The 2001 National Liberation Convention was a primary Costa Rican electoral process in which supporters of the National Liberation Party, at that time the first opposition force, chose their presidential candidacy ahead of the 2002 presidential election in Costa Rica.
Precandidates BellIt was Victor Rolando Araya who had the support of various figures of the party including his uncle Luis Alberto Monge and his brother the mayor of San José, Johnny Araya. Once the election ended Corrales recognized the defeat but did not immediately join Araya, unlike Desanti who in addition to giving immediate support to Araya announced that he would run for the 2006 elections.
Araya would lose the election to the PUSC candidate, psychiatrist Abel Pacheco de la Espriella obtaining the lowest percentage of his party history until then (33%) and for the first time in history, the PLN lost two consecutive elections. Some of the reasons for this have been pointed out as the popular figure of Pacheco and the emergence for these elections of the Citizen Action Party founded by exliberationist dissidents who postulated the charismatic figure of Ottón Solís.
For the next elections a controversial reform that allowed again the presidential reelection gave free space to the candidacy of former president Óscar Arias Sánchez. Desanti resigned the PLN after its tendency was defeated in the internal district elections accusing electoral fraud and being candidate by the ephemeral party Union for the Change. For the 2006 elections, none of the three candidates in 2002 supported Arias' candidacy. Corrales resigned in 2005 from PLN and participated briefly in the also ephemeral Patriotic Union. Araya would return to be candidate in 2010 by the small party Patriotic Alliance but would put his aspirations giving the adhesion to Ottón Solís and for the elections of 2014 would support his brother Johnny Araya. Corrales would be a candidate for the newly formed Patria Nueva Party for these same elections.
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