Epsy Campbell running for Costa Rica’s presidency

By Karen Juanita Carrillo

Among Afro-Latino activists in the Americas, the announcement that Epsy Campbell Barr, the long time Costa Rican politician, grassroots organizer and economist, has begun a campaign for the presidency of Costa Rica is not a surprise. 

The international press is heralding Campbell as a candidate in the vein of U.S. President Barack Obama – a politician of African descent who has more local organizing experience than knowledge of international politics. 

But most of the international press is surprisingly unaware that she has spent years travelling throughout the world and working with grassroots organizers both in her own country and abroad.

The 45 year old Epsy Campbell is the grandchild of Jamaican migrants, part of a wave of workers who came to Costa Rica in the 1900s looking for work on the railroads and on local banana plantations near Limón, Costa Rica.  Afro Costa Ricans share a mix of Jamaican and native Amerindian heritages; they form less than five percent of the population.

While racism has been crushing for the majority of Afro Costa Ricans, Campbell has been able to make a name for herself working with social activist groups on projects that fight for Afro Costa Rican and women’s rights.  She only became a politician after her Partido Acción Ciudadana (PAC/Citizen Action Party) – which is a network of community activist groups – came together to form a party in the year 2000.

 

 Costa Rican presidential hopeful Epsy Campbell 

Campbell is running as a candidate for the progressive PAC, which is today the nation’s second largest political party.  In 2006, PAC almost won the presidency with Campbell on the ticket as the vice presidential candidate and Ottón Solís, the party’s founder, as the presidential candidate.  The 2006 Solís-Campbell ticket barely lost the presidency to Oscar Arias and the Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN/National Liberation Party) by a margin of as little as one percent. This year, Campbell is running against Solís, she’s hoping that at the next party convention, the PAC party will choose her to run for the presidency.

If she wins the party’s primary on Sunday, May 31, and then the Costa Rican election in 2010, Campbell will be the first president of a Latin American or Spanish-speaking Caribbean country to identify herself as of African descent.  (Although there have been past Spanish speaking presidents of full or partial African descent – among them Cuba’s Fulgencio Batista, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Mexican presidents Juan Benítez and Vicente Guerrero, and Colombia’s Juan José Nieto – not one of these presidents prominently spoke of being of African descent).

Campbell’s campaign website is www.epsy.cr, she also has a Facebook and a Hi5 page.  The activist-turned politician once served as a congresswoman in Costa Rica, has been an organizer of the Black Parliament of the Americas, a social activist with the Durban World Conference Against Racism, and served as head coordinator of the Network of Afro-Latin American and Afro-Caribbean Women from 1997 to 2001.  

Last year Epsy Campbell told the Costa Rican newspaper, La Nación:  “I’m Black in every sense of my being; it’s one of the banners I waive proudly and this country has never viewed that as a reason to force me out of the political arena.”