A second turn at the helm: Costa Rican President Oscar Arias leads a country long known for its progress on peace and the environment, but this time around he is facing a more polarized society.

• Author: Trujillo, Amparo

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Costa Rica is a delight for visitors--a place of tropical forests and volcanoes set between two oceans, with an extraordinarily beautiful and fertile central valley that is home to its largest population centers. It is a land of great hospitality, and many of its residents children of recent waves of immigrants, such as that of many Nicaraguans in the 1980s.

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Twenty years after receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace for his role as a mediator in the Central American armed conflict, during his first presidential term, Oscar Arias Sanchez is halfway through a second mandate. He leads a country that has a long, peaceful democratic tradition but that faces serious problems related to security and social justice. This is a time of growing political polarization, reflected at the polls in 2006, when Arias achieved a photo-finish victory over rival Oton Solis in the presidential race. A high percentage of the electorate simply abstained from voting.

President Arias welcomed Americas into his office with the formal courtesy that tends to characterize Ticos, as Costa Ricans call themselves. That shilling young man the world remembers as a Nobel laureate two decades ago has given way to the Arias of today: grim and gray-haired, with a gaze that seems focused far beyond the horizon. Asked why he had launched himself once again into turbulent political waters, instead of continuing a tranquil life at the helm of the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress, Arias had a pensive response. "This was a country without a true north, without a clear path to follow, a country that was going off course with a complete absence of leadership," he said. "We spent four years talking about taxes and never voted on them; they were neither approved nor rejected.

"So I found a very polarized society," Arias added, "but I knew what I wanted and took on the challenge of defining a direction for that path--defining that path and getting Costa Pica back on track again."

Arias recognized that he lacked a strong enough popular mandate to carry out such initiatives as the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States, and said his position as a former president actually worked against him during his campaign. "I convinced a majority, but we still have a good part of the country against the FTA," he said. "Today I have a lot more support from Costa Ricans than in February 2006, when I was elected, because I have restored something that is essential for Costa Ricans--confidence. Confidence that we are doing things right on an economic and social level, but also from an ethical standpoint, which is very important. We have two former presidents who will soon appear before the courts of justice. It turned out to be a major liability to be an ex-president on election day, because people thought my hands might...