Costa Rica elects new president to succeed Arias

Latin American business leaders probably were delighted with Sunday's easy victory by Laura Chinchilla in Costa Rica's presidential election. Chinchilla, currently vice president in the administration of Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias, well-outpaced her two closest rivals and garnered 47 percent of the vote, enough to avoid a runoff. Her election means a continuation of pro-business policies that have proved controversial in the Central American country but are credited with helping Costa Rica avoid the worst effects of the global economic slowdown, according to the Reuters international news service. Chinchilla is the first elected female president in Costa Rica, which has long been one of Latin America's most stable countries. She and Arias, who is finishing his second term in office and plans to retire, championed the U.S.-backed Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) that relaxed trade barriers between the United States, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. But CAFTA met with widespread opposition in Costa Rica before being narrowly approved by voters in 2007. "I am thankful for the good work of the outgoing government and thankful our country is again moving forward and refuses to allow this advance to stop," Chinchilla said told cheering supporters in San Jose. She promised to expand existing trade pacts and attract new investment to Costa Rica's vibrant economy in the campaign, and received twice as many votes as either of her two strongest opponents, center-left Otton Solis, a CAFTA opponent, and conservative Otto Guevara. Costa Rica's economy is thriving on a mixture of tourism, manufacturing and exports of its popular coffee, pineapples and bananas, Reuters said.

The gang that wouldn't give up

Nice to hear from George W. Bush-era CIA director warning against release of secret memos authorizing invasive interrogation techniques -- NOT. The new Obama administration ought to be nominated for the Nobel Prize for agreeing to release the memos, which reveal who in the Bush administration was in on decisions to break international treaties and violate the country's fundamental principles. But these characters never give up, not even after U.S. voters resoundingly rejected the former administration's cavalier attitude toward human rights as it preached them to other countries. The latest outrage comes from Gen. Michael V. Hayden, CIA director during the last two years of the Bush government, who Sunday that release of the so-called torture memos would hamper the country's ability to fight terrorism, according to the New York Times. Hayden said the CIA had already stopped using waterboarding, a technique involving simulated drowning, by the time he became the agency's director, and told a Congressional committee in 2007 that he thought its use was probably illegal. But in an interview broadcast on Fox News Sunday, Hayden said release of the memos gave Al-Qaida an advantage by revealing what practices the CIA used in the past. “It describes the box within which Americans will not go beyond,” he said, according to the Times. “To me, that’s very useful for our enemies, even if, as a policy matter, this president at this time had decided not to use one, any, or all of those techniques.” The memos released this week Thursday detailed interrogation techniques used by the CIA from 2002-2005, apparently with the approval of the White House.