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"A New Way Of Doing Politics": The Movement Against Cafta In Costa Rica, Jeremy Rayner
"A New Way Of Doing Politics": The Movement Against Cafta In Costa Rica, Jeremy Rayner
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In October of 2007, Costa Ricans voted in a referendum to ratify a Free Trade Agreement with the United States (DR-CAFTA, or CAFTA). The first referendum in their nation's history--and the first referendum ever held on a Free Trade Agreement--marked the culmination of a cycle of contention over liberalization that transformed practices and expectations of politics in a country often considered an exemplar of representative democracy. In this dissertation I provide an account of the opposition to CAFTA (the NO), based on two years of ethnographic research with the Patriotic Committees (Comites Patrioticos), the decentralized, grassroots network at the heart …