Luis Alberto Monge
Luis Alberto Monge was president of Costa Rica from 1982 to 1986, the trade unionist and co-founder of the National Liberation Party who won the election of February 1982 with fifty-nine per cent, the largest majority the party ever had, on the ruin Carazo had left. His four years were the rescue and the tightrope. The rescue was the IMF agreement of December 1982, the debt rescheduled, the colón stabilised, and the inflation down from ninety per cent to ten in two years. There was the American aid, a billion dollars over the four years, more per head than anywhere but Israel. That was the price of the tightrope. The Reagan administration wanted the country's northern border for the Contras, who were there anyway, under Edén Pastora, with CIA airstrips at Santa Elena. The country wanted no part of the war. His answer was the proclamation of permanent, active and unarmed neutrality of 17 November 1983, read out in the national theatre, by which the country declared it would take no side in Central America's wars and keep no army. Washington accepted it with bad grace and the Sandinistas did not believe it. It held, more or less, under the civil guard's trainers from the Green Berets. There were the border incidents, the bomb at La Penca that killed the journalists at Pastora's press conference in May 1984, and the two civil guards killed by Sandinista fire at Las Crucitas in May 1985. He was born in Palmares, the son of a coffee farmer. He left school for the union movement at nineteen. He was the youngest member of the constituent assembly of 1949, at twenty-three. He founded the party with Figueres in 1951, ran the Inter-American Regional Organisation of Workers from Mexico City. He was the party's secretary-general and the Assembly's president. He lost the presidential election of 1978, and won the next. He handed over to Arias, whom he had not wanted as the party's candidate, in May 1986. He lived thirty more years, the last surviving founder of the party and of the constitution. He died in November 2016 a month short of ninety-one.
- Lived: 1925 CE – 2016 CE
- Nationality: Costa Rican
- Roles: president, trade unionist, politician
