"Trust is the philosopher´s stone of political systems" -- A conversation with Raquel Chanto

Costa Rica is an exceptional country in a number of ways. It is a small nation in a region torn by civil war well into the 1980s, that abolished its army over 70 years ago and has lived in peace ever since. The country has achieved exceptionally high levels of human development despite its relatively modest income level. This is in part because it has invested in health, education and other public services resources that otherwise would have gone into military spending. Costa Rica Is also a pioneer in environmental sustainability, generating nearly 100% of its electricity from renewable sources, and more than doubling its forest cover over the past thirty some years.

Perhaps most striking in a region plagued by political instability, Costa Rica has enjoyed a stable and robust democracy for over seven decades. But in the Presidential elections that took place in April of this year, victory went to a candidate whose discourse was peppered with attacks on the Costa Rican political system itself, including the very institutions on which the country´s longstanding democracy was founded.

In this interview, FOGGS Vice-President Yoriko Yasukawa speaks to Raquel Chanto, a Costa Rican political scientist, about what these elections tell us about the state of democracy in Costa Rica country as well as in the world in general. Chanto, currently a PhD. candidate at Oxford, has also worked in public administration, in Costa Rica, with the Office of the President and the Ministry of Foreign Trade, as well as internationally, as a political analyst and election observer in OAS and as an advisor to the Secretary-General of the Ibero-American Summits Secretariat.