José María Hipólito Figueres Ferrer (25 September 1906 – 8 June 1990) served three terms as President of Costa Rica: 1948–1949, 1953–1958 and 1970–1974.

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.

[3][page needed] Figueres became a successful coffee grower and rope manufacturer, employing more than 1,000 sharecroppers and factory laborers.

The highly controversial Calderón had angered Costa Rican elites, enacting a large social security retirement program and implementing national healthcare.

Washington officials closely watched the Legion's activities, especially after Figueres carried out a series of terrorist attacks inside Costa Rica during 1945 and 1946 that were supposed to climax in a general strike, but the people did not respond.

After the civil war, Figueres became president at the head of a provisional junta, known as the Founding Council, that held power for 18 months.

Both of these leaders' programs were in many cases exactly like the ones Franklin D. Roosevelt passed during the Great Depression that helped lift the US out of its own economic slump and social decline it had faced in the 1930s.

Figueres admired what president Franklin D. Roosevelt did; however, he noted that "the price he had to pay to get his programs through was to leave the business community free overseas to set up dictatorships and do whatever they liked...What we need now is an international New Deal, to change the relations between North and South.

"[9][10] Figueres stepped down after 18 months, handing his power over to Otilio Ulate, and ever since Costa Ricans have settled their arguments constitutionally.

"[9] In 1953, Figueres created the Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN), the most successful party in Costa Rican political history, and was returned to power in 1953.

Figueres condemned the Venezuelans, but said that he understood them, criticizing the United States for their support of Rafael Trujillo, resource extraction, and enabling of corruption and autocracy.

[3][page needed][13] When opponents of Nicaragua's President Anastasio Somoza Debayle seized a plane flying from Managua to Miami and forced it to land in San José in 1971, holding the passengers hostage and demanding fuel for a diverted flight to Cuba, Figueres ordered Costa Rican police to shoot out the engines and tires.

"[4] According to revelations from the Mitrokhin Archive, the KGB secretly transmitted to Figueres a $300,000 loan via the Costa Rican Communist Party to help finance his 1970 campaign, in exchange for establishing diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, which he did upon election.

Figueres later escalated his relationship with the San Jose residency of the KGB, expanding his activities to providing confidential reports on other countries in Central America and the Caribbean.

"[8] Figueres also opposed the dictatorial regime in pre-Castro Cuba and went so far as to dispatch a planeload of weapons for Cuban insurgents led by the young Fidel Castro, a member of Caribbean Legion.

[8] In March, 1959, Figueres was invited to Havana, and during a public speech, he warned Castro about the ideological deviations he had observed in Cuba, and immediately the microphone was taken from him.

[5] Figueres was stubborn about his blunders, most notably his most controversial decision to grant asylum to Robert Vesco, the fugitive U.S. financier, accused of looting millions of dollars from the Investors Overseas Service, Ltd. (IOS) mutual funds in the 1970s.

Mr. Vesco not only had a personal and business relationship with Mr. Figueres but he also made contributions to the campaign coffers of both leading political parties in the 1974 elections.

[17][18] As a result, for the first time in human history, a World Constituent Assembly convened to draft and adopt the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.

His other daughter, Christiana, is a Costa Rican diplomat who served from 2010 to 2016 as the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and is widely considered to be the architect of the Paris Agreement.