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José Figueres

José Figueres Ferrer
José Figueres Ferrer 1.png
32nd President of Costa Rica
In office
8 May 1948 – 8 November 1949
Preceded by Teodoro Picado
Succeeded by Otilio Ulate Blanco
34th President of Costa Rica
In office
8 November 1953 – 8 May 1958
Preceded by Otilio Ulate Blanco
Succeeded by Mario Echandi
38th President of Costa Rica
In office
8 May 1970 – 8 May 1974
Preceded by José Joaquín Trejos Fernández
Succeeded by Daniel Oduber
Personal details
Born José María Hipólito Figueres Ferrer
25 September 1906
San Ramón, Alajuela
Died 8 June 1990 (aged 83)
San José
Political party PLN
Spouse(s) Henrietta Boggs
Karen Olsen Beck
Profession Landowner, politician

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 blacks the right to vote. He was a good friend of the Governor of Puerto Rico, Luis Muñoz Marín, praising his political achievements in one of his essays.

Figueres was born on 25 September 1906 in San Ramón in Alajuela province. The locations are significant, according to his best biographer, because his parents came from a world of wide ambition that most Costa Ricans envied, and he was born in a nation that put a high value on his impeccable Spanish background. 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, as he talked to his parents in this language.

After four years of work and study in the United States, Figueres returned to the country in 1928 and bought a farm in Tarrazú. He named the farm, with a certain degree of foresight, La Lucha sin Fin (the struggle without an end).10

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.3

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.3


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