QCOSTARICA – Rolando Araya, presidential candidate for the Costa Rica Justa party agrees with PLN presidential candidate José María Figueres’ recent comment that Costa Rica does not have room for political experiments of any kind, adding, however, “but not bad experiences”.
The politician, in his latest bid to sit in the presidential chair, referred on Monday to an interview published by La Republica with José María Figueres, in which Figueres asserted that “Costa Rica is adrift and urges to end political experiments” after eight years of the PAC governments.
“I fully share the idea that the country needs experience at the head of the government, it needs an experienced, credible leader that the people trust, but for that, it is not necessary to repeat bad experiences from the past,” said Araya.
The Costa Rica Justa candidate refers to the first government of Figueres between 1994 and 1998 and the ICE-Alcatel case over the alleged mishandling of the signing of French communications contract with state-owned ICE, in which local media reports claimed Figueres had also received payments from Alcatel, up to US$900 thousand dollars for three years of consultancy work on telecommunications with Alcatel initiated two years after his presidency.
Meanwhile, Figueres said in the interview with La Republica, that the PLN is the most capable party.
Both politicians clashed at the internal PLN convention.
Araya ran for president in 2002 losing the general election as the PLN candidate. In 2010, he made another unsuccessful bid for the presidency, that time the candidate for the Alianza Patriótica party.
Araya is the nephew of former president Luis Alberto Monge (1982 – 1986) and brother of long time San Jose mayor, Johnny Araya, who ran for president for the PLN party in 2014 and losing to Luis Guillermo Solís (2014-2018).
Read more: Johnny Araya Quits Presidential Race!
“Costa Rica in this particular situation needs experience and not experiments. We walk on the razor’s edge, where the country is falling apart, the product of an undeclared emergency. We need people with experience to transform Costa Rica and advance in living well and leave this chapter of political experiments,” said Figueres.
Currently, there are 25 candidates seeking the vote for president in the February 2022 general elections.
