After over 20 years of residing legally in Costa Rica, a friend recently chose to renounce his residency. It was not an easy decision. He likes it here. But when he went to re-up for five more years the Caja handed him an updated bill. It was more than he wanted to pay. There was no negotiating the new amount, which was more than double what he had been paying. So he went to a lawyer and did the reverse paperwork and now travels and resides here as a tourist, on his EU passport. I asked him if he ever considered the irony of his situation– shedding himself of residency here when thousands arrive each year ready to pay good money to get their paperwork in order and become citizens of Costa Rica.
He said that he really no longer needed residency as he traveled several times a year, and never overstayed his visa, which is now up to six months for most travelers (though I know another person who must have looked at the agent in the airport the wrong way, because he only got a 3 month renewal when he made a border run). He has his own international medical insurance and doesn’t need the Caja. And, as he put it, his name is no longer in the system here. One less way of tracking him down.
Good old anonymity– many of us came here years ago in search of it. In the early 1990s, I lived in an off the grid house for a year. The house was a ten minute drive or fifty minute walk to the highway, and another 35 kilometers to the nearest town of any size. Few people knew where we lived. The owner had put in a hydropower system that worked by diverting water from a nearby river, channeling it through about a mile of small canals to a holding pond, which then fed the water down an incline to a turbine, which ran and provided power for the property.
After the year was up, I returned to the US for a visit. I had overstayed my visa for almost a year. The fine was a few dollars a month. The day before flying out, I went to migracion. Young men with connections inside the bowels of the bureaucracy offered expedited passport service. I negotiated a price with one, but before he disappeared inside with my passport and money, I asked for his ID. He handed it over. An official looking cedula. Fair enough. Thirty minutes later we traded cedula for passport and I was on my way.
Flash forward almost a decade. I continued to live without residency, but as I was now the father of three, all born here, there was no way they would expel me from the country. I carried copies of my children’s birth certificates folded up in my wallet as proof. I was making a passable living baking breads and cookies and selling my products in nearby beach towns. Then I got a better job running a popular sports bar that catered to tourists. My third day behind the bar, two smiling immigration agents walked in and asked to see my papers. I showed them the birth certificates.
They told me I could continue working but had to get started on residency. Six months later I was a legal resident. I was issued a small booklet with my photo and all data handwritten. There was later confusion at times due to the fact that my resident ID number had 2’s that looked like 7’s (or was it the other way around?); Whatever office worker was in charge of filling these out by hand was probably suffering from arthritis of the fingers by that time.
In over two decades I have gone from the booklet to the modern laminated cedula. Those kids who assured my continued presence here are now adults. Two of them live in the states. Yet I find myself considering the path my friend took. The Caja wants more money from me. Is it worth it? My one time in the hospital, I was kept there for two weeks awaiting a surgery that never happened. I pay for private doctors any time I need a body part looked at. I will never pay in enough to the Caja to qualify for a pension. And Hacienda also sends me occasional messages about money I supposedly owe dating back several years.
Living in limbo is not for everybody. But as I make an annual trip north to visit kids and grandkids, it would not require much effort to keep my passport up to date. As for what I own here– property and car in my wife’s name, and my local bank accounts sit at zero as I now use only an account outside of Costa Rica. My name is on three birth certificates and one marriage license, in the national registro, but once my cedula expires that will be all that proves my existence here. Anonymity beckons. It soon may be time to consider going back off the grid.
