the path of development, not speeding ahead at a break-neck pace like India or China, but moving along nonetheless, and with powerful consequences on our lives.

In the talk, Alarcón and an assortment of Latin and American writers highlighted various aspects of life in the quickly changing continent, noting preserved culture and improved tolerance as well as rampant poverty and environmental disasters. Alarcón’s main point was that the cities and accessible parts of Latin American countries are experiencing a condensed version of industrialization, a sort of mad dash to catch up with the modern world. Like the Brazilian movie City of God, which illustrates the effects of the changing times on a group of poor boys in Rio de Janeiro, what were unpaved rural housing projects with identical single-story bungalows in the seventies are now dense, developed neighborhoods in the city. With development come a larger middle-class, better jobs, and a higher quality of life. But as also shown in the movie, the transition from an agrarian to an industrialized society can be disruptive and lead to pollution and gang-infested slums with all the drugs and crime that follow. How to reach the final stage without the violent intermediate ones is the question leaders need to answer to ensure peace and stability as the world develops in the 21st Century.

While urban Latin America has already taken, and in many aspects failed, the test of smooth and stable development, the rural parts of the region remain a virgin ground for experimentation. They currently are stuck in a traditional world of small villages, rickety houses, simple food, physical labor, and inadequate education and healthcare. Even in these places, though, many aspects of globalization seep in. You might, for example, see kids watching Hannah Montana dubbed into Spanish on old TV sets, or find oblivious adults wearing counterfeit shirts with English sayings like “YOU DON’T KNOW ME -- Federal Witness Protection Program, Washington D.C.”

New forms of development that take advantage of the in-between state of rural Latin America can lay the foundation for a sustainable future for the region and serve as a model for other parts of the developing world. Luckily, with outside help, many small communities are trying out experimental methods of development. One of these is a village of four hundred people on Costa Rica’s Central Pacific coast named El Silencio. In the 1970s, El Silencio’s founders recovered land from the United Fruit Company, and, from simple beginnings, established a successful agricultural cooperative.

I heard El Silencio’s history from a family friend and decided to visit. I hoped to experience life in a small, out-of-the-way village that could reportedly feed its growing population and preserve critical habitat, incorporate new technology and awareness of the outside world and maintain its cultural identity, and retain its young when leaving could offer greater wealth and possibility.
A Changing World

Billboards promoting la pura vida (the pure life) in luxury resorts line the smooth, paved road west from San Jose, Costa Rica to the Pacific coast. From there, the beach-front hotels and condos protrude from the rainforest thirty-five miles down the coastal plain to the port and regional center Puerto Quepos. Development ends past Quepos. The road deteriorates to rutted, pebbly dirt, and rural villages sprout up. Houses with peeling paint perched on rotting wooden stilts surround carefully maintained soccer fields.

I travel south along the unpaved part of the Costanera Sur (the southern coastal route) with an American ex-pat named Matt Cook. He tells me that there is talk of paving the road. “Some politicians want it to be the Costa Rican part of the Pan-American Highway. They want to save trucks from having to go inland through the mountains,” he says. “It makes sense. But for me, the dirt’s the only thing that prevents the entire coast from being another Cancun.”

Cook learned Spanish when his parents worked in California as organizers for the United Farm Workers. Wanting to study abroad during his junior year of college, he chose Costa Rica as a safe place to practice his Spanish. He went back to the states to finish his degree the next year, sure of returning south soon. When he did, he fell in love with his future wife, and stayed for good. Cook now divides his time between heading The Fund for Costa Rica, an environmental group that prevents illegal development in the Quepos area, and leading trips for American high-school groups.

We pass another of many rickety stands with bright signs advertising ¬¬¬¬Imperial beer as the land opens up and we come to the Savegre River. “All this flat land from here to the beginning of the mountains about ten kilometers inland is an alluvial floodplain,” Cook says. He motions eastward towards an elongated valley filled edge to edge with palm trees as we cross a recently built metal bridge above the wide shallow mouth of the river. “It’s especially fertile, which has made it hotly contested for a long time.”
The Octopus’ Grasp

African palm trees are the preferred crop on the Central Pacific coast. But they weren’t always. Before it was bananas, and the American-owned United Fruit Company owned all the land.

