Caribbean & Central America - December 2012 (ISSN 1741-4458)

As the Costa Rican legislative assembly (AL) and the supreme court of justice clashed in a public institutional crisis (see below), Johnny Araya, the incumbent mayor of San José and leading hopeful for the ruling Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN) 2014 presidential nomination, interjected in the dispute. He said that while he agreed that the court needs to renew some of its members, the AL’s actions constituted “an attack against the independence of judges”. The comment was undoubtedly calculated: with the first half he played to the party in congress – lack of renewal was the reason the PLN bloc cited for voting against the re-election of a judge – and with the second he played to the electoral gallery.

The contest for the PLN nomination is now a four-horse race, after businessman Antonio Alvarez Desanti withdrew from the competition in late September as he doesn’t want to run against former president José María Figueres Olsen (1994-1998) in the party primary. Instead, he joined the mayor’s efforts as campaign manager, pledging to bring about renewal in the party leadership. However, renewal at the top of the PLN appears as unlikely as in the constitutional court’s composition. The other presidential hopefuls include: Rodrigo Arias, the former minister of the presidency under his brother Oscar’s two terms in office (1986-1990; 2006-2010), who wants to bring the election forward to January 2013; former president Figueres Olsen; and Fernando Berrocal Soto, the former minister of the presidency during the Luis Alberto Monge presidency (1982-1986) and former minister of security under Arias’s second term (2006-2008).

Rodrigo Arias is advocating for the PLN to bring forward its presidential primary contest, from April 2013 to January 2013, so that it can be held in conjunction with Costa Rica’s district-level elections. His brother has said holding two electoral processes would be a “waste of money”. Araya responded that “Arias has no moral authority to ask us to save on the convention”, in reference to the high fiscal deficit left by his administration, adding that bringing the convention forward “appears to be intended to affect the time this government [led by President Laura Chinchilla] has left...I see an excessive anxiety for power”.

Party members, and Costa Ricans in general, as the latest (October) Unimer poll showed, are highly critical of President Chinchilla’s apparent inability to rein in the ongoing power struggle within the PLN. Rodrigo Arias has done nothing but try to undermine the president’s authority since she took office in May 2010, but his strategy appears to have backfired since, after being neck and neck for several months, Araya has emerged as the favourite pre-candidate. When all (1,200) respondents were asked who they would vote for if the primary were held “today” (between 3 and 11 October), 16% chose Araya, compared with 6% for Arias and 6% for Figueres. The overall poll has a 2.8% margin of error (MOE). When the same question is put to self-proclaimed PLN sympathisers, which brings the MOE to 5.5%, Araya’s support soars to 32%, while Arias and Figures are left behind on 16% each. In both scenarios, Berrocal barely scores 2%.

Clash of the Titans: Legislative Vs Judiciary

In mid November the AL triggered an institutional crisis when 38 of its members voted against the re-election of Judge Fernando Cruz to another eight-year term in the constitutional court. Cruz has a history of voting against political actors in some of the most highly controversial cases of recent times – even when doing so in minority. For example, he opposed the Dominican Republic-Central America-US free trade agreement (Cafta-DR), a proposal to allow presidential re-elections and the Las Crucitas open pit gold mine.

The vote in itself may not have been as controversial if the chief of the PLN bloc in the AL, Fabio Molina, had not said after it that “this is the moment to change the course in search of some governability” and “should serve as a warning for the Court that it must renew [its members]”. Thus, it came as no surprise when Cruz, some of his bench colleagues and the supreme court itself said the vote had been politically motivated and constituted a violation of the separation of powers, with the AL meddling in judicial affairs.

The president of the supreme court, Luis Paulino Mora, said the vote against Cruz had been “a clear censure of his opinions as judge” and constituted “a threat to judicial independence and the very foundations of democracy itself...This is a crass excuse to search for one way of thinking and a complacent behaviour, [a message] that this majority can do anything, especially silence the dissident; in other words, silence the rich diversity of democracy”.

When tensions between the AL and the Court reached their climax – the latter called the vote “a technical coup d’état” – the opposition legislator Luis Fishman, of the Partido Unidad Social Cristiana (PUSC), filed an injunction before the constitutional court itself, arguing that legal procedures had been violated in the congressional confirmation process. The court accepted the injunction, which will now have to be considered by the substitute members of the IV chamber, after the head of the AL, Víctor Emilio Granados of Partido Accesibilidad sin Exclusión (Pase), declared “null” – for being “extemporaneous” - the session in which the initial vote against Cruz’s re-election took place. However, 26 of the 57 AL members objected to Granados’s decision, forcing Fishman to file the injunction.

Thus the controversy is to be resolved by Cruz’s own colleagues and, while the Court considers the matter, the AL’s vote remains inapplicable. Cruz’s future is still uncertain, but while it is being resolved, he is able to return to his duties in the IV chamber.

• Colombia gains terrain

As Colombia and Costa Rica move forward in bilateral discussions for the signing of a Free Trade Agreement (FTA), official investment figures calculated by the Costa Rican central bank reveal that Colombia was the fourth largest investor in Costa Rica in 2011 – after the US, Spain and Mexico. Colombian investment in Costa Rica also registered the highest rate of growth since 2000. At the turn of the century, Colombian investment in the country amounted to just US$1m; eleven years later it totalled US$147m. Most of the investment is concentrated in just three sectors: agriculture (mainly in the banana and pineapple industries); industry (mainly in the construction materials’ sector); and financial services (banking and insurance). According to the minister of foreign trade, Anabel González, accumulated Colombian investment in Costa Rica between 2000 and 2011 “is above US$3bn”.

• Services

According to the ministry of technology, in 2011 the services industry accounted for 68% of GDP, compared with 58.5% in 2000. In total exports by the sector, however, its importance has almost doubled, with software exports and IT-related industries acting as the main driver. Exports from these sub-sectors have jumped from US$695m in 2006 to US$2.1bn in 2011.