OPINION by Luis Paulino Vargas Solís — What I’ve heard these last few days clearly suggests one thing to me: Laura Fernández has decided to take to its ultimate and most extreme limit the thesis that the Costa Rican population is easily deceived, tricked, and manipulated.
This, in fact, has been the political thesis on which Rodrigo Chaves worked throughout his entire administration, who knew how to identify and profit handsomely from people’s prejudices, their anger and frustrations, and their aspirations for “change.”
An aspiration for “change,” alive in popular sentiment, but diffuse, formless, without substance, lacking profile and form. Therefore, easily manipulated.
That, without a doubt, made things easier for Chaves, who made himself the vehicle through which to channel that anger, that frustration, and that discontent. He tried it by displaying anger and vulgarity, and, seeing that it worked, he continued with the method.
In other words, many people believed they saw in his violent tirades the representation and expression of their own anger. These same people also felt that Chaves’s furious attack against democratic institutions and the rule of law accurately captured their frustration, discontent, and desire for change.
Chaves was very skillful at establishing this subjective and emotional connection, and from then on, everything went smoothly.
The fanatical followers—a small group—elevated him to the status of redeemer, prophet, and messiah. For the general population, he didn’t reach that level, but he was readily granted the status of spokesperson and representative.
As if these people were saying: “He says and does what we would like to say and do.” That’s right: he did it for them, allowing them to remain comfortably settled in their passivity.
Then the “confirmation bias” kicked in, full steam ahead. Having their spokesperson and representative, many people chose to see the world they wanted to see, with the colors and nuances that allowed them to evade doubts and reaffirm their tranquility.
This resulted in a total cognitive inability to grasp and correctly interpret the countless symptoms of government incompetence and inefficiency, as well as its innumerable expressions of corruption.
Trapped in this “confirmation bias,” many people developed great skill in the painful task of justifying the unjustifiable, determined to see light where there was darkness, beauty where there was ugliness, and righteousness where there was rampant corruption.
But lies have their limits. And, sooner or later, reality itself can impose them. This is what could happen if the “foreign investment bubble” that accompanied the four years of the Chaves administration bursts. The other bubble that benefited him—the “narco-capital bubble”—could also have a short lifespan.
It is very likely that Laura Fernández will have to deal with the bursting of these bubbles and the accompanying problems. With one aggravating factor: she inherits a fiscal situation on the very verge of collapse.
It is evident that she is struggling to keep things afloat, displaying a brazenness and level of violence that are in no way inferior to her predecessor’s legacy.
However, I believe I see two cracks.
First, the one I already mentioned: economic storms are brewing, against which noisy diatribes could lose their effectiveness. Second, I think Fernández is really pushing her luck to the point where she seems to be trying to outdo her predecessor, which is saying a lot.
Reducing her entire argument to the adjective “communist” to disqualify anything said or done that she doesn’t like is so incredibly repetitive that it risks becoming just an annoying noise, like the rattling of a loose tin roof on a windy night, devoid of any power to rally support or any emotional or subjective impact.
Translated and adapted from Luis Paulino Vargas Solís post on social media.