COSTA RICA has elected its first female president in a landslide victory, marking another political milestone for women in Latin America. Laura Chinchilla, from the centrist ruling party, won 47 per cent of the vote in a crowded field in Sunday's poll, further eroding the region's reputation as a bastion of machismo and patriarchy.

“Wives and working women continue overcoming barriers to make a greater Costa Rica,” the 50-year-old said in her acceptance speech. “All the women and also the men who have accompanied us have made it possible that a daughter of this country can today be president.”

Chinchilla is the fifth woman to be elected president in Latin America in the past two decades, a sign of slowly growing female economic and political clout after centuries of subservience.

She followed Argentina's Cristina Kirchner, elected in 2007, Chile's Michelle Bachelet, elected in 2006, Panama's Mireya Moscoso, elected in 1999, and Nicaragua's Violeta Chamorro, elected in 1990.

Chinchilla, married and mother to a teenage son, is a protégé of President Oscar Arias, a Nobel peace laureate and veteran political operator who has consolidated Costa Rica as one of central America's most stable, prosperous economies.

She stepped down as vice-president last year to run as his successor and promised to keep the ruling National Liberation party's free market policies of expanding trade deals and wooing investment.

— The Guardian, London