Word: chinchilla
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Recovering the Tico mojo is Chinchilla's prime mandate - provided she proves to be her own woman and not, as her opponents insist, Arias' political proxy. "Costa Rica has certainly lost some of its dynamism," says Susan Kaufman Purcell, director of the Center for Hemispheric Policy at the University of Miami. "But if Chinchilla turns out to be the leader she shows promise of being, she can get that back." As she declared victory last Sunday night, Feb. 7, in the capital, San José, with 47% of the vote vs. 25% for her main center-left rival, Otton Solis...
...Chinchilla's gender may not be as important as her age. As a vigorous 50-year-old replacing her political mentor, 69-year-old President Oscar Arias, the center-right Chinchilla (pronounced cheen-chee-ya) is ushering in a new generation of leadership at a moment when Costa Rica's stature as the Switzerland of Central America is in decline. Its democracy remains the region's strongest, but it has been rocked in recent years by a spate of high-level government corruption scandals, a spike in drug-trafficking violence and a widening gap between rich and poor. Costa Rica...
...makes a point of eschewing a military so it can spend more on schoolteachers. But until the Feb. 7 presidential election, it had yet to select a female head of state, something its two less-developed neighbors, Nicaragua and Panama, did long ago. Now a new President-elect, Laura Chinchilla, has finally struck a blow for Ticas, female Costa Ricans...
Many Costa Ricans feel that the Arias generation, which did such an impressive job keeping those problems at bay at the end of the 20th century, has let them leach into the country in the 21st. If Chinchilla's winning platform is any indication, rising drug-related violence worries Costa Ricans the most. ("Security, security and more security," she promised.) But worsening social inequality is high atop her campaign's list as well, particularly when it comes to access to education. Schools used to be one of Costa Rica's largest sources of pride and a big reason First World...
What's the next book you're working on? The next project is tentatively titled The Chinchilla Girl in Exile. It's about a 9-year-old girl who has hypertrichosis, which is a condition in which you have lots and lots of hair. She looks kind of like Jo Jo the Dog-Faced Boy. She's pretty hairy, and she's been homeschooled because her family doesn't think she is going to succeed socially in school. But she's very plucky, and she wants to have a normal life, so they reluctantly allow her to go to school...