One of the largest and most powerful multinational conglomerates in history, United Fruit traces its origins to 1871. Then, a New Yorker named Minor Copper Keith traveled to Costa Rica to help his uncle, Henry Miggs, build a passenger railway from San Jose to the Caribbean. Two years later, Keith began to plant bananas along the tracks to help feed his workers -- many of whom were black convicts from Louisiana, laboring as de facto slaves. While the nutritious bananas were a hit, disease, overwork, and dangerous methods killed 5,000 workers by 1874. Miggs was among the dead, so Keith took charge of the construction. He completed the fifty-five mile railroad in 1890, almost twenty years after its start. Low demand quickly made passenger service unprofitable. Undeterred, Keith added freight cars and used them to export bananas to the United States.

Minor Keith’s business took off during the turn of the century, as new forms of refrigeration allowed more Americans access to fruit. He bought shares of other companies and then merged with the well-established Boston Fruit Co. to form United Fruit in 1899. Within the year, the new conglomerate bought seven companies in Honduras and gained control of three-quarters of the American banana market. The company, known as “the Octopus” in Latin America, spread its tentacles throughout the region to gain one of the strongest governmental influences in modern history.

The Octopus reached Guatemala, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Colombia, Ecuador, and many Caribbean islands. It became more powerful than the individual governments; and, on a handful of occasions, even convinced Washington to intervene on its behalf. The most notorious case is the 1954 CIA orchestrated coup d’ètat against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. The toppling of his reform-minded, democratically elected government led to a succession of military regimes, a thirty-six year civil war, and more than one hundred thousand deaths.


Gabriel García Marquez’s description of the history of the mythical Colombian town Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude immortalizes the ruthless influence and manipulation of the United Fruit Company. Its overnight arrival could transform rural, solitary villages into bustling, drug and prostitute infested boomtowns, and its blink of an eye departure could leave them in depressed nothingness.

Due to Costa Rica’s proud democratic tradition, United Fruit never had the same strangle-hold over its government as elsewhere. Nevertheless, it deeply affected the economies in its areas of operation. It first owned plantations on Costa Rica’s rainy Caribbean side, since it used the railroad to transport the bananas to the sea. Also on the Caribbean, it had a workforce of West Indians who tolerated lower wages and inferior working conditions than would the mestizos who lived elsewhere in Costa Rican.

In the early 1930s, the Caribbean plantations were decimated by a root-killing fungus called Panama Disease. Preferring a quick profit to maintaining the local economy, United Fruit shifted its operations to a sleepy Pacific port named Golfito. The Caribbean slumped through the rest of the 20th Century, while Golfito experienced rapid, uncontrolled growth. To this day, the Caribbean lowlands are depressed and under-developed, their inhabitants culturally and geographically isolated from the rest of Costa Rica.

On the Pacific, United Fruit spread northwards. It cultivated bananas in vast plantations on either side of the rough Costanera Sur, one of which is now a 2,500 acre finca (large farm) in the Savegre River valley.
El Silencio

Cook and I arrive in El Silencio under quickly darkening skies. He drives to the hill-top restaurant where Juan Carlos, one of the village’s few English-speakers, awaits. Juan Carlos is a short and lean thirty-year-old Costa Rican. Educated as a naturalist in San Jose, he is a rising leader. His tanned skin and defined calves are testament to the rigors of rural life. Son of one of El Silencio’s founding families and brother to foreign-educated sisters in the United States and Britain, Juan Carlos has chosen to stay and use his knowledge to help his community.

