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UCF Professor to Serve as Official Observer of Costa Rican Presidential Election
By Chad Binette (cbinette@mail.ucf.edu)
ORLANDO, Jan. 27, 2006 -- Bruce Wilson, an associate professor of Political Science at the University of Central Florida, will serve as an official observer of the Costa Rican presidential election on Feb. 5.
Wilson, the author of "Costa Rica: Politics, Economics, and Democracy," was the only U.S.-based professor to observe the 1998 and 2002 presidential elections in Costa Rica. Along with other international observers, he will talk with voters, poll workers and politicians and pass on their comments and complaints to the country's Elections Tribunal and possibly the press.
Observers could play a larger role in the election if the results are challenged, but that has not happened since 1948. Wilson said Costa Rican elections are some of the best run in the hemisphere and that the observers' presence helps to validate that on an international level.
"They have absolutely nothing to hide, so they want people to see exactly what the process is like," Wilson said. "It's clean from start to finish."
Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias, who served as Costa Rica's president from 1986 to 1990, is considered the favorite to win the election. Arias won the Nobel Prize for his efforts in negotiating a peace agreement that led to the end of several Central American civil wars in the 1980s.
Before the current election, Costa Rican presidents were limited to one term in office in their lifetime. However, the country's Constitutional Court ruled in 2003 that presidents can run for another term after they have been out of office for at least eight years, which allowed Arias to seek re-election.
All 57 seats in the Costa Rican Legislative Assembly are also up for election, so it is difficult to determine what an Arias victory would mean for Costa Rica or the United States, Wilson said.
Arias supports the Central American Free Trade Agreement and wants to gradually open up state-run utilities such as electricity and telephone services to private companies. However, he likely would have trouble opening up the utilities to competition, a move that the Bush administration supports, if his National Liberation Party does not fare well in legislative races, Wilson said.
Wilson's research specialties include the politics of Central America, the Caribbean and Latin American countries. He has studied the Costa Rican Constitutional Court extensively, and he gave a presentation on judicial reform before the Supreme Court in 2003. The Constitutional Court is a chamber of the Supreme Court.
In November, Wilson gave a presentation on minority groups' access to the judicial system at Programa de la Nacion, Costa Rica's leading think tank. He gave a similar presentation in February at the Universidad Estatal a Distancia in San Jose.
Wilson has written several journal articles about Costa Rican elections and judicial reforms. He also is the editor of The Latin Americanist, an international, peer-reviewed Latin American studies journal that covers many disciplines.
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