Our political class very much knows where its bread is buttered (if the Left ever wins, ever, it's gonna get screwed by a divided Legislature), and we have fuck all for exploitable resources. It's a country very much safeguarded by its relative irrelevance.

As a Costa Rican poster, I've concluded you're unfortunately right, we're a bit of a historical accident so to say and unfortunately our tranquility and peace is supported by sucking up to the States (which I'm not fond about rn but alas). Panama is similar.

Le tengo tanto hype a Mamdani, que florezca una ciudad ejemplar para Estados Unidos y el mundo.

Anyways, we'll see, perhaps this is just jumping the gun (which I hope so). Marco Rubio como el gusano que es is surely frothing at the mouth and chomping at the bit, the fucking bastard.

Or the Americans win quickly (at least initially, not counting an insurgency) and these fascist assholes get a rare foreign policy 'win' to trot out and distract from their fuckups at a time when the knife needs to be driven deep into their ambitions to kill American democracy completely.

Mine own country one of the biggest culprits of sucking up to the Americans to my deep shame. Point is: either America gets in a protracted war that kills civilians by galore, further destroys what remains of the shambles of Venezuela, and sends the region into a tailspin with a new migrant crisis.

Brazil and Mexico and etc. may protest (rightly) but the Venezuelan government has few real friends and many countries in the region eager to send their migrants back to Venezuela in case the regime gets overthrown, so a good chunk will just turn a blind eye. A lot are just America's lap dogs too.

If a U.S.-Venezuela conflict does rev up, and the Americans do not fuck this up more than they always do (which considering the bastards in charge is a less likely outcome), this is possibly the only conflict that has even a slight chance of not kneecapping them. There are no good outcomes really.

Even so, it feels a bit disheartening to not have a desk of my own so as not to study in my bed, to have to nag my father in order for him to pay his alimony (while he travels around the world), to know that things are kinda fucked back home, to eat rice by itself various times due to being broke.

I instinctively understand English (tbf I was taught it from around 7 years old on); any other language I've tried to learn (unsuccessfully) is translated into Spanish (curiously I can more or less understand written Italian by its similarity to Spanish but it's also translated in my head).

What a fantastic show, they knocked it tf out

Nevertheless, in a globalized world autarky is willingly kneecapping oneself, so I may need to read some more in order to reconcile this fact with my preference for national control. It ties into many issues CR faces; not every solution fits all countries.

The current Costa Rican administration has loosened tariffs on foreign rice, yet there seems to be no actual decrease in prices to make me trust in a general relaxation of rules; national production of rice as our staple food has gone to shit these past few years, so there seems to be few positives.