Manipulation and Pressure Tactics win the CAFTA ReferendumOctober 9, 2007By Tom Loudon, Alliance for Responsible Trade With the final polls predicting a resounding win for the opponents of the CAFTA referendum last Thursday, the U.S. government and the business elite in Costa Rica pulled out all the stops. In spite of a law which explicitly prohibits all public discussion of the issues in the two days before the referendum, the law was fragrantly and systematically violated by the press; especially several TV stations which ran one "news" program after another designed to instill fear in the population if they voted against CAFTA. read more