For an administration that was largely weighed down by scandal and perceived mismanagement, public security has ended up as President Laura Chinchilla’s most likely legacy for Costa Rica.
Negotiations that took place last week between three political parties for control of the Legislative Assembly’s directorate will play an important role in legislating by consensus. And that gives lawmakers considerable political capital, analysts say.
Spanish police seized 2.5 tons of cocaine hidden among pineapples on a ship from Costa Rica in one of the biggest ever seizures of the drug, they said Wednesday.
The Costa Rican Coast Guard in the southern city of Golfito confiscated 1.9 tons of cocaine Tuesday, and Spain seized 2.5 tons in a shipping container from Moín, according to the Public Security Ministry.
Alexander Leudo Nieves, a Colombian man who the U.S. government accuses of having links to an international drug trafficking cartel, could be released this month from a minimum-security prison in Costa Rica, where he is serving a seven-year sentence on drug-related charges.
Central America is a region rife with problems of inequality, political corruption, weak institutions, poverty, displaced and marginalized populations, and a history of violence. Two journalists who are part of a group of fellow scribes who spent several years looking at those issues and trying to understand them have compiled enough stories to turn them into a book.
President-elect Luis Guillermo Solís got a VIP tour of his new office from outgoing President Laura Chinchilla as the two leaders met for coffee and walked the halls of the Casa Presidencial in Zapote, in southeastern San José, Tuesday morning.
The Jade Museum reopened yesterday in its new location in the Plaza de la Democracia, a stone’s throw from the National Museum. Originally conceived in 2008 by National Insurance Institute President Guillermo Constenla and Culture Minister María Elena Carballo, the museum’s reopening was marked by great fanfare, including a speech by President Laura Chinchilla.
Obama – who like Solís came to office as an underdog riding on a campaign of hope and promises of political change – will not personally attend, and instead is sending a three-person delegation led by Gina McCarthy, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
