2010 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS
Truth or Dare in Costa Rica’s Presidential
Campaign
By Alex Leff*
Costa Rica's presidential campaign has
become quite tense in the lead-up to the
February 7 elections, but it also has turned
rather goofy.
One of the latest displays of wackiness took
the form of a lie detector test, which
several leading candidates actually agreed
to take on national television.
I was eating dinner at a Japanese restaurant
here on the east side of San José, when
right-wing candidate Otto Guevara popped on
the restaurant's TV screen strapped to a
polygraph machine.
"Have you profited in any way while carrying
out your duties for which you could be
legally charged?" a moderator asked Guevara,
49, of the Libertarian Movement. "Have you
lied to the media during your election
campaign?" she asked.
Guevara replied "No" to both, and the
machine gave him a green light—Canal 7 told
viewers he was telling the truth. The
front-runner in the campaign, National
Liberation Party's (PLN) Laura Chinchilla,
refused to participate in the televised
interrogation. Guevara is in second place in
the polls, hovering at or under 30 percent.
Not to miss the opportunity to capitalize on
the polygraph test, he bought a two-page
spread in national newspapers that boasted
he is the only honest candidate in the race.
This was partly an attempt to dispel
controversy that has boiled over in recent
months about the questionable source of the
cash the Guevara campaign has been shelling
out for propaganda, which reportedly had
surpassed $1 million by December. Fingers
even pointed at Ricardo Martinelli, Panama's
president and probably the region's only
standing libertarian, as a possible donor,
an allegation which Guevara denies.
Guevara stunned analysts by virtually
sneaking up in the polls and stealing the
second place spot from Ottón Solís, who
narrowly lost the last elections in 2006 to
President Óscar Arias.
Back in September—which already seems like a
political eternity ago—former Vice President
Chinchilla looked poised to win Costa Rica's
February 7 presidential elections in a
landslide. A Unimer poll published in La
Nación newspaper gave her 63 percent of
voter support.
The same pollster said support for Arias'
favorite candidate has sunk 23 points since
then to about 40 percent, in part thanks to
a relative outsider who started closing the
gap. The Libertarian Movement's Guevara
scooped 30 percent of decided voters'
support, according to Unimer poll this
month.
However, an analyst at a separate polling
company said the tide again is changing.
"Otto Guevara seems to have hit a ceiling,"
Esteban Alvarez of CID-Gallup told me
earlier this week. CID-Gallup has been doing
daily tracking, he said. As of Friday,
January 29, their numbers were: Laura
Chinchilla 44 percent (steady), Otto Guevara
26 percent (down from 30 percent on
Tuesday), Ottón Solís 18 percent (up from 15
percent) and Luis Fishman 9 percent (up from
8 percent).
In other wackiness, Luis Fishman of the
Social Christian Unity Party—fighting to
pick up the pieces after the party's last
candidate, former President Rafael Angel
Calderón was convicted of
corruption—launched a campaign with the
slogan "the lesser evil is better." Voters
could not believe he was apparently
admitting to some degree of evilness, but
Carlos Denton, CID-Gallup’s founding
president, said the campaign has gone over
well.
I will leave you with a beyond absurd TV
commercial the campaign ran earlier this
month: gorgeous pregnant women singing about
why they're voting for Fishman and men
dressed only in diapers or bibs and drinking
from oversize baby bottles? Yes, it has come
to this.
*Alex Leff is a
contributing blogger to
AmericasQuarterly.org
based in San José, Costa Rica |
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