While Americans were busy “awww”ing over that Google ad on Sunday, Costa Ricans were handing a landslide victory to Georgetown graduate Laura Chinchilla, the center-right politician who has become the first woman elected President in the country’s history.

“Today we are making history,” said Chinchilla, who lead her closest rival by 22 points in the election. “The Costa Rican people have given me their confidence, and I will not betray it.”

Chinchilla received her master’s degree in public policy at Georgetown in the late ’80s after graduating from the University if Costa Rica. A social conservative who opposes abortion and same-sex marriage, she campaigned on continuing free market policies in Costa Rica. She is the former vice president and public security minister of Costa Rica, and when she takes office in May, she will be the fifth Latin American female president.

Of course, she’ll be one of several presidents to have graduated from Georgetown University. A few in particular come to mind. There’s everyone’s favorite former Harbin resident, of course—Bill Clinton (SFS ‘68)—and then there’s Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the current president of the Philippines. Arroyo is incredibly unpopular and has been linked to the deaths of many Filipino activists and serious corruption scandals. (We like Chinchilla and Clinton a lot more.)

Before her victory, the Global Post’s Alex Leff wrote that given Costa Rica’s very progressive laws about women in politics, it’s actually a wonder that Chinchilla was about to become only the first female president of that country.

“By law, women must make up 40 percent of a party’s seats in the Legislative Assembly, and by 2014, the law mandates a 50-50 split. That’s well above the world average,” he wrote. “Parties also are obligated to include at least one women on the ballot for their executive branch bids, whether for one of the two vice presidencies or the presidency.”

Bill Clinton (SFS ‘68) wasn’t the only president to come through Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service during the ’60s.

Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the current president of the Philippines, attended the SFS, too. Arroyo didn’t graduate from Georgetown, but she did study here for two years while Clinton was an undergraduate. In fact, Clinton recalled her as his “friend, a long, long time ago” when he attended a ceremony for the Clinton Global Initiative in the Philippines in 2007, and spoke admirably of the tough decisions she had made as the leader of her country.

Like Clinton’s, Arroyo’s term in office has also been marked by legal troubles … and that’s about where the similarities end.

Arroyo, notes every article about her presidency, is incredibly unpopular. She has had to stave off impeachment several times, and her administration is supposed to be behind several serious corruption scandals and the killing or kidnapping of many Filipino activists.

Most recently, “[h]er closest political allies in the southern Philippines were implicated last week in the massacre of 57 people, most of them journalists, in the country’s worst case of election-related violence,” writes Carlos Conde in the New York Times.

So when Arroyo announced on Monday that she would run for a seat in Congress in next year’s elections, it prompted speculation that she was doing so to retain immunity from prosecution, or so that she could use her clout to become prime minister—after creating the position herself.

Arroyo actually does have one last thing in common with Clinton—hers is a political family. A bizarre detail of this story is that the person who currently holds the seat she intends to run for—who said he will step aside for her to run—is Juan Miguel Arroyo, her son.

Photo from Flickr.

Sunday’s Washington Post had a nice writeup of the late Georgetown Professor Walter Giles (SFS ‘43, GRD ‘45) in which Bill Clinton (SFS ‘68) and some of his classmates reminisce about his stringent classroom practices by T. Rees Shapiro. Giles, a constitutional law and American government professor, used to lock the door of his lecture hall five minutes into class against tardy students.

“If students were not prepared and wanted to avoid the humiliation of being called upon without an answer, they had to approach the professor before class began and plead ‘nolo contendere,’ or no contest,” Shapiro writes.

For his part, Clinton remembers falling asleep in Dr. Giles’s class during a lecture on a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Dr. Giles said the ruling was easy to understand, “unless, of course, you’re from some hick town in Arkansas,” which sent the class into stitches and startled Clinton awake. Clinton recalls never falling asleep in the class again.

According to his Washington Post obituary Giles graduated from the School of Foreign Service in 1943. He returned to Georgetown after serving in the Army Air Forces in World War II and earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in government in 1945 and 1956. He taught government for 43 years until he retired in 1990. He passed away as a result of congestive heart failure at 89 on October 9.

Photo from the The Washington Post