by Rod Hughes
Nidia Gonzalez, a congresswoman of the Citizen Action Party (PAC, in its Spanish acronym) has resigned her seat due to a conflict of interest and Ottón Solís, the party’s chief, named the party’s assistant general secretary, Beatriz Rodriguez, as her successor.
A year ago, Gonzalez co-sponsored a bill to continue permanently as law a rice farmer stabilization fund. Her ethical problem is that she and her husband own rice farms in the northern part of the country and that in 2003 she received $16,369 from the fund (which had been established by presidential decree previously). Her political problem is that the country’s leading newspaper, La Nación, had published a news story about the payment. Rodriguez blamed her lack of political experience for the ethical lapse.
Her party vehemently opposes ratification of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) with the United States and she found that, recently, her name was being bandied around in pro-CAFTA forums as a “big rice farmer and a representative of big rice farmers.”
She protests, “But I’m not big and I don’t represent the big boys.” She says “this was the final drop that overfilled the glass. And it keeps on running over.” (The fund bill failed to find a place on the crowded congressional agenda and was filed away.)
The case shows that the political climate may be changing slowly. At one time, a lid of silence would have been clamped over the case by her political colleagues and La Nación’s exposé would have been forgotten the next week, another case of what one columnist for La Nación once called “Costa Rica’s three-day scandals.” This time, the party’s leader in congress, Elizabeth Fonseca, pursuaded her colleague to resign, and both Gonzalez and Solís admitted she had committed an error.
And it took only a year to happen…