Juan Carlos chats with Cook about the impending referendum on CAFTA, while I stretch and get my bearings. He then turns to me, “What makes El Silencio different,” he begins in well-practiced fashion, “is that we haven’t just managed to survive since our founding in 1973. We have started economic enterprises that have done better than neighboring farms. And we have services and work opportunities for all members. As a result, we have been able to attract outsiders and expand.”

Juan Carlos continues while Cook and I eat typical Costa Rican fare -- rice and beans with a little chicken. I survey the Savegre River valley. Below the cabaña-style restaurant’s airy perch, orderly rows of African palm trees stretch to the Pacific. Gray hawks soar over the distinct squares of differing tree heights. On the two boundary ridges and interior mountains, virgin rain forest forms an impenetrable emerald casing. The narrow tree trunks of the forest reach ever higher before spreading their canopies in constant competition for the sun.

The community of El Silencio sits below the restaurant on the south side of the valley. Tin-roofed bungalows painted in an eclectic mix of pastel turquoises, whites, greens, and yellows line the pebbled main street and branching lanes. A square between the community store and the soda (a casual cafe) serves as the main gathering place. At the end of the village, the road descends and curves around a square soccer field, still swamped by a 2005 hurricane.


Juan Carlos walks me through town. As we pass, school-children in light blue shirts and dark blue shorts stop talking and turn. He introduces me to my host-family, and asks to meet up again later that afternoon. My family lives in one of the larger houses on the main road. On one side, it has three bedrooms, barely larger than the beds, and a tight bathroom. On the other, is an open living area and kitchen. The corrugated tin roof continues the length of the house over several yards of concrete, almost doubling the living space.

I put away my luggage and reassure my host-mother that I have had enough to eat. I then relax on a wooden rocking chair on the covered front porch. My host-father trims an almendro tree, a tropical relative of the almond, in a thin V-neck T-shirt and mud-darkened khakis, oblivious to a quickening rain. We both complain about the length of the trip from San Jose.

Later, I return to the restaurant and meet Juan Carlos and a twenty year old apprentice named Johan, who listens attentively to the conversation. “El Silencio was formed by a collective effort of local campesinos (peasants) who wanted to own and profit from their own land,” Juan Carlos says with periodic pauses to accentuate his points. He continues that a group of squatters eventually gained the title to land that the United Fruit Company vacated, and, through trial and error, formed the cooperative that is now El Silencio.
Breaking Free

Juan Carlos’ story is the polite version for gringo visitors. The truth, similar to other struggles against United Fruit, is violent.

Ever in search of the highest profit, the United Fruit Company left the Savegre River valley in 1955 after a hurricane and a bout of Panama Disease. The following year, it leased the area to local landowners who lacked the resources to cultivate more than a small portion of land near the highway. Meanwhile, the rest of the valley grew wild and locals looked on with envy.

From here, the story takes on an almost mythical aspect. In the early seventies, one hundred years after the beginning of the United Fruit Company, locals envisioned the empty land as their own. They started to meet occasionally beneath a large tree near the entrance of the finca. Although they quickly developed a consensus that they should invade the valley, they initially took no action. Then in 1972, spurred on by the dream of personal ownership in a region entirely controlled by a foreign company for generations, they attempted the first of three invasions.

One night in November, a group of eighty men crossed the Savegre, hiked through dense undergrowth to a hill on the southern side of the valley, and cleared a basketball-court sized area of land by day break. They had started to build bamboo huts when a local United Fruit official heard of the invasion, and ordered his men to disperse the squatters. The United Fruit workers promptly traversed the overgrown road in bulldozers. They demolished the huts, and evicted the squatters, sure that the movement would end.

A few months later the campesinos tried again. This time, the United Fruit officials grew impatient and wanting to make a statement, asked the police to accompany their workers. The police and United Fruit workers again bulldozed the clearing and, for emphasis, followed the fleeing locals with clubs.

