Instead of rich landowners with slaves and peasants, Costa Rica was settled by Spanish farmers. Unlike the usual Latin American model of a small rich class controlling a large mass of poor peasants, Costa Rica developed into a working class democracy. Except for two lapses totally only a few weeks, Costa Rica has had a democratic government for over 100 years. In 1948, the government took the unusual step of disbanding the army, which allowed it to spend more money on development. Today the United Nations ranks Costa Rica as the most developed underdeveloped country and expects it to join the ranks of developed nations by 2000.
Literacy is universal and almost all homes have electricity, telephones, and running water.
That is not to say there aren't still pockets of poverty, but they're more like poverty in the U.S. rather than poverty elsewhere in Latin America. All these wonderful things combined with liberal shortwave licensing laws have made Costa Rica a center for small scale international broadcasting. The oldest is TIFC, Faro del Caribe, which relays its local AM service on SW for a regional audience. In the late 1980s, after the screwup in Guatemala, Adventist World Radio turned to Costa Rica for its Latin American station.