Abel Pacheco de la Espriella (born 22 December 1933, in San José) was president of Costa Rica between 2002 and 2006, 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 sp...
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Abel Pacheco de la Espriella (born 22 December 1933, in San José) was president of Costa Rica between 2002 and 2006, 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 in Mexico City and psychiatry at Louisiana State University in the United States.
During this time period, Pacheco participated in a counter-revolution attempt mounted from Nicaragua in 1955, led by former president Rafael Calderón. He drove an armored car with a mounted machine gun. This failed invasion was...
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