The brutality of the two evictions only fueled the campesinos’ desire to regain their land. Knowing that a similar invasion would fail, they decided to take their women and children along on their next attempt, hoping the police would be forced to act less harshly. So for the third time, the group crossed the Savegre at night -- this time, the men wading with their children on their shoulders -- hiked through the undergrowth, and started to construct a community.

When news of the third invasion reached the United Fruit officials, they sent yet another eviction force. The police arrived with loaded rifles, and the company workers with clubs. They traveled slowly along the by now easily passable road to sneak up on the squatters and end the movement. The bulldozers turned off the road when they neared the clearing. They encircled the camp before charging full speed forward. The multiplied roar of the machines gave a few campesinos time to flee into the forest. The rest were surrounded.

The eviction force burst into the clearing, and trampled everything in the bulldozers’ path, including a Costa Rican flag. The United Fruit workers jumped off the back, and beat the men who resisted. They threw the children into a trailer, while the police shot into the air to intimidate the crowd. The force gathered everyone in one corner, and set the rest of the clearing on fire. Villagers tell of a cacophony of cackling branches, whimpering children, and thundering machines, and a terror that any wrong move would cause a gunshot and bloodshed.

At this point, the story diverts from that of the typical campesino socialist movement. The police held their fire. They loaded the defeated campesinos into a truck and hauled them to jail in Quepos. The prisoners numbered around eighty men and eighty women, while the cell was meant for one eighth that. The police were forced to guard the men in the larger waiting room and to release the women due to lack of space.

Once outside, the women petitioned for the release of their husbands and the rights to the land. The Joint Social Assistance Institute provided food and shelter for the women and children. The Lands and Settlement Institute (ITCO) negotiated with United Fruit. (Formed after the 1961 passing of the Law of Lands and Settlement, ITCO was one of the most successful vehicles for agrarian reform in Central America and one of the main reasons Costa Rica avoided the widespread rural violence common in neighboring countries). Tired of the cost of policing an area they no longer used and aiming to improve their declining reputation, the United Fruit officials agreed to sell the land and drop charges against the squatters.

In 1973, however, ITCO refused to hand over the land to individual owners. It contended that natural disasters or low crop demand would sooner or later send the farmers into debt and force them to sell out to larger landowners. Instead, it agreed to transfer the land to the farmers only after they promised to join their holdings and form a self-managed cooperative. Many of the families who had invaded the valley resisted the formation of a coop because they wanted exclusive profit from their own labor. Others, though more receptive of the idea, were inexperienced and unsure how to get started. In the end, of the eighty families that invaded the valley, only fifty-two joined the cooperative.

Unsurprisingly, the community struggled initially and its members lived in rudimentary dwellings. It had no organization, capital, or infrastructure. The adults first formed a committee and agreed on the name El Silencio (the silence) because the valley had been vacant for almost twenty years. The villagers next built bamboo huts with palm leaf coverings, elevated off the ground to protect against deadly -- and all too prevalent -- Fer-de-Lance snakes. With time, they improved their homes, built an aqueduct to transport clean water, and experimented with raising livestock and growing rice, corn, and beans.

Although El Silencio made progress, it quickly went into debt and could not find a crop that met its two simple requirements: grow well and make money. ITCO continued to provide advice and economic support as the village found its footing. The community barely survived through the seventies. But in 1985, its development accelerated with the introduction of African palm trees. The trees, which produce fruit for palm oil year round for up to thirty years, proved to be a viable cash crop, and infused the village with much needed capital.
A Self-Managed Agricultural Cooperative

From its early beginnings, El Silencio has grown into what Juan Carlos calls a competitive and sustainable economic enterprise. El Silencio has diversified its economy, which now includes a dairy, organic vegetable garden, grocery store, forest-management company, inn and restaurant, and machine repair shop. In 2000, it established a wildlife rescue center with the help of the Environment and Energy Ministry. The center is currently the only one on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast to reintroduce confiscated animals into the wild. As a result of the center’s success, foreign volunteers come to El Silencio to work with the wildlife and stay with host-families, helping improve the local environment and adding another source of revenue.

