Word: america
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...over Washington, as another snowstorm approached, this sort of swirling message confusion reigns, as Democrats and Republicans both maneuver for political advantage while claiming to be above politics. The well-staged jockeying to rise above America's most cynical caricatures of Washington politics risks only confirming the worst in the minds of voters...
...important as her age. As a vigorous 50-year-old replacing her political mentor, 69-year-old President Oscar Arias, the center-right Chinchilla (pronounced cheen-chee-ya) is ushering in a new generation of leadership at a moment when Costa Rica's stature as the Switzerland of Central America is in decline. Its democracy remains the region's strongest, but it has been rocked in recent years by a spate of high-level government corruption scandals, a spike in drug-trafficking violence and a widening gap between rich and poor. Costa Rica's image as Central America's moral...
...gardens and release green balloons, a reference to the signature color of the opposition, which is known as the Green Movement. Other tactics proposed by organizers include joining in the official ceremonies and then switching into green clothing, or changing the meaning of government-sanctioned slogans like "Death to America" into satirical ones like "Death to Russia" or more pointed ones like "Death to the Dictator." And though some have called on demonstrators to be as peaceful and silent as possible, disruption is the order of the day. "The more overwhelming we are, the more difficult it will...
Costa Rica has always been a progressive beacon on Central America's benighted street: the reliable democracy that makes a point of eschewing a military so it can spend more on schoolteachers. But until the Feb. 7 presidential election, it had yet to select a female head of state, something its two less-developed neighbors, Nicaragua and Panama, did long ago. Now a new President-elect, Laura Chinchilla, has finally struck a blow for Ticas, female Costa Ricans...
That's as important to Central America as it is to Costa Rica, which has long given the isthmus a model to emulate - something it still urgently needs. Central America may no longer be fighting the civil wars that ravaged it in the 1980s, but its problems are nonetheless mountainous and pose policy headaches for Washington in areas like the drug war, free trade and illegal immigration. The region's homicide rates, for example, are among the world's highest, as are its illiteracy and malnutrition indexes. Rule of law, as the Honduras debacle demonstrated, remains largely dysfunctional...