José María Hipólito Figueres Ferrer (25 September 1906 – 8 June 1990) served as President of Costa Rica on three occasions: 1948–1949, 1953–1958 and 1970–1974. During his first term in office he abolished the country's army, nationalized its banking sector, and granted women and Afro-Costa Ricans the right to vote, as well as access to Costa Rican nationality to people of African descent.
His son José María Figueres was also President of Costa Rica from 1994 to 1998.
Early life and career
Figueres was born on 25 September 1906 in San Ramón in Alajuela province. Figueres was the eldest of the four children of a Catalan doctor and his wife, a teacher, who had recently immigrated from Catalonia to San Ramón in west-central Costa Rica. Figueres' first language was Catalan.
In 1924 he left for Boston, United States, on a work and study trip. There he studied hydroelectric engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Figueres returned to Costa Rica in 1928 and bought a farm in Tarrazú. He named the farm "The Endless Struggle".
Figueres became a successful coffee grower and rope manufacturer, employing more than 1,000 sharecroppers and factory laborers. Describing himself as a "farmer-socialist", he built housing and provided medical care and recreation for his workers and established a community vegetable farm and a dairy with free milk for workers' children.
His sharecroppers could either sell hemp grown on his plantation to him at market price for use in his rope factory, or sell it elsewhere if they were offered a better price.
Political career
Return to Costa Rica, the Caribbean Legion, and the Costa Rica Civil War (1944–1948)
When Figueres returned to Costa Rica in 1944 following two years in exile for criticising President Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia, he established the Democratic Party, which a year later transformed into the Social Democratic Party. The party was intended to be a counterweight to the ruling National Republican Party (PRN), led by former President Calderón and his successor Teodoro Picado Michalski. The highly controversial Calderón had angered Costa Rican elites, enacting a large social security retirement program and implementing national healthcare. Calderón was accused of corruption by the elites, providing a rallying cry for Figueres and the Social Democratic Party.
Figueres began training the Caribbean Legion, an irregular force of 700. Figueres launched a revolution along with other landowners and student agitators, hoping to overthrow the Costa Rican government. With plans of using Costa Rica as a base, the Legion planned next to remove the three Central American dictators. Washington officials closely watched the Legion's activities, especially after Figueres carried out a series of terrorist attacks inside Costa Rica during 1945 and 1946 that were supposed to climax in a general strike, but the people did not respond.
Former President Calderón supporters prevented and invalidated the 1 March 1948 presidential election in which Otilio Ulate had allegedly defeated Calderón in his second term bid with fraud. In March–April 1948, the protests over the election results mushroomed into armed conflict, then into revolution. Figueres defeated Communist-led guerrillas and the Costa Rican Army, which had joined forces with President Picado.
With more than 2,000 dead, the 44-day civil war was the bloodiest event in 20th-century Costa Rican history.
Figueres as the provisional president (1948–1949)
After the civil war, Figueres became president at the head of a provisional junta, known as the Founding Council, that held power for 18 months. During that time he took several actions:
abolishing the army (as a precaution against the militarism that has perennially thwarted or undercut democracy in Central America) Figueres said he was inspired to disarm Costa Rica by H. G. Wells "The Outline of History", which he read in 1920 while at MIT. "The future of mankind cannot include armed forces. Police, yes, because people are imperfect.", he declared. Ever since, Costa Rica has had no army and has maintained a 7,500-member national police force for a population of over five million. enabled women and illiterates to vote, put into effect basic welfare legislation, nationalised banks, outlawed the Communist Party, directed the writing of a new constitution, guaranteed public education for all, gave citizenship to black immigrants' children, established civil service to eliminate the spoils system in government, and