Host Already Feels Strain of Latin Summit : Costa Rica: ‘Ticos’ are determined to impress world leaders as the conference opens today. But some see it as a publicity stunt.

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica —  First there was the flap over the bullet holes.

With President Bush and 16 other Western Hemisphere leaders due here today, some authority decided to erase those remnants of the 1948 civil war, lest the backdrop to the summit’s closing ceremony be marred by pockmarks.

When a Costa Rican television channel reported the cover-up of the old army fort’s stone facade, history buffs cried foul. Obliging workers chiseled new holes, only to stir a new uproar because they were fake.

“I can’t tell you which side will win,” shrugged construction supervisor Julio Aragon as his workers filled the second set of holes. “There is still time for new instructions.”

The tempest over such a trifling but symbolic detail of history is a sign of the strain on this tiny republic as it plays host to the hemisphere’s largest summit in 22 years.

For the most part, the traditional bienvenido attitude of the Ticos, as Costa Ricans call themselves, prevails. But the magnitude of the two-day event--which will close the capital’s airport and main streets, fill its 1,400 hotel rooms and absorb half the national police force--has caused many to question whether their country can handle its new-found claim to regional leadership.

Although the heads of government invited by President Oscar Arias Sanchez are coming officially to celebrate “100 years of Costa Rican democracy,” some steps taken to impress or protect them--such as sweeping away street peddlers--have ruffled the Ticos’ self-image as a tolerant, easygoing people.

For many of Costa Rica’s 2.9 million people, the summit is as much a point of pride as their president’s Nobel Peace Prize, their soccer team’s passage to the 1990 World Cup finals and native son Frank Chang Diaz’s recent journey aboard the U.S. space shuttle Atlantis.

An official honor guard of 15,000 schoolchildren will take part in the event, and 1,300 families have volunteered to lodge journalists who are coming to cover it.

“The world will be watching Costa Rica,” said Claudia Cortes de Gomez, a housewife who turned her middle-class home into an international press center. “Nobody will ever confuse us with Puerto Rico again.”

But others dismiss the summit as a dangerous and disruptive publicity stunt of no lasting benefit to Costa Rica.

“The whole event is a facade, a way to pretend to be something we are not,” said Pedro Platero Morales, a 28-year-old sandalmaker who moonlights as a bouncer at a discotheque.

“It’s so pompous. They say this is costing a million dollars. That’s nothing for a place like the United States, but we are poor. We cannot afford it.”

Besides, he worried, the summit might bring other people’s violence to this pacifist oasis, which abolished its army after the 1948 war.

“The president of Colombia will be here,” he said. “What if the drug mafia tries to kill him? What if some loco throws a bomb?”

Before leaving town to escape the hoopla, the sandalmaker brought his young son downtown to watch workers assembling Democracy Plaza, a treeless expanse of tan bricks that sweep uphill in terraces to Fort Bellavista, the old army barracks with the bullet holes.

The plaza and a refurbishing of the fort, now the National Museum, were supposed to be ready for the summit. But workers admit there will be some loose bricks underfoot during Saturday’s farewell ceremony.

If anything, Democracy Plaza is a monument to that Tico mix of stubborn idealism and last-minute improvisation that can be maddening to outsiders but quite effective in the pursuit of a political vision.

Arias, who won his Nobel for trying to pacify Central America, views the summit as nothing less than the dawn of a new era in inter-American cooperation. But he gave his bureaucracy just three months to throw it together.

Scouring the city for lodging, the tourist bureau found that several establishments in its hotel guide were whorehouses. And the Ticos’ generosity with their homes did not apply to Mercedes-Benz owners, who ignored a government appeal to donate their luxury cars for the presidential motorcade.

Two Saturdays ago, a trial closing of the 12-mile motorcade route threw this city of 300,000 into chaos. “It was a disaster,” said Rogelio Castro, a security official. “They closed some roads that didn’t need to be shut.”

Then there was the furor over beggars and panhandlers.

Last week, the police ran 250 licensed street vendors and scores of assorted itinerants out of central San Jose, telling them not to come back until Oct. 30. Some were beaten for resisting and their wares were seized. Vendors have gone to court seeking compensation.

Police deny that the evictions are part of a cover-up. The presence of so many street people, they insist, is a security risk for the foreign dignitaries.

“We are preparing for the grand hemispheric event in the same manner as when we are surprised by important visitors at home,” wrote columnist Edgar Espinoza in the newspaper La Nacion.

“The housewife runs to take off her apron and powder her nose, hiding the old man so he won’t talk nonsense, shoving the chamber pots under the bed, tying up the dog so he won’t bite the visitor, stuffing rags into all the cracks except one for peeking, muzzling the parrot so she won’t insult the guest, covering the spring in the chair and putting Grandma’s teeth in.”

The ultimate summit controversy is Arias’ own manipulation of history to create a centennial before his term ends next May.

Some Costa Rican analysts believe that the country’s apparent economic health is too fragile to last and that Arias’ successor, whoever it be, will have to abandon regional diplomacy and turn to the home front. “This is his swan song, his last ego trip,” says pollster Carlos Denton.

A century ago, a Conservative-led uprising kept the ruling Liberal party from stealing an election. But several allegedly tainted elections followed, along with a dictatorship in 1917-19. Never before has the 1889 revolt been commemorated as anything special.

Most historians date Costa Rican democracy from the 1948 civil war, when Jose Figueres’ victorious forces ushered in electoral integrity and universal suffrage.

“Arias needed a pretext for a summit,” said historian Manuel Araya, who nevertheless defends the idea. “Eight years of war in Central America have damaged Costa Rica’s image enormously. It was important to find something to change that.”