Any adult resident can become a member of the cooperative and work in one of its economic projects. The projects have heads who give reports at frequent town meetings, presided over by an elected mayor. The members work six days a week from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m., with two weeks paid vacation and an assortment of holidays. Their salaries differ by no more than 33%, and they split all year-end profits.

According to Juan Carlos, El Silencio has succeeded because its amassed capital has allowed it to successfully compete with agribusiness. Buying equipment, building roads and bridges, and transporting products for sale would all have been impossible had the farmers operated independently. Instead, the community has chosen sustainability over quick profit, which has improved production in comparison to neighboring farms. The cooperative uses organic farming techniques for the garden and far fewer pesticides for the African Palm plantation than is typical elsewhere on the coastal plain. The limited use of pesticides has seen an increase in fish in the local rivers. The cooperative also begins harvesting fruit from the palms at a later age than neighboring farms, which has resulted in longer production and less susceptibility to disease. Similarly, although cow birth rates on other coastal farms have decreased due to malnutrition and over-milking, El Silencio’s free range cows have steadily reproduced.

Economic diversification has been instrumental in maintaining El Silencio’s sustainability. Many other areas cultivate African Palms as their one cash crop, and are therefore economically dependent on demand for palm oil. Though growing African Palms is El Silencio’s main enterprise, the community is protected from sudden changes in the international market by its other projects. In fact, El Silencio is largely self-sufficient. The garden and dairy provide community members with much of their food, the forest-management company harvests timber, and the repair shop fixes costly machinery. In other words, the palm plantation provides El Silencio with much of its disposable income, but is not essential for its survival. This was useful in 2005 when flooding caused by Hurricane Rita swamped the plantation and destroyed much of the year’s harvest. While devastating for other farms, El Silencio was able to continue with its other projects for the rest of the year and later begin to rebuild with saved earnings.

Other decisions favoring sustainability have improved the community in more discrete ways. The community’s reforestation efforts and its wildlife rescue center, for example, would at first seem, environmentally beneficial, but economically problematic. However, these measures have gained El Silencio recognition as an ecologically sensitive community, which has increased the number of visitors and boosted its tourism project. Volunteers at the wildlife rescue center are economically positive in two ways: they reduce the center’s operating costs and pay local families for room and board. Less apparently, they are beneficial socially, providing interaction with outsiders to members of an isolated community.


Finally, El Silencio has benefited from its organized structure. Services usually found only in much larger towns are attracted to the community because of its organized government. El Silencio has a church, bus-service into Quepos, and school up to 9th grade. All are extremely rare for such a small population. Whereas students from neighboring villages travel for about forty minutes by bus to attend school, students in El Silencio walk five minutes down the hill and have plenty of time to play soccer after class.
What Lies Ahead

El Silencio is impressive when compared to other communities in Costa Rica and astounding when compared to those in the rest of Central America. Still, Juan Carlos believes it cannot maintain its high standard without incorporating more technology. The community has no Internet or telephone access, and Juan Carlos’s desire to modernize has faced resistance from older leaders. He explains, “Our tourism project can only grow to a certain extent without modernization. Only so many Americans will choose a remote rural village with a poor website. The rest will flock to the resorts up the road in Quepos. And it’s sad because they think they’re seeing the real country.”

He also fears that increasing numbers of El Silencio’s youth will leave. “They’re going to be exposed to what’s out there. And why would they stay when there’s so much more to be had? Sure, some will be content to spend the rest of their lives working in the fields, but the most promising won’t.”

Juan Carlos’ stance is influenced by his own decision to leave as a youth and the examples of his siblings. I met his brother Marvin on my third day in El Silencio. I was sitting on the front porch when I noticed a teenager fixing a motorcycle in front of the house across the way. He saw me and came over, walking right through the front yard as if it were his own. Marvin apologized for not meeting me earlier, “It’s just that my mom’s kept me inside ‘cuz of the tests next week. Most parents don’t care, but I’ve been held back twice. She says I’ve gotta finish sometime.”

