RICO’s Q — Former President Rodrigo Chaves had “a slip of the tongue” during a meeting held Tuesday morning at the Casa Presidencial with Frente Amplio faction leader, legislator José María Villalta.
Chaves participated in the meeting because he serves as both Minister of the Presidency and Minister of Finance in Laura Fernández’s administration.
“We had Minister Chaves there, and he had a slip of the tongue because he addressed Ms. Laura as ‘Madam Minister.’ It was later clarified that he meant ‘President’, and fortunately, the meeting with whom we spoke and interacted was with the President,” Villalta said.
It is important to remember that Fernández served as Minister of Planning and Economic Policy from the beginning of the former president’s administration. Furthermore, she served as Minister of the Presidency on two separate occasions: first from June 2024 to January 2025, and then again from February 4th of this year until May 7th. The following day, she officially assumed the Presidency for the next four years.
Freudian slip?
Was it just that, a slip of the tongue, having worked together in a ‘reverse’ role for some time or something more sinister, a Freudian slip, if you will, slip-ups that are never random accidents, but rather windows into our unconscious mind, revealing hidden desires, repressed thoughts, or internal conflicts
Coined by the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, this concept suggests that the conscious mind usually represses certain urges or feelings.
Freudian slips are best known as “slips of the tongue,” but they actually show up in three key forms: forgetting things unexpectedly, doing something by mistake, and messing up speech—like saying the wrong word because your unconscious mind is sneaking in what it’s really thinking.
You can likely think of plenty of instances where someone accidentally reveals what they really think, such as referring to someone by the wrong title.
The idea that President Laura Fernández is just a “puppet” controlled by the former president is a common critique in Costa Rican politics.
Fernández backed up these claims by naming Chaves to a “Super Minister” role (Minister of the Presidency and Minister of Finance) right after she took office. Critics say this muddied the waters between administrations since Chaves stayed firmly planted in a top executive role.