Daniel Oduber
Daniel Oduber was president of Costa Rica from 1974 to 1978, the co-founder of the National Liberation Party with Figueres and its intellectual. He was the man who had been at Figueres's side in the 1948 war and who won the presidency at the second attempt. He had lost in 1966 to Trejos by four thousand votes. The four years were the high point of the Costa Rican state that Figueres had begun. There was the state holding company CODESA founded in 1972 and grown into cement, sugar and aluminium. There was the family allowances fund of 1974, which paid for the rural clinics and the school meals that made the country's infant mortality Latin America's lowest. There was the national parks system, which set aside a tenth of the country, Corcovado and Chirripó among them, when nobody else in the hemisphere was doing it. There were the cooperatives, the northern Guanacaste ranches bought up for the peasants, and the diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, Cuba and the Chinese, which Washington disliked. There was the debt, which the oil shock and the state companies ran up and which his successor was left holding. The presidency ended under a cloud. The financier Robert Vesco, wanted in the United States for looting a mutual fund, had bought his way into the country under Figueres and stayed under Oduber. The opposition made the election of 1978 about it, which Liberation lost. He was born in San José, studied law there and philosophy at McGill and the Sorbonne. He was Figueres's secretary in the junta of 1948, the country's ambassador to the United Nations and to Europe. He was foreign minister from 1962 to 1964 and president of the Legislative Assembly. After the presidency he was a vice-president of the Socialist International, the party's elder. He was the man Arias defeated for its leadership in 1986. He died in San José in October 1991. The airport at Liberia, in the Guanacaste he had thought about, has his name.
- Lived: 1921 CE – 1991 CE
- Nationality: Costa Rican
- Roles: president, lawyer, politician
