President Rodrigo Chaves further stirred the political waters of Costa Rica just six weeks after completing half of his presidential term, by surprisingly expelling from his Cabinet the minister who was beginning to emerge as his possible standard-bearer in the 2026 elections. apparent anomaly in the contract in favor of a powerful construction company was the justification given by the president for dismissing the head of Public Works and Transportation, Luis Amador, on Tuesday, but the news of the coming days has only added agitation and shades of drama to the atmosphere political in the Central American country that mixes its tradition of democratic stability with a strong process of reconfiguration of forces.
It is now known that since January there was a criminal file to investigate the questioned contracting of the transnational Meco to repair the airport runway in the tourist province of Guanacaste (northeast of the country). Among those investigated is Luis Amador, but also President Chaves himself, who has accumulated more than 30 criminal investigations against him since he took power in 2022 as a champion of anti-corruption. Since January, the Attorney General's Office of the Republic opened the file to investigate whether there was a crime in the use of a decree signed by Chaves and his Minister of the Presidency, Natalia Díaz, which resulted in the disapplication of prior controls when processing a contract for more than 42 million dollars.
However, Amador's dismissal was decided unexpectedly by Chaves and announced by telephone while he was on an official trip to Canada, the country where he worked for years and of which he has nationality. This information became important on Thursday, when after returning to Costa Rica he decided to record a video in which he described the reasons for his dismissal as “political” and announced that he would leave the country to go into “voluntary exile” with the aim of being out of the country. reach of “the tentacles of evil,” in apparent allusion to Chaves. In addition, he announced that he would return for the 2026 presidential campaign. The trip was immediate; On Friday morning he took the flight, despite the unforeseen event of having to hand over his mobile phone and personal computer to judicial police who were waiting for him there.
“Absolutely inexplicable, I don't know what went wrong, what happened, I feel that Don Rodrigo lost trust in him and for that reason decided to remove him,” said the deputy head of the ruling party, Pilar Cisneros, to the newspaper. The Observer. He was referring to Amador, the minister best known to the population despite numerous questions about decisions in his portfolio, an engineer who came to enlist as a senior official in 2022 when Chaves was putting together a cabinet without knowing the political environment well, after the surprising victory. with a party that debuted in national elections and from which it distanced itself shortly after. His verb seemed to imitate that of Chaves and he always received his trust, but something abrupt happened and the contract with the construction company does not seem enough. The hypotheses of analysts and the thesis that has circulated in political circles and social networks is that Chaves was uncomfortable with that shadow, that he has now changed his “elected” character or that the minister behaved as if he already had his own power. The president, however, avoided a question from a journalist who asked him to specify what the trigger was.
“The trigger is that you have to do what you have to do when you have to do it,” he responded without responding. She warned, however, that she did not go for vanity and that it hurt her to do without him. “Dismissing the most popular minister… Do you think it's for pleasure?” She added one day after announcing his dismissal. In the following week he has not spoken publicly about that case again, not even when it became known that he is also involved in the criminal investigation, as well as other officials whom he has not dismissed or questioned.
Questions abound, but there is one certainty: without completing half of the quadrennium, the issue of the 2026 elections has been unleashed or to whom Chaves will try to transfer the support he receives from almost 50% of the population, according to January surveys. “The electoral discussion has been rushed,” warns Ronald Alfaro, political scientist at the Center for Research and Political Studies (CIEP) of the University of Costa Rica. Calculations and questions are activated about who can take over and how, especially in the face of the president's highly personalistic type of leadership, as the specialist described it. The doubt is greater if one considers that the president lacks a political party, since in 2023 he broke relations with the Social Democratic Progress Party (PPSD), which nominated him in 2022 as a letter of rupture against the traditional parties.
The void is notorious, adds Alfaro, recalling that leaders close to Chaves tried to set up new parties for the municipal elections in February of this year and failed. This same weekend, the president of one of these groups resigned, a publicist named Federico Cruz who was an electoral strategist for Chaves and his advisor in the current Government, also involved in questions about electoral financing for 2022. In December the President said that he He is no longer his advisor and that he must answer for the same before Justice. The Government, for its part, remains busy with the insecurity crisis and pressure from various sectors despite favorable macroeconomic indicators.
In the Legislative Assembly, criticism is rife against Amador and his decision to leave the country without giving explanations to Justice, but the opposition also calls the Chaves government to account. A legislative commission has decided to open a political investigation and Minister Díaz and Amador have been called to appear. In addition, the largest group, National Liberation, has decided to stop the processing of a budget that the Executive wants to use a loan for 700 million dollars from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI) for infrastructure works, because now they suspect the way in which private company contracts will be made.
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