Laura Chinchilla
Laura Chinchilla was president of Costa Rica from 2010 to 2014, the first woman in the office, elected in February 2010 with forty-seven per cent as the successor Arias had chosen, his vice-president and justice minister, on a platform of continuity and of security. That was the country's new fear, the murder rate having doubled in a decade as the cocaine came through from Colombia to Mexico. The four years were the Isla Calero affair, in which Nicaragua's dredgers and troops occupied a few square kilometres of wetland at the mouth of the San Juan in October 2010 on the strength, Managua said, of the border shown on Google Maps. She took it to the International Court of Justice, which ruled for Costa Rica in 2015 and ordered Nicaragua to pay. There was the road she built along the river in answer, without environmental studies, which washed away and which the prosecutors investigated. There was the fiscal reform that the Assembly would not pass and the constitutional court then struck down, leaving the deficit at five per cent. There were the security tax on companies; the ban on open-pit gold mining, the same-sex civil unions she would not push and the in-vitro fertilisation she was made to legalise by the Inter-American Court, and the approval ratings that fell to the lowest of any president in the Americas. The country's press, hers being the government it most enjoyed disliking, made a sport of. She was born in Carmen Central, San José, the daughter of a comptroller-general, studied political science there and public policy at Georgetown. She worked on judicial reform for the American aid agency across Latin America. She was public security minister under Figueres Olsen from 1996 to 1998, a deputy from 2002, and Arias's vice-president from 2006. Her party lost the election of 2014 to the Citizens' Action Party in the first round, effectively, its candidate withdrawing before the run-off. She has been a visiting professor at Georgetown and elsewhere. She headed election observation missions for the OAS in Mexico and Paraguay. She chaired the Club de Madrid of former leaders. That is where former presidents of Costa Rica go.
- Lived: 1959 CE – ?
- Nationality: Costa Rican
- Roles: president, political scientist, politician
