Skip to main content

Jose Maria Figueres Olsen Biography

José María Figueres Olsen

(San José, 1954) Costa Rican politician who was President of the Republic (1994-1998).Jose María Figueres Olsen was the son of Karen Olsen Beck and José Figueres Ferrer, a leader of Catalan origin considered the father of modern Costa Rica, founder of the National Liberation Party (PLN) in 1951 and president of the country three times.

José María Figueres Olsen

He completed his primary studies at the La Lucha school and at the Humboldt school and secondary at Lincoln School.He graduated from West Point Military Academy with a degree in industrial engineering, and later expanded his studies at Harvard.At the end of his studies, he joined the companies founded by his father, which at that time were going through difficult times, mired in the economic crisis that devastated Costa Rica at the beginning of the eighties of the 20th century.José María Figueres managed to save family businesses and also created new ones that considerably increased the family fortune.

During the first term of President Óscar Arias (1986-1990), Jose María Figueres Olsen held the position of director of the Instituto Costarricense de Ferrocarriles (INCOFER), with which he began his political activity.Subsequently, he was director of the Board of Administration and Development of the Atlantic Slope (JAPDEVA), Minister of Foreign Trade and Minister of Agriculture.

After the death of his father in 1990, sectors of the PLN proposed that promote his candidacy for the presidency, to which he dedicated himself for some time, except for a brief hiatus in 1991 to do a master's degree at Harvard University.The official designation was reached in June 1993, after defeating other candidates in a national convention, including Óscar Arias's wife, Margarita Peñón.In the elections held on February 6, 1994, he was elected President of the Republic of Costa Rica by defeating by few votes the official candidate of the Christian Democratic Unity Party (PUSC), Miguel Ángel Rodríguez Echeverría, of Christian Democratic tendency.They were the closest elections in the history of the country, which were defined by only two points of difference.

After his victory in the elections, Figueres Olsen reiterated his commitments made during the electoral campaign to improve education and health and boost the country's progress.Thus, during his tenure, the health care program based on the so-called EBAIS (Basic Equipment for Comprehensive Health Care) was designed and developed, which was very effective in improving health indices.

Important investments were also made in science and technology, telemedicine and environmental conservation programs and strategies, in order to create the foundations to advance towards the information society and sustainable development.With this, it was possible to attract high-tech companies such as Intel and many others.He also applied a plan to reduce public debt that included higher taxes and a privatization policy.He was succeeded in the presidency by Miguel Ángel Rodríguez Echeverría, winner of the 1998 presidential elections.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

John boorman Biography

John Boorman (London, 1933) British film director.He began his career as a film critic and editor on television.His most representative works are: Duel in the Pacific (1968), Leo, the last (1970), Defense (1972), Excalibur (1981), The emerald jungle (1984), Where the heart is (1990), I dream I woke up (1991) and Beyond Rangoon (production, 1995).

Gustavo Pittaluga Fattorini Biography

Gustavo Pittaluga Fattorini (Florence, 1876-Havana, 1956) Spanish physician.A scholar of recognized international prestige, he dedicated himself to research on endemic diseases of equatorial Africa and was Professor of Parasitology at the University of Madrid. Gustavo Pittaluga Fattorini He studied Medicine at the University of Rome, where he received his doctorate with a thesis on acromegaly.He was for several years Battista Grassi's assistant, with whom he devoted himself to researching malaria-transmitting insects.In 1903 he arrived in Madrid as a speaker at the International Congress of Medicine, to which he presented a communication on the etiology and epidemiology of malaria.From this moment he settled in Spain and, together with a group of doctors who rallied around him, continued his work as a parasitologist here. In collaboration with Francisco Huertas, among others, he published, Investigations and studies on malaria in Spain (1903), an excellent work in which ...

Jose Marin Cañas Biography

José Marín Cañas (San José, 1904-?, 1980) Costa Rican novelist.Representative of the indigenous current, his work has as a backdrop the response of the indigenous people to a hostile environment and their fight against the social injustice that oppresses them.His most important novels are Green Hell (1935), in which he describes the Chaco War; and Pedro Arnáez (1942), a tragic peasant story.Of the rest of his production, it is worth mentioning the collection of short stories Los bigardos del ron (1929) together with the novels Tears of steel (1929) and Land of rabbits (1971).

