The first primary for Costa Rica’s upcoming presidential elections was held by the center-right National Liberation (PLN) party yesterday. Political aficionados have been on tenterhooks as the results for the “verdiblancos” (the green and whites, as they are nicknamed) have slowly rolled in.

Party members were pleased with the turnout, but many were not happy about what seemed to be an anomaly in the vote tallying which was briefly halted around midnight, as reported in several major national Spanish-language media.

PLN party faithfuls had a choice between four candidates, with the two top contenders being Antonio Álvarez Desanti and José María Figueres, son of the legendary leader of the 1948 revolution “Pepe” Figueres, co-author of the country’s Constitution which abolished the country’s standing army and enshrined universal social guarantees, and founder of the PLN.

The party lost control of the presidency when left-center PAC (Citizen Action Party) President Luis Guillermo Solís won after PLN’s Oscar Arias and Laura Chinchilla’s back-to-back terms.

Primaries for other parties will be held in upcoming months as Costa Rica gears up for the 2018 presidential elections.

Shortly after noon today, former President José María Figueres declared an end to his campaign and acknowledged the victory of Antonio Álvarez Desanti after the PLN’s Internal Elections Tribunal issued the official primary vote outcome.

With 28 percent of precincts counted, 45 percent of the votes were for Álvarez Desanti, and 39 percent going to Figueres.

Antonio Álvarez Desanti, a businessman by trade, has served as minister of agriculture, minister of interior, a congressman, and is currently president of the legislative assembly for the second time.

His main business activities, according to Wikipedia, include banana production and the Wendy’s franchise in Costa Rica.

One notable controversial decision early in his political career was regarding his stance on lesbians. As minster of the interior, Alvarez Desanti on April 11, 1990 announced he would not allow foreign lesbians into the country to participate in a meeting, and instructed Costa Rican consulates not to grant visas to women traveling unaccompanied by men, warning all such women would be stopped at the airport. He also said lesbians could be identified and stopped at the country’s borders, saying women with short hair, wearing pants, and traveling alone would be considered lesbians, according to reports at that time in La Nación, the country’s main Spanish paper.

While seeking his first nomination as a presidential candidate in 2012, Alvarez Desanti said in an interview to La Nación that he no longer held these views on lesbians, saying, “Now I have a much more open mind. It was long ago. The world has changed.”