QCOSTARICA — When the evening papers told me about the magnificent gesture of José María Figueres Ferrer, swinging a demolition sledgehammer to knock down the walls of the Bella Vista Barracks and declaring the National Army dissolved, I did not want to believe it.
The first was romantic and symbolic, the second surprising and exemplary.
I waited for the night to pass, believing that I had read in the morning papers the rectification of concepts, explaining that his words had been given a different meaning and that the resolutions of the president did not go so far.
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It is not that I distrusted Figueres’ loyalty to the Republic. Throughout his hard-working life, as a peaceful farmer and a courageous fighter, the figure of José Figueres has gained prominence and lasting prestige that we all have to recognize. But his last civic journey, through the paths of sacrifice, seeking a certain death or a triumph that seemed illusory, to free the country from the cancer that consumed it, elevated him to the pedestal of collective admiration, as a national hero.
Precisely for that reason, it was difficult for me to believe that this gesture now was, in reality, as amazing as the first informants said.
Wars can be conducted with more or less success and good fortune, using talent and courage. But what is difficult to digest and manage is victory.
At the time of arrival, the leaders see themselves surrounded by improvised opportunists, men of adventure who hope to reap a fat advantage for their persons and who have in mind plans of wide ambitions.
They have the right to them, but they translate into bad advice to the rulers in the sense of considering as good, in the height, whatever was bad in the days of the struggle.
Victors often become proud against the doctrines they encouraged and apostles easily become apostates.
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They inflate themselves like balloons and, feeling themselves suspended in the air and carried on the shoulders of the multitudes, they forget the principles they upheld. They then become small, they become dull and cease to be what we expected them to be.
They position themselves behind walls of stone and cement, through whose skylights and battlements the cannons peek out, and they turn a country of peace into a permanent battlefield and their own property which they dispose of as they please.
The so-called strong men, who surround victory, those who took their courage to the point of recklessness, continue to be reckless against their enemies and, drunk with the wine of their exploits, dance on the ruin of the fallen. They feel invincible, protected by their armies, they believe themselves to be supermen caressing their pistols without reason to draw them.
It is the evil of revolutions in almost all latitudes: to end the misdeeds of some, they hand over the country to the misdeeds of others.
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To free themselves from the threat, they exercise the threat and to build the fraternity they preached, they sow hatred and thus they stop being Ariel’s armies to become Caliban’s troops.
The revolution in Costa Rica (of 1948) did not take those paths and we have continued to live, without fear or threats, the republic of all Costa Ricans. But the case of Figueres is something strange and unique in this America of heroes and thinkers that he yearns for.
While the dictators of America rely on the army and oppose it against civilians, while in Venezuela and Peru the military castes mock democracy by imposing a president at their whim, in our small democracy a man, the product of an armed revolution, dissolves his army and returns its absolute powers to the people.
And not only does it provide a fortress to house a museum, but it also puts the war budget back on the Education portfolio and, if our repeated pride is that of having more teachers than soldiers, it reaffirms it, making unproductive money from weapons become producers of culture in schools.
It takes unlimited loyalty to republican principles to dissolve an army that can be their support, the unconditional support of their actions and the docile executor of their orders. What served him then to amass victory, can serve him today to impose his whims. All this reveals that there is in him a character of steel and a heart of gold that places him at the level of the great men of history.
The civility of Costa Rica is well known. The instinctive repugnance of the Costa Rican for everything that is a mandate and not reason is proverbial, but nobody ever suspected that the bravery of a leader would reach where not even the most civil of our presidents, Mr. Cleto González Víquez, dared to reach.
I do not agree with this total and surprising resolution and I even fear that its projections may offer aspects that we cannot see clearly. But, in any case, it means a strong and courageous resolution in defense of the civility of this exemplary democracy.
That barracks was once the peaceful, stately home of a great patrician to whom the country owes the solid foundation of its educational institutions. It is possible that on calm nights the shadow of Don Mauro Fernández passes over its walls, reading the gospel of peace while the soldiers sleep, caressing their rifles.
The house has once again become the possession and fiefdom of that luminous and propitious shadow. It has once again become the school that the most enthusiastic founder of schools dreamed of. The spirit of good has triumphed, culture has won, and Don José Figueres, who was the first in war, has become the first in peace.
Behind the thick walls of the fort, Figueres’ voice is like a great lament when he says: “We men who recently bloodied the country understand the gravity that these wounds can assume in Latin America and the urgency of stopping them from bleeding.”
It is an oath of maximum republican loyalty, which will shake the spine of our America, when it says: “We are the firm supporters of the ideal of a new world in America. To this homeland of Washington, of Lincoln, of Bolívar and Martí we want to say today: Oh, America! Other people, your children too, offer you their greatness. Little Costa Rica wishes to always offer you, as now, along with its heart, its love for civility, for democracy, for institutional life.”
I have not read another more profound, or more moving message from a president of America. With pride as a Costa Rican and a civilized man, I would read it from the summit of Irazú, so that its words would roll over the storms of both seas, as a message from all of Costa Rica. Right there, looking at both oceans, I would place the bronze of José Figueres, raising his hammer destroyer of tyrannies and builder of democracies.
Translated and adapted from the article by Luis Dobles Segreda, published in SemanarioUniversidad.com. Read the original in Spanish here.
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