When Laura Chinchilla won office in February, it seemed that the thorniest challenge facing Costa Rica’s first-ever presidenta would be scraping together the funds for the crackdown on public security she had promised on the campaign trail. Two months later, the Costa Rican legislature voted to host up to 7,000 US marines for six months, solving Chinchilla’s problem of delivering her law-and-order platform without emptying state coffers.
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