(This may make the coup plotters' fury about their claim Zelaya intended to get a second term seem a little too close for comfort!)Mediator is at home as peacemaker
Costa Rica's president is bringing persistence, a Nobel Peace Prize and a passion for demilitarization to the task of resolving the Honduran crisis.
BY CAROL ROSENBERG
crosenberg@MiamiHerald.com
Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, the man who is seeking to resolve the Honduran crisis in his living room, is a 67-year-old economist and lawyer by training with salt-and-pepper hair, and the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize.
He is also a wealthy aristocrat -- known to many as Don Oscar -- who skillfully
overcame his own nation's single-term presidential limit by championing a reinterpretation of the Costa Rican Constitution that allowed him to run and win his current, second term, which runs from 2006 to 2010.Friends and admirers describe him as a dogged, self-confident conservative, a bit dull by some standards with a professorial air and passion for demilitarizing Central America.
Even as he agreed to mediate the crisis last week, he said Honduras' coup d'etat was an inevitable outcome -- and ''wake-up call for the hemisphere'' -- of the Latin America's bloated militaries, whose costs he estimated at $50 billion this year.
''We should recognize that such events are not random acts,'' he wrote in an opinion page article published last week in American newspapers. ``They are the result of systematic errors and missteps that many of us have been warning about for decades. They are the price we pay for one of our region's greatest follies: its reckless military spending.''
More:
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/story/1138043.html