User blog comment:Lordxehanort/Various Topics/@comment-1329925-20100216132509

I have a question: Why would the CIA invade Costa Rica?

Costa Rica was a US ally during the Cold War.

1. During the Civil War, the US tacitly supported Figueres's rebels.

2. After the war, the strong ties that came about due to US aid helped to lift Costa Rica out of the economic instability that it had been facing in the years before the revolution.

3. Figueres's wife was an American.

4. Figueres admits that he is pro-american, a friend of Allan Dulles, and that he recieved money from the CIA to publish a political journal, Combate, and to sponsor the founding meeting of the Institute of Political Education in Costa Rica in November 1959. The institute was organized as a training school and a center for political collaboration for political parties of the democratic left, principally from Costa Rica, Cuba (in exile), the Dominican Republic (in exile), Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua (in exile), Panama, Peru, and Venezuela.

5. In 1959, Figueres warned Fidel Castro about the ideological deviations he had observed in Cuba.

6. Figueres supported JFK's Alliance for Progress movement.

7. In May 1961, Figueres was involved with the CIA and the Dominican Dissident Movements in the assassination of the right-wing Dominican dictator, Rafael Trujillo.

Costa Rica was one of the US's few left-winged allies durning the Cold War. Although Figueres did say that testified that the United States must change its policy in Latin America and that it could not sacrifice human rights for "investments."

Figueres disagreeded with the CIA's clandestine wars with Cuba, including the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

Figueres also backed the leftist Sandinista revolution in neighboring Nicaragua that overthrew dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979. And he railed against U.S. policy when the United States supported Nicaragua's Contra guerrillas.