A lanky sixteen year old whose white teeth protrude from his dark face when he laughs, Marvin is the youngest member of a family of six children. He considers dressing up putting on flip-flops and a T-shirt. All his siblings except his twenty-two year old brother, Eduardo, are married with families. Marvin and Eduardo worked on their motorcycle every afternoon.

Eduardo, the opposite of his brother physically -- short and stout with fair skin and bushy hair -- but with the same restless spirit, chose to ride the bus to Quepos at 5 a.m. each weekday to work as a security guard. I asked him why he didn’t stay in El Silencio. He couldn’t come up with much of a response other than the cliché “I wanted to get out.” In a complete turnaround several days later, Eduardo told me he hated his job and wanted to quit. He did before I left, but was still dissatisfied with working in El Silencio.

Though the village does not cater to ambition, many youths such as Johan, the tour guide to be, are happy to stay in town and live a hard but fulfilling life. And many of those who have left, having experienced the good and the bad of the outside world, have realized how fortunate they were to grow up in El Silencio. Some have returned, happy to use their skills for the community’s benefit. Juan Carlos mentioned that he could have had a better job somewhere else. But he couldn’t live without the industrious mornings, afternoon soccer games, boisterous nights with blaring “reggaeton” music, and, most of all, the shared sense of belonging.

A Delicate Balance

I experienced Juan Carlos’ description first-hand as a volunteer in El Silencio. When I returned from meeting with him on my first day, I found the previously absent member of my host-family. A barefooted ten-year-old named Josué was kneeling beside the house, deep in a game of marbles. I already had sat down to take off my shoes when the creaking of the rocker brought him to. Josué bounded up the steps and stuck out a scrawny arm, declaring he was excited to have me as a brother. With a jerk of his head to either side and intense wide eyes, he whispered, “My sister isn’t very fun to play with.”


Josué then stomped inside, leaving small footprints on the freshly mopped floor, and quickly reemerged with a tattered soccer ball. He disappeared down the street. A few minutes later, increasingly audible, high-pitched squabbles of “Sí, mae! No, mae!” (Yeah, dude! No, dude!) signaled Josué’s return with a small group of shirtless boys, arguing over who could carry the ball. He told me we were going to play a real game of “bola,” as Costa Ricans call soccer, in “la plaza,” the pitch.

Most afternoons in El Silencio are similar, and evenings are even more social. After the sun sets around six, families head outside and amble through town. They stop to chat on their way to visit their grandparents and fill them in on the day’s gossip. Later the parents return home, and the teenagers are left to hang out. After I met Marvin, I spent most nights with some other kids at his house. Marvin’s motley gang ranges from his brother’s adult friends, tired from a day of hard labor, to kids his own age like Roger, the one blond-haired blue-eyed kid in town, to talkative little brothers like Josué. Following their grandparents’ example, Marvin and his friends have pooled their savings and, through working on school-breaks, have managed to save enough to buy a TV, guitar, and two video games: God of War and FIFA 06. Listening to music and watching TV at Marvin’s, I feel like I am hanging out with my friends back home. It is easy to forget I am in a developing country with a range of social issues five minutes down the road.

El Silencio’s challenge is to continue to accept the modern world in manageable steps -- to keep developing and satisfying its young and preserve its culture. Change is naturally discomforting. But by replicating examples like El Silencio’s, we may be able to minimize the problems related to the changes of development and chart a path to a more sustainable and peaceful future.
A Community

On my last day in El Silencio, a van comes at eight in the morning. While the driver loads my bags, I awkwardly hug and say goodbye to my host family. I then walk over to Marvin. He looks at me and asks, “Did you like Costa Rica?” I take a moment to think of a good answer, but before I can say anything, he laughs, pats me on the shoulder, and answers for me.

“Pura vida, mae.”


El Silencio is no utopia. It is an example of what can be.