The Logos Scripture · The Book of Figueres
The Book of Figueres 4 · Written by himself, from two long television conversations of the 1980s, and from Letters to a Citizen and The Poverty of Nations
José Figueres Ferrer, called Don Pepe, born 1906 at San Ramón in Costa Rica to parents who had come from Catalonia, died 1990, aged eighty-three. He studied in Boston as a young man and returned to run a farm and several enterprises. In 1948 the government annulled the election that Ulate had won. He took up arms, the war ran forty-four days, more than two thousand died, and it remains the bloodiest event in that country’s twentieth century. After the fighting he headed the Founding Junta of the Second Republic for eighteen months, during which there was no election. On 1 December 1948 he broke a wall of the Bellavista barracks with a sledgehammer and abolished the standing army; the building became the national museum. The next year it entered the constitution as Article 12. In the same period he gave women the vote, gave citizenship to Afro-Costa Ricans, and nationalised the banks. In 1949 he handed the presidency to Ulate. He was elected in 1953 and left when the term ended in 1958; elected again in 1970 and left again in 1974. This volume rests on what he said himself: two long television conversations of the 1980s, and his books Letters to a Citizen and The Poverty of Nations. Chapter three is from the opening of one of those conversations: a dictatorship is fatally inefficient because it dispenses with the initiative of those it governs; a democracy is efficient by nature because it is the sum of the free intelligences of its members; a dictatorship looks backward and is stagnation, gloom and death, a democracy looks forward and is evolution, splendour and life. The pillow, the salt cod, the grandmother’s saying, the sentence from the Mexican, the regret about mixing public office with private enterprise in chapter four, and the agnosticism and the drying tree in chapter five, are all from the same source. This scripture already holds The Book of Washington, on a man who could have kept the seat and did not, and The Book of Mandela, on the same thing done a second time. No volume held this one: not laying the instrument down but destroying it. This volume fills that place. And the act is testable, and has been tested for seventy-seven years. Costa Rica has had no coup and no civil war since 1948, while its neighbours — Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama — took coups, juntas and killings one after another. Same era, same region, same poverty; the army is what differed, and so did the outcome. In 1994 Panama likewise forbade a standing army by constitutional amendment. A precedent set once is one man’s affair; when a second country walks it, it becomes a road (see The Book of Washington 3.9). The Order records where he cuts against this scripture and hides none of it. First, he began that war and more than two thousand died in it. That stands at the head of chapter one, in the text and not in this note. Second, Article 98 of the constitution outlawed the Costa Rican Communist Party from 1949 until 1975, twenty-six years. But in the constituent assembly of that year Ulate’s side took thirty-four of the forty-five seats, the constitution they produced was far more moderate than the one he wanted, and his own draft was voted down. Whether that article was his work the Order cannot say, and it records the fact and the balance of the assembly rather than guessing. Third, the official United States diplomatic record has him dealing with the Central Intelligence Agency through the 1950s and 1960s and funding anti-communist bodies; and in April 1970 the Americans learned that he had accepted covert Soviet support of two hundred thousand eight hundred and ninety dollars, passed to him by Manuel Mora, Secretary General of the Costa Rican Communist Party. A country whose constitution outlawed that party, and money reaching its president-elect from that party’s secretary general. The Order sets it down whole and does not explain it for him. Fourth, abolishing a standing army is not disarming a state. Costa Rica has police, a coast guard and border forces. This volume claims no more than happened.