San Jose, Costa Rice – Thousands of Costa Ricans took to the streets in this capital on Wednesday to peacefully protest the CAFTA-DR trade treaty linking their country with four Central American neighbors, the Dominican Republic and the United States.
Organizers of the protest said that some 15,000 workers from government agencies and state-owned firms turned out to show their opposition to the free trade accord.
The secretary general of the ANEP labor federation, Albino Vargas, told EFE that “this is an effort of all the unions.”
“The first victims of that (free trade treaty) are the labor rights we’ve acquired. With the pact, Costa Rica has to conform its labor law downward to the rest of Central America, which means giving up rights for those who struggled to get them,” he said.
Recently, Costa Rica’s Constitutional Court annulled a series of benefits that workers from different public organizations negotiated in collective bargaining agreements, which, the union contends, means “smoothing the road” for the free trade pact.
Costa Rica is the only signatory of the CAFTA-DR that has not ratified the accord, whose other Central American parties are El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala.
