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Miguel Ángel Rodríguez Echeverría (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. He is currently under domicile arrest(since October 2004) waiting trail for his allegations.
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 Fernández.
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 Ángel 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 César 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).
External links
- OAS website: (http://www.oas.org/documents/eng/biography_sgRodriguez.asp) Brief biography
- univision report (http://www.univision.com/content/content.jhtml?cid=476382) (in Spanish)es:Miguel Ángel Rodríguez Echeverría