Francesco Robortello Biography

Francesco Robortello (Udine, 1516-Padua, 1567) Italian philologist.He was a teacher of eloquence at various Italian universities (Pisa, Venice, Padua, and Bologna).His main works are: De historica facultate (1548), De vita et victu populi Romani sub imperatoribus Caesaribus Augustis (1559) and his editions of the Poetics of Aristotle (1548).

Gary oldman Biography

Gary Oldman (Leonard Gary Oldman; London, 1958) British actor.Born into a humble family, he studied Drama Art on a scholarship at Rose Brudford Drama College until 1979.He then joined the Greenwich Young People's Theater group and appeared in numerous plays in the early 1980s.He had his greatest success with The pope's wedding , which earned him the Best Actor award from the British Theater Association in 1985. He began working in film in supporting roles.His portrayal of the punk singer Sid Vicious, leader of the legendary rock group Sex Pistols who died of heroin overdose, in Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy (1986), made him known internationally.In this role some of the constants of his acting career were already present: giving life to a character at the limit for whose characterization he had to physically transform, in this case lose weight. Gary Oldman in Sid and Nancy (1986) In Open your ears ( 1987), by Stephen Frears, delighted the viewer in one of his mos...

Heinrich Brüning Biography

Heinrich Brüning (Münster, 1885-Norwich, 1970) German politician, Chancellor of Germany from 1930 to 1932, during the final phase of the so-called Weimar Republic, presided over by Paul Hindenburg.A conservative in ideology and a practicing Catholic, Brüning also served as Foreign Minister from October 1932, shortly before Adolf Hitler assumed power in Germany.As a specialist in financial affairs, his greatest achievement was to reduce to minimal amounts the war reparations that the Allies had imposed on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles (1919).Unable to solve the country's serious economic problems, he was driven to practice a clearly right-wing policy that allowed him to govern with more or less dictatorial procedures, bypassing the Reichstag itself, which did not prevent him from being a convinced democrat. Heinrich Brüning Heinrich Brüning studied philosophy, history and political science at three different universities.After having made a series of study trips to Fran...

John Millington Synge Biography

John Millington Synge (Rathfarnham, Ireland, 1871-Dublin, 1909) Irish playwright, a key figure in the Irish literary renaissance of the early 20th century.Born into a Protestant family, he graduated from Trinity College, Dublin.He studied music in Germany and later went to Paris, where he lived poorly for some years; During this period, he became interested in the novelists of French naturalism, prepared essays on literary criticism, and composed elegantly crafted poems, characterized by accents of deep tenderness. John Millington Synge In Paris he met WB Yeats, his compatriot poet who led him to return to Ireland and be inspired by the lives of the poor peasants and fishermen of his land.In the Aran Islands, the western outpost of Irish territory eternally beaten by rain and wind, a Catholic colony had lived there since Cromwell's time to avoid persecution.The difficulty of relations with civilization, the hard work necessary to obtain the scarce resources from the ocean an...

John kerr Biography

John Kerr (Ardrossan, UK, 1824-Glasgow, id., 1907) British physicist.He studied at the University of Glasgow under the supervision of Lord Kelvin.He investigated the behavior of light rays in a transparent medium (particularly liquids and cubic crystals) to which an intense electric field is applied transversely.Kerr observed that said medium became birefringent, that is, that the light is resolved into two components (one parallel and the other perpendicular to the field), so that the light beam emerges from the circularly polarized medium, since the two components propagate at different speeds and therefore in different phases.This electro-optic effect, called the Kerr effect, has found important applications in the study of lasers and communications.

Edgar Douglas Adrian Biography

Edgar Douglas Adrian (London, 1889-Cambridge, 1977) British physiologist.Author of important works on the physiology of the nervous system, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1932.Edgar Adrian studied at Trinity College, Cambridge University, graduating in 1911 with the highest marks. Edgar Adrian His interest in the mechanisms of nerve transmission led him to accept a medical position at the Connaught Military Hospital during World War I, where he did research the various nerve injuries and neuroses afflicting the Allied soldiers.In 1920 he became Professor of the Department of Physiology at Cambridge, and three years later he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. In November 1925 he managed to record the propagation of the impulse in a single afferent nerve fiber with the Lucas capillary electrometer.He was able to explain the transmission mechanism of nerves with the help of Dr.Zotterman, and later developed a method for transforming electrical impuls...

Gaspare Diziani Biography

Gaspare Diziani (Belluno, 1689-Venice, 1767) Italian painter and printmaker.Disciple of S.Ricci, he inherited from his master the intense brushwork and brilliant chromaticism ( Limosna del venerable Paoli ), which save the conventional scenographic approach of his compositions.