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.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

James Wilkinson Biography

James Wilkinson (Calvert County, 1757-Mexico, 1825) American politician and adventurer.He participated in the American War of Independence and in the Kentucky separatist movement (1787) as a double agent for Spain.He was named Governor of Louisiana in 1805 and Commander of New Orleans in 1813.
Post a Comment
Read more

Gregorio López Raimundo Biography

Gregorio López Raimundo (Tauste, 1914) Spanish politician.In 1936 he joined the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC).He fought in the civil war and then went into exile in Mexico.Back in Spain, he participated in the general strike in Barcelona (1951), for which he was imprisoned.Secretary general (1955-1978) and president (1978-1981 and 1982-1985) of the PSUC, he was elected deputy to Congress in 1977, 1979 and 1982.He has published Writings.Fifty years of action, 1937-1988 (1989), collection of political texts, and his memoirs, First clandestinity (1993).
Post a Comment
Read more

Armando Discépolo Biography

Armando Discépolo (Buenos Aires, 1887- id ., 1971) Argentine playwright.His work abounds in festive themes and reideros that were very successful at the time ( The continuous movement , 1916; El chuco Pintos , 1917).Also noteworthy are his sainetes with dramatic touches, which make up what is known as grotesque criollo ( Mateo , 1923; Stéfano , 1928; Clockmaker , 1934).
Post a Comment
Read more

Jorge Rojas Biography

Jorge Rojas (Santa Rosa de Viterbo, Boyacá, 1911-Bogotá, 1995) Colombian poet who was the animator and editor of the notebooks of Piedra y Cielo , which gave name to the poetic group founded by him.He was the first director of the Colombian Institute of Culture (Colcultura), and a member of the Colombian Academy of Language. In his first collection of poems, The form of his flight (1939) The influence of some contemporary Spanish poets, such as Juan Ramón Jiménez and Pedro Salinas, is clear.The influence of Juan Ramón Jiménez was prolonged in the volume The submerged city (1939), the first of a collection of poetic notebooks promoted by Rojas that took the name of a book by Juan Ramón ( Piedra y cielo , 1918) and around which the poetic group Piedra y Cielo was formed, in which young poets such as Tomás Vargas, Darío Samper, Arturo Camacho, Gerardo Valencia, Eduardo Carranza and Carlos Martín participated. Jorge Rojas The aesthetics of Jorge Rojas and his fellow "Pi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Hayato Ikeda Biography

Hayato Ikeda (Hiroshima, 1899-Tokyo, 1965) Japanese politician.Prime Minister of Japan from June 1960 to October 1964, he was one of the main architects of Japan's spectacular economic recovery after the end of World War II.He has come to be known as the father of the Japanese economic miracle. He was born into a wealthy merchant family in the city of Hiroshima.In 1925 he obtained degrees in Law and Economics from the Imperial University of Tokyo.That same year he obtained a civil servant position in the Tax Office of the Prefectures in the Ministry of Finance.Until the end of World War II he had a life as a bureaucrat in the Japanese administration.Little by little he rose to the post of Vice Minister of Finance in 1947. Hayato Ikeda After the end of the Second World War, he began his career politics in the ranks of the Liberal-Democratic Party (Minshu Jiguto).In the January 1949 elections he was elected representative of the Hiroshima prefecture in the Diet.He held the T...
Post a Comment
Read more

Gordian I Biography

Gordian I (Rome, c .157-Carthage, 238) Roman Emperor (238).Procurator in Africa, the army opposed his appointment as emperor, the work of the great proprietors.His son defeated and killed by Capeliano, Maximino's legacy, committed suicide.
Post a Comment
Read more

Ilias Venezis Biography

Ilias Venezis (Aivali, Asia Minor, 1904-Athens, 1973) Greek writer.The novel Matrícula 31328 (1931), which recounts his experience of deportation after the Greco-Turkish war (1920-1921), is his main work.He is also the author of novels ( Serenidad , 1939; Tierra eolia, 1943, and Los vancidos, 1954), of short stories ( The archipelago, 1969), from travel books ( Autumn in Italy, 1950, and Eftalón y viajes, 1973) and from the historical essay Los argonauts (1962).
Post a Comment
Read more

Gian Domenico Cassini Biography

Gian Domenico Cassini (Perinaldo, present-day Italy, 1625-Paris, 1712) Italian-French astronomer.He was a professor of astronomy at the University of Bologna, where he studied and tabulated the positions of the satellites of Jupiter.In 1669 he assumed the direction of the Paris Observatory, at the express request of King Louis XIV, and in 1673 he was granted French citizenship.Continuing the studies begun in Italy, Cassini discovered the satellites of Saturn: Iapetus (1671), Rhea (1672), Tethys (1684) and Dione (1684).In 1675 he detected the dark space that separates the A and B rings of Saturn and that bears his name, the Cassini division.He was the first to consider zodiacal light as a phenomenon of cosmic and not meteorological origin (The elements of astronomy verified, 1693).Cassini rejected Johannes Kepler's theory of elliptical planetary orbits and proposed trajectories through oval curves, the so-called Cassini ovals.
Post a Comment
Read more

Emilio Castelar Biography

Emilio Castelar (Emilio Castelar Ripoll; Cádiz, 1832-San Pedro del Pinatar, Murcia, 1899) Spanish politician, last president of the First Republic.Editor of El Tribuno (1854), La Soberanía Nacional (1855) and La Discusión (1856-64) and professor of History at the University from Madrid since 1858, his frank opposition to the government of Queen Elizabeth II, manifested through the anti-dynastic newspaper he founded and directed in 1864, La Democracia , cost him the chair.In 1865 he was sentenced to death, but managed to flee abroad and remained in Paris until the revolution of 1868.Returning home, he became head of the republican party opposed to Generals Serrano and Prim, who sought to establish the constitutional monarchy and the Duke Amadeo I of Savoy, who held the throne of Spain for three years.Minister of Foreign Affairs after his abdication, president of the Cortes and then of the Republic in 1873, his influence gradually diminished and he left power the following year...
Post a Comment
Read more

Guglielmo Ferrero Biography

Guglielmo Ferrero (Portici, 1871-Monte Peregrino, 1942) Italian historian.Disciple of Cesare Lombroso, he continued his positivism.From his first major work, The Grandeur and Decay of Rome , published from 1901 to 1907, he demonstrated a marked tendency towards sociology and the philosophy of history. Guglielmo Ferrero When fascism arrived, Guglielmo Ferrero lined up among his most intransigent adversaries and had to exile himself.Hosted in Switzerland, he continued the fight against the aforementioned political regime and in 1930 obtained the chair of History of the French Revolution at the University of Geneva. The courses on the French Revolution gave rise to two works, written in French: Adventure , Bonaparte in Italy (1796-1797) and Reconstruction , Talleyrand in Vienna (1814-1815) .In them he tried to point out to contemporary politicians the paths to a stable peace.At the same time, he taught history at the Institut Universitaire des Hautes Études Internationales ...
Post a Comment
Read more