Word: chinchilla
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Former Vice President Laura Chinchilla won a Feb. 7 vote to become the first woman elected to lead Costa Rica. A protégé of the outgoing President, Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias, Chinchilla is expected to continue Arias' economic policies and his efforts as peace broker in the region. A social conservative, Chinchilla opposes gay marriage and abortion and has promised to combat the country's increasing crime rate...
Even Costa Rica's vaunted green luster has begun to brown. Its rain-forest protection and ecotourism are still envied in the Americas; Chinchilla says she's committed to Arias' goal of making the country carbon-neutral by 2021. But Arias has been accused of lax national-parks preservation and pandering to open-pit mining ventures in Costa Rica...
...Chinchilla, as a result, has had to fend off suggestions by Solis and other political foes that she's a puppet of Arias, under whom she served as Vice President, and his social-democratic National Liberation Party, to which she belongs as well. The daughter of a former Costa Rican comptroller general, Chinchilla earned a master's degree in public policy at Georgetown University in Washington in the 1980s. But while she often wore indigenous fashions as a college student and criticized the Reagan Administration's involvement in Central America's conflicts, she is a social conservative, opposing abortion rights...
Political analysts say Chinchilla, who takes office May 8, has a talent for dialogue and coalition building, which she'll need when she faces Costa Rica's ultra-fractured Congress. Her center-right credentials set her apart from the other female heads of state in Latin America today: Chile's outgoing President, Michelle Bachelet, is a moderate socialist; Argentina's Cristina Fernández represents her Peronist Party's left wing; and the leading candidate in this year's Brazilian presidential election, Dilma Rousseff, hails from the leftist Workers Party. At the same time, Kaufman notes, Chinchilla follows a string...
Mora points out that Chinchilla, a former Justice Minister, "is generally regarded as an incorruptible woman, which is a very important calling card right now for Costa Ricans," who in the past decade have seen at least two former Presidents investigated (but so far not charged) in major financial-kickback cases. Still, he says, "the generational change she represents is the most significant." Being the first Tica President is definitely important - but taking Costa Rica back to the future will matter even more...