Word: ricas
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Recovering the Tico mojo is Chinchilla's prime mandate - provided she proves to be her own woman and not, as her opponents insist, Arias' political proxy. "Costa Rica has certainly lost some of its dynamism," says Susan Kaufman Purcell, director of the Center for Hemispheric Policy at the University of Miami. "But if Chinchilla turns out to be the leader she shows promise of being, she can get that back." As she declared victory last Sunday night, Feb. 7, in the capital, San José, with 47% of the vote vs. 25% for her main center-left rival, Otton Solis...
...Chinchilla's gender may not be as 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...
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...
...winning platform is any indication, rising drug-related violence worries Costa Ricans the most. ("Security, security and more security," she promised.) But worsening social inequality is high atop her campaign's list as well, particularly when it comes to access to education. Schools used to be one of Costa Rica's largest sources of pride and a big reason First World high-tech giants like Intel invested in the country. But "most Costa Ricans feel the quality of public education has dropped off considerably," says Jorge Mora, director of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences...
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...