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According to President Laura Chinchilla, Costa Rican career diplomats refuse to take postings in faraway places. That was the official reason she gave as to why her foreign minister, René Castro, had appointed 40 people -with close links to the ruling Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN) - without holding the appropriate tendering process, to posts in the ministry of foreign relations and in Costa Rican embassies abroad.
The scandal promised to reach such proportions that, soon after the opposition-led legislative assembly (AL) called Castro to give formal testimony explaining his actions, President Chinchilla ordered her minister to dismiss all 27 diplomats, whose appointments were allegedly due to nepotism and re-hire for the positions in a process open to all Costa Ricans. In fact, the foreign ministry scandal was in large part responsible for the media only mentioning in passing that the AL has already exhausted its budget for overseas travel in 2011. It appears then that Costa Ricans’ taste for travel, especially when bankrolled by the taxpayer, crosses the political divide but the opposition has somehow managed to avoid explaining how it went through ¢70m (US$86,762), spent during 38 trips for 22 legislators in the first six months of 2011.
Public discontent with the Chinchilla government has been on the rise since the president was hit by several scandals last year; to be fair, however, most of them were linked to events that took place during the previous administration of Oscar Arias (2006-2010), but they did not come out in the open until his successor had taken power. Thus, it is not surprising that in the most recent Unimer poll for the daily La Nación, of the 80% (out of 1,202 respondents) who said they had read in the news of the opposition’s takeover of the AL [RC-11-05], 57% said it was a “positive” political development for the country. Even within the sub-group that voted for Chinchilla in 2010, 45% was in favor of an opposition coalition taking charge of congress. The reason is simple: 53% thought that by losing control of the AL, the PLN would be forced to put its internal divisions behind and be more productive in congress.
What should be worrying the president is the fact that 44% of respondents said they would like to see the emergence of a coalition candidate to challenge the PLN’s hold on power in the 2014 general election; 25% of those polled said they would in fact vote for such a candidate. The opposition, however, is quite fragmented and it seems impossible, at least at this stage, that it would be able to overcome its differences to rally behind a joint candidate. Nonetheless, the reaction to the poll was rather promising with several leading coalition figures in congress saying it was an interesting idea that may “mature with time”.
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