Oscar Arias Sánchez

President of Costa Rica (1986-1990, 2006- )

• Born: September 13, 1941
• Place of Birth: Heredia, Costa Rica

As president of Costa Rica, Arias drafted the Esquipulas II peace accord, signed by Arias and the presidents of Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. This accord, for which Arias received the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize, became the impetus for democracy and peace in war-torn Central America.

Early Life

Oscar Arias Sánchez (AHR-ee-ahs SAHN-chays) was born into one of the leading families of Costa Rica. His father, Juan Rafael Arias Trejos, was descended from a line of legislators and government ministers and was head of the Costa Rican Central Bank. Oscar’s mother, Lillian Arias Sánchez, was the daughter of one of the wealthiest coffee plantation owners in the nation.

Arias was raised in the town of Heredia, near the capital city of San José in Costa Rica’s central plateau. Sick with asthma as a child, Arias was a voracious reader who aspired to political office. After attending Catholic schools, Arias enrolled in Boston University in 1959 and attended Harvard University during one summer. After describing his views on Central America in a letter to president-elect John F. Kennedy, Arias was invited to meet with Kennedy in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. The Kennedy administration would become a model for Arias’s vision in politics.

Deciding on a political career, Arias left Boston after two years and enrolled in the University of Costa Rica. Graduating in 1967, he studied political science at the University of Essex and the London School of Economics in England for two years before returning to Costa Rica in 1969 as a professor of political science (he would be awarded a Ph.D. in 1974). President José Figueres appointed Arias as an economic adviser in 1970 and to a cabinet position as minister of planning and political economy in 1972. That year Arias published his book Pressure Groups in Costa Rica, in which he argued that the central government must resist the pressure that interest groups can apply to a small democracy. In 1973, Arias married Margarita Penón Góngora, also from a wealthy family. They would have two children before eventually divorcing.

Life’s Work

Beginning a steady rise through politics, Arias was appointed international secretary for Costa Rica’s leading party, the Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN) in 1975. In 1978, he was elected to the National Assembly of Costa Rica as a deputy from Heredia. In 1979, he was elected general-secretary of the PLN, its leading post, positioning himself to achieve his dream of the presidency. In 1986, Arias secured the PLN candidacy after a contested primary. After winning a hard-fought election, Arias was sworn in as president on May 6, 1986.

President Arias set about fulfilling an ambitious domestic agenda promised in his campaign. Sixteen thousand homes were constructed in 1986, and the number of farming cooperatives expanded to five hundred fifty. Even more ambitiously, Arias tied Costa Rica’s domestic problems to its foreign policy and, in particular, to the violence afflicting Costa Rica’s Central American neighbors. Although Costa Rica had been a peaceful democracy since former president Figueres’s constitutional revolution of 1948 (Costa Rica also abolished its army in 1949), the same could not be said for its neighbors. The government of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinista National Liberation Front), better known as the Sandinistas, was fighting a vicious civil war against the counterrevolutionary Contras in Nicaragua. The Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN) rebels were fighting the government in El Salvador. Guatemala and Honduras were marked by chaos, poverty, and murderous death squads. Arias took the position that the regional conflicts threatened both Costa Rica’s democracy its northern border overrun by Contra forces and its debt-laden economy, heavily dependent on aid from the United States and the earnings from tourist revenue.

There had been earlier ventures at peacemaking, such as those of the Contadora group of Latin America foreign ministers (which began in the early 1980’s), Arias’s own San José peace ideas launched at his presidential inauguration, and a 1986 summit meeting in Esquipulas, Guatemala. On February 17, 1987, Arias invited the presidents of Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador to finalize a concrete treaty with him in a joint meeting in Guatemala City. At 4:00 A.M. on August 7, the five presidents emerged from their hotel room with the Arias peace plan, called the Procedure to Establish a Firm and Lasting Peace in Central America, or the Esquipulas II accord. The accord required each country to take specific steps to implement democracy by such measures as freeing political prisoners; instituting a National Reconciliation Commission to oversee amnesty; negotiating with political groups willing to abide by peaceful measures; and guaranteeing freedom of the press, a pluralist party system, and fair elections to be monitored by international observers. As an essential condition, all five nations had to commit to ending the arming and funding of foreign insurgencies. Also, the nations would meet in regional conferences to negotiate arms reduction, discuss the refugee crisis, and monitor progress.

Progress in implementing Esquipulas II was difficult but steady. Honduras and Guatemala stopped supplying arms to the Nicaraguan conflict. The governments and rebels in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua agreed to cease-fires, peacekeepers, and internationally monitored elections. In 1990, National Opposition Union candidate Violetta Chamorro defeated Sandinista president Daniel Ortega, dramatic proof of progress toward peace.

In 1987, Arias was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for proposing and for encouraging the signing of the peace accord. After leaving the presidency in 1990, as mandated by the Costa Rican constitution, Arias traveled around the world speaking on demilitarization, securing peace by ending poverty, and ending global arms trafficking. Arias used his Nobel Prize money to set up the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress to secure “just and peaceful” societies in Central America. He also received numerous other awards for his peace initiative, awards including the Martin Luther King Peace Prize in 1987 and the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism in 1988.

Building on Costa Rica’s pacifist tradition, Arias set out to persuade war-torn nations to abolish their armies. Panama abolished its army in 1994; Haiti in 2000; the island nations of Dominica and of Saint Kitts and Nevis thereafter. In 1995, Arias, with other Nobel Peace laureates, drafted the Arms Trade Treaty to limit the export of arms, which led both the European Union and the United Nations to curb sales of arms to small nations. In 2006, Arias, widely regarded as the most significant figure in Costa Rican history, was elected to a second term as president of Costa Rica.

Arias's second presidency included several historic moments. Arias's administration chose to recognize China's dominion over Taiwan, breaking with previous Costa Rican governmental policy. Arias also served as a mediator during the 2009 Honduran Constitutional Crisis. The President was criticized for taking credit for numerous incomplete government projects near the end of his term, including Costa Rica's then-unfinished National Stadium. In 2019, several women accused Arias of sexual misconduct. However, by December 2020, all formal charges had been dropped.

Significance

Arias’s greatest achievement as a politician is the Esquipulas II accord, which proposed concrete objectives for achieving peace and democracy in one of the most war-torn and unstable regions of the world Central America. Despite nearly universal skepticism toward Arias’s efforts, Esquipulas II proved a strong impetus in the movement toward peace in Central America, as Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala began to institute safeguards for human rights and heal conflicts that had persisted for decades. Arias’s efforts helped Central America become a safer, more democratic, and more peaceful region.

Arias’s success was rooted in the history and experiences of Costa Rica. In that sense, Arias can be seen as insistently recommending the Costa Rican experience as the model for all Central America: free elections, an end to exporting arms to foreign insurgents, and a free press. Similarly, Arias was able to export Costa Rica’s example of abolishing its own military to Panama, Haiti, and other island nations of the Caribbean.

Arias carried out his Central American initiatives as a relatively young man; as a former president, he continued his peace efforts with the United Nations, the Carter Foundation, and his own Arias Foundation. In 2009, Arias served as a negotiator in the Hondoran constitutional crisis, which pitted Honduran congressional leader Roberto Micheletti against President Manuel Zelaya. Zelaya sought to amend the country's constitution in the effort to extend his tenure as president. The Honduran military detained Zelaya while Micheletti served as the country's interim leader. His greatest legacy remains a future prospect: If the pacific and democratic initiatives he promoted in Central America and the Caribbean can inspire cessation of violence in other war-torn parts of the globe, his legacy is assured.

Bibliography

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