The Irish Times - Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Landslide victory for Costa Rica's first female president

Laura Chinchilla is the fifth woman to be elected president in Latin America in the past two decades.
Photograph: Reuters

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RORY CARROLL

COSTA RICA has elected its first female president in a landslide victory, marking another political milestone for women in Latin America.

Laura Chinchilla (50) from the centrist ruling party won 47 per cent of the vote in a crowded field in Sunday’s poll, further eroding the region’s reputation as a bastion of machismo and patriarchy.

“Wives and working women continue overcoming barriers to make a greater Costa Rica,” Ms Chinchilla said in her acceptance speech. “All the women, and also the men who have accompanied us, have made it possible that a daughter of this country can today be president.”

Ms Chinchilla is the fifth woman to be elected president in Latin America in the past two decades, a sign of slowly growing female economic and political clout after centuries of subservience.

She followed Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner, elected in 2007, Chile’s Michelle Bachelet, elected in 2006, Panama’s Mireya Moscoso, elected in 1999, and Nicaragua’s Violeta Chamorro, elected in 1990.

Ms Chinchilla, married and mother to a teenage son, is a protegee of President Oscar Arias, a Nobel peace laureate and veteran political operator who has consolidated Costa Rica as one of central America’s most stable, prosperous economies.

She stepped down as vice-president last year to run as his successor. She promised to keep the ruling National Liberation party’s free market policies of expanding trade deals and wooing investment.

“I am thankful for the good work of the outgoing government and thankful our country is again moving forward and refuses to allow this advance to stop,” Ms Chinchilla told cheering supporters.

A social conservative who opposes gay marriage and abortion, she campaigned under the slogan “Laura: firm and honest,” and said her priority would be to combat drug-fuelled violent crime.

Opponents had cast her as a hypocritical Arias puppet who was soft on criminals. One rival, Otto Guevara, took a televised polygraph test to show he was more honest. Another, Luis Fishman, ran on the slogan that of all the candidates he was the “lesser evil”.

Despite or perhaps partly because of such tactics, Ms Chinchilla won in all seven provinces, a rare feat, and easily surpassed the 40 per cent needed to avoided a run-off. – (Guardian service)