QCOSTARICA — Following the backlash, President Rodrigo Chaves on Wednesday tried to walk back his controversial statement on Friday, June 14, when he assured that Costa Rica has lived in a “perfect dictatorship” since the middle of the 20th century.
“Perhaps the word ‘dictatorship’ was not the most appropriate, but a perfect tyranny,” Rodrigo Chaves said this Wednesday, in his live program, which usually follows a morning session of his cabinet.
Tyranny is the exercise of power by someone who “obtains the government of a State against the law, especially if he governs it without justice and according to his will,” according to the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy.
– Advertisement –
Chaves’ words were a direct attack on seven of the last eight former presidents, through a manifesto made public the same day, censuring Chaves for calling Costa Rica “the perfect dictatorship”.
This “tyranny”, Chaves’ reaction to the statement signed by all the former leaders of Costa Rica, in which they say that the country is “the oldest uninterrupted democracy in America” and, although they admitted the need for improvements, they rejected the speech by the current president because “he equated Costa Rica with countries like North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and others.”
Read more: Former presidents censure Chaves for saying that Costa Rica is a “dictatorship”
The pronouncement of the former presidents did not make Chaves reconsider, but rather he used it to criticize the former rulers for “building the tyranny of what some defend as institutionality, but they put pieces in place to share the cake,” as he said.
The exception to Chaves’ response is Abel Pacheco (2002-2006), although he also signed the statement.
Within the framework of his desire to call a referendum that reforms the powers of the Office of the Comptroller General (CGR) because he considers it part of that institutionality that he complains about and describes as harmful, Chaves maintains his speech against the system traditional legal system that dates back decades, to the Political Constitution (1949).
– Advertisement –
“The governments of those seven people and their deputies elected all the judges, the CGR and passed the laws that bind us today. They began to give absolute powers to the middle managers they appointed,” Chaves accused, adding to the criticism against the traditional politics that he claims to be reforming with actions such as the eventual referendum.
“You (former presidents) were accomplices but fundamental authors of what we are trying to fix today,” Chaves said when answering the first question of his weekly press conference.
Chaves maintains his attack against the Costa Rican democratic system despite the fact that he himself said in March that “Costa Rica has been a beacon of democracy” and numerous international organizations that have held Costa Rica up as an example of democratic stability.
Chaves’ argument is that current laws do not allow him to carry out various reforms that he considers desirable to a referendum, which limits the true right of the people to vote in a direct election such as the one intended with the bill presented by this month before the Legislative Assembly, although without the projects that had been announced and limited to reforms of administrative controls.
– Advertisement –
The statement of the former presidents does not even mention the possibility of the referendum, but it does mention the current context of the political discussion.
“Ignoring the best of our history and altering the truth of the facts will not only prevent us from solving the problems that we still have, but will aggravate them,” says the document signed by Óscar Arias, Rafael Ángel Calderón, José María Figueres, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, Abel Pacheco, Luis Guillermo Solís and Carlos Alvarado.
– Advertisement –
Source link
Rico
