Costa Rica Campaign Caught in Drug Traffic : Election Day: Latin America’s most stable democracy picks a president, amid charges that drug money helped fund both candidates.

When Costa Ricans go to the polls today to choose a successor to President Oscar Arias, they will be among the most expensive voters in the world.

The two major political parties, the incumbent social-democratic National Liberation Party (PLN) and the conservative Social Christian Unity Party (PUSC) have spent a combined total of about $12 per voter to capture the presidency of Latin America’s most stable democracy.

The pressures of an increasingly expensive campaign--foreign funding is permitted and unregulated--have led both parties to accept funds from questionable sources.

An experienced Costa Rican political analyst said, “The mobsters and gangsters of the international drug cartels are always looking for a small country as a haven. They practically controlled Panama and they’re moving in on Costa Rica . . . . The fact is both political parties have been indirectly in touch with people who are laundering money or have actually been smuggling drugs.”

In truth, the connection between prominent Costa Rican politicians and functionaries of the drug cartels has not been exactly “indirect.”

In recent weeks, front-runner Rafael Angel Calderon, the conservative PUSC candidate, saw a comfortable lead over PLN candidate Carlos Manuel Castillo almost evaporate, in part because of evidence that PUSC has received nearly $1 million from two sources now hostile toward each other--Gen. Manuel A. Noriega and the U.S. Republican Party.

Interviews, sworn congressional testimony and documents indicate that since 1985 both Noriega and two Republican administrations backed Calderon, the man perceived as more willing to support their regional interests.

In the 1986 elections, Washington saw the pro-peace PLN candidate Oscar Arias an obstacle to pursuing its proxy war against Nicaragua. Calderon, on the other hand, threatened to break diplomatic relations with Nicaragua, send Costa Rican guardsmen to fight the Sandinistas and forge closer U.S. relations.

Noriega allegedly had other motives for helping Calderon, a wheeling-and-dealing politician who might more likely turn a blind eye to drug-related activities in Costa Rica.

More embarrassing for Calderon was testimony presented to a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee in 1989. In a sworn declaration, Jose Blandon, a former Panamanian diplomat, said that during 1985 Noriega made two cash donations of $250,000 each to Calderon’s campaign, one directly to the candidate. The funds were not party-to-party, but came from a special military account controlled personally by Noriega.

Until January, Calderon enjoyed a comfortable 10-point lead over Castillo, in part because the Liberation Party had been tainted, early in the campaign, with ties to drug traffickers. Last July, the Special Commission on Drug Trafficking of Costa Rica’s Legislative Assembly issued an explosive report implicating a former PLN president, Daniel Oduber, and other party officials in drug trafficking and money laundering.

PLN aspirant Castillo, an experienced but rather colorless economist, immediately plummeted in the polls, although the legislative report produced scant evidence that he had personally accepted drug money for his campaign. In testimony to the commission, however, Castillo admitted that while running in the Liberation Party primaries in 1985, he had received two checks, totaling about $2,000, from a Cuban subsequently implicated in drug trafficking.

Calderon told the commission that during the last campaign, he accepted political loans totaling about $100,000 from two wealthy foreigners later linked to drug trafficking.

But the drug charges stuck more firmly on Liberation, which has been in power for the past eight years.

For the 1990 campaign, Calderon’s chief ad man and image-maker is Roger Ailes, the Republican media consultant who worked on George Bush’s presidential campaign.

Luis Manuel Chacon, who handled Calderon’s two previous unsuccessful presidential campaigns, says Ailes has recommended many changes and “has given a lot of confidence to Mr. Calderon.”

The Ailes-inspired changes are apparent. Gone are Calderon’s controversial, hawkish statements about Nicaragua and arming Costa Rica. Few interviews are granted and public appearances are carefully controlled. The 1989/90 PUSC campaign has been long on image, short on substance.

Republican efforts to put Costa Rica in more conservative hands began several years ago. The Association for the Defense of Liberty and Democracy in Costa Rica, a PUSC political think tank, promoted Calderon’s candidacy and opposed Arias’ peace policies. Since 1986, the think tank, according to its critics, has received $434,000 in U.S. government funds from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Documents show this included almost $50,000 in salaries to Calderon, its executive director for two years. The grants have been channeled via the National Republican Institute for International Affairs, a Republican Party entity set up to receive NED funds.

Meanwhile, the U.S. contributions raised eyebrows on Capitol Hill, since NED is specifically barred from involvement in partisan politics. Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa) called it “mind-boggling”--that U.S. taxpayer money would fund “the opposition of the strongest democracy in Central America.”

Association President Luis Chacon denies that funds have been improperly used, noting the seminars, conferences and public-opinion polls designed “to do political upgrading of the country.” He adds that his association is now concentrating on monitoring “democratic processes” in Nicaragua and Panama and that NED funding is being phased out.

Throughout Latin America and much of Europe, it is common for political parties to make donations to sister parties in other countries. But it is quite another matter for U.S. government funds to be applied in the partisan politics of a friendly country.

Between elections, cocaine trafficking through Costa Rica, and other Central American countries, has soared.

Whoever wins this time will have to deal with that problem over the next four years.