Miguel Angel Rodríguez Echeverría 1998-2002(born 9 January 1940) is a Costa Rican economist, businessman, and politician. He served as President of Costa Rica from 1998 to 2002 and was briefly Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS) in 2004, before being forced to step down by allegations of financial wrongdoing during his presidential tenure in Costa Rica.
Rodríguez was born in San José. From an early age he distinguished himself as a talented, hard-working, and ambitious student. At the University of Costa Rica he obtained degrees in both economics (1962) and law (1963) and worked there briefly as an assistant professor of economics. He then attended the University of California at Berkeley in the United States, where he received both M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics in 1966. His thesis work was on monetary policy. Immediately after graduating he returned to Costa Rica to serve as Minister of Planning and member of the board of directors of the Costa Rican Central Bank during the government of president José Joaquín Trejos Fernandez.
In the 1970s and 1980s Rodríguez combined his academic work as a professor of economics at the University of Costa Rica and at the Autonomous University of Central America with a business venture in cattle holding: Grupo Ganadero Internacional, S.A. A devout Roman Catholic and a believer in free enterprise, Rodríguez earned a reputation as an important conservative intellectual. He was elected to Costa Rica's legislative assembly in 1990 and served as president of that body from 1991 to 1992.
Rodríguez ran three times for president: in 1990 he lost his party's nomination to Rafael Angel Calderón Fournier. In 1994 he won his party's nomination but lost the election to José María Figueres. He finally secured the presidency in 1998. In spite of his previous record as an economist and businessman, his presidency was generally regarded as ineffectual. Proposed free-market reforms, including a plan to end the state monopoly on telecommunications, fell apart under opposition from the trade unions of government employees and other groups. After his term of office, Rodríguez worked as a consultant at Manatt Jones Global Strategies and as a visiting professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., USA.
On 7 June 2004 he was unanimously elected to replace Cesar Gaviria Trujillo as secretary general of the OAS. He began his term on 15 September 2004 but served only 24 days before having to step down when a former political collaborator accused him of having accepted a pay-back from the French telecommunications firm Alcatel, which had been awarded a large government contract for cellular phone bandwidth during Rodríguez's tenure as president. Succeeding news reports claimed that Rodríguez had also received money from the government of Taiwan and banked it in Panama.
On 8 October 2004, Rodríguez resigned as OAS Secretary General, effective 15 October, and was replaced by Assistant Secretary General Luigi Einaudi, a former U.S. State Department official who assumed the title of Acting Secretary General. After resigning from his post, Rodríguez returned to Costa Rica on 15 October 2004 and was placed first under house arrest and two weeks later in jail, pending further investigation. He has been expelled from his political party, Unidad Social Cristiana (PUSC).
Abel Pacheco de la Espriella 2002-2006 (born 22 December 1933, in San José) is the president of Costa Rica, representing the Social Christian Unity Party (Partido Unidad Social Cristiana PUSC). He ran on a platform to continue free market reforms and to institute an austerity program, and was elected, in a second electoral round, with 58% of the vote in April 2002.
He was the sixth child of a banana farmer. Part of his childhood was spent in the province of Limón on the Caribbean coast, but he returned to the capital to complete his secondary education. He then went on, aided by scholarships he had won, to study medicine at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and psychiatry at Louisiana State University
During the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s he was a popular presenter of cultural programmes on Costa Rican television. During this time he continued to teach at the University of Costa Rica and personally attended to customers at the gentleman's outfitters, El Palacio del Pantalón, that he had established in downtown San José in the mid-1980s. He also wrote a series of novels and a number of popular songs.
On 1 February 1998 he was elected to serve as a party-list deputy in Costa Rica's unicameral Legislative Assembly, representing San José for the PUSC.
In the run-up to the 2002 presidential election, the PUSC party convention selected him to be its candidate by an overwhelming 76% of the delegates' votes on 10 June 2001. His candidacy was seen as a victory for the rank-and-file members over the party's entrenched hierarchy.
In the first round of the election Pachecho received 38.6% of the vote: just short of the 40% needed to avoid a run-off. On 7 April 2002, in the second round the first time the mechanism had been used since the rules were introduced Pacheco got 58% of the vote, beating Rolando Araya Monge of the liberal PLN by a narrow margin.
More info about Presidential's House: Spanish information about Government of Costa Rica