Learning to Love Exile

"I'm not homesick for the States or bored with this life. Costa Rica is a lovely country. Great weather, isn't it?"

The speaker is Financier Robert Lee Vesco, who last week gave a rare telephone interview to TIME Correspondent Bernard Diederich. His sentiments are understandable: if the U.S. can get him extradited from Costa Rica, to which he fled in 1972, he will face trial on four indictments. The latest, returned in mid-January, charges Vesco and six associates with selling stocks held by mutual funds that were managed by I.O.S. Ltd.--the investment complex once controlled by Bernard Cornfeld--and then investing more than $100 million of the proceeds "for their own use and benefit" in corporations they controlled. Some $60 million allegedly went into Inter-American Capital, a Costa Rican-based corporation.

It so happens that $60 million is the most common estimate of how much money Vesco has pumped into the Costa Rican economy, most of it through the purchase of government bonds. Vesco will not say what else he owns; he is reputed to have invested heavily in industry, agriculture and real estate and to own the tallest office building in the capital city of San Jose, along with various restaurants, a coffee plantation and interests in newspapers and radio-TV stations. He is known to have sunk more than $2 million into a holding company called San Cristobal S.A., a chief interest of Former President Jose ("Pepe") Figueres, a popular figure who is Vesco's leading backer in Costa Rica.

The money has not bought Vesco universal popularity. Last December he served as honorary president of a fiesta in Heredia, a provincial capital. But after the newspaper Excelsior (which Vesco is rumored to own) ran pictures of the financier crowning the winner of a beauty contest, the town fathers rebuked the fiesta commission for honoring the infamous exile, and two other dailies published expressions of moralistic indignation from educators and public officials. Vesco's presence is frequently denounced by politicians in opposition to the government of Figueres' successor, Daniel Oduber. Mario Echandi, who served as President from 1958 to 1962, has accused the government on television of granting special favors to Vesco and his associates and enlisting them to reap windfall profits in a deal with Costa Rica's national petroleum refinery.

But many Costa Ricans feel Vesco has become too important to the country's tiny economy to be kicked out. "To extradite him," sighs an opposition politician, "would mean the extradition of his money too." Indeed, in 1974, under Figueres, Costa Rica rewrote its extradition law to allow the government to veto an extradition demand before it ever reaches the courts. That new statute is popularly known as the "Vesco law."

Burly Bodyguards. For his part, Vesco says he has torn up his American passport, but he refuses to make the formal declaration before a consul that is required to renounce U.S. citizenship. "Sure they would like me to walk in there," says Vesco. "There are quite a few cases of U.S. officials kidnaping and torturing people in Latin American countries." Vesco's $500,000 home in a San Jose suburb is surrounded by high walls with TV cameras mounted atop each corner. He rarely ventures outside without burly bodyguards, who often tote submachine guns. Recently a Vesco entourage in a six-car caravan made a trip to the coastal city of Limon, whose officials were courting a Vesco investment. After entering the driveway of a popular country restaurant, the convoy suddenly pulled out and sped away. Someone had spotted the American ambassador's car parked out front.

Vesco, his wife Patricia and his four oldest children plan to become Costa Rican citizens after they fulfill their five-year residence requirement in mid-1977. They figure their chances for acceptance can only be enhanced by the birth of Son Patrick Francisco--an undisputed Costa Rican citizen--last November. Says Vesco: "I am hopeful that some day the politicians will find something else to play around with, and it will all die down. All we want is to be left alone."

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