Not pissing off the United States? My understanding is that most Central and some South American countries have had their governments intentionally destabilised by the US because they were perceived as too left wing.
This has to be a huge part and it's sad but not surprising that you're being downvoted here. Almost every other country in Latin America has either been invaded by the US, or has gone through US-backed coups, economic sanctions during the cold war, etc.
Tensions between government and the opposition, supported by the CIA, caused the short-lived Costa Rican Civil War of 1948 that ended Calderón's government and led to the short de facto rule of 18 months by José Figueres Ferrer.
Sounds like he had an interesting relationship with the CIA, to say the least:
>"At the time, I was conspiring against the Latin American dictatorships and wanted help from the United States", he recalled. "I was a good friend of Allen Dulles."
>"Anyway", Mr. Figueres went on, "the C.I.A.'s Cultural Department helped me finance a magazine and some youth conferences here. But I never participated in espionage. I did beg them not to carry out the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, which was madness, but they ignored me."
>Figueres backed the leftist Sandinista revolution in neighboring Nicaragua that overthrew dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979. He railed against U.S. policy when the United States supported Nicaragua's Contra guerrillas.
It also reads as though his 1958 testimony before Congress [0] shamed the CIA into facilitating the assassination of Rafael Trujillo, a bloody right-wing dictator who Figueres all but named:
>"If you’re going to speak of human dignity in Russia, why is it so hard to speak of human dignity in the Dominican Republic? Where is intervention and where is non-intervention? Is it that a simple threat, a potential one, to your liberties, is, essentially, more serious than the kidnapping of our liberties?"
>With Figueres as sponsor, Bosch and Ornes agreed to form a coalition government in anticipation of the overthrow of dictator Rafael Trujillo.
Such a fascinating figure. Amazed I never knew his name before now.
Wow, Ferrer was brilliant. He made friends with the devil, and kept the devil looking elsewhere. One suspects this was also thanks to the fact that Costa Rica had no oil or fruit plantations...
With respect to the coup mentioned upthread, it's notable that Ferrer instituted largely the same reforms proposed by Calderón and previously instituted in USA by FDR. That took courage.
Yeah, not strictly zero intervention of course (a socialist won a democratic election and the US wasn't going to have it), but compared to other countries it was shorter-lived and longer ago.
