By Frank McNeil
Most Costa Ricans say the founding fathers of modern Costa Rican democracy were Dr. Rafael Angel Calderón Guardia and José Figueres Ferrer. Many others also helped forge the nation’s devotion to the ballot, education and development. But it was Dr. Calderón who instituted Costa Rica’s pension and national health care systems.
And it was “Don Pepe” who refused to turn his 1948 revolution into a dictatorship, abolished the army and conducted a free election which gave the presidency to a man not of his party.
Jorge Manuel Dengo would have killed me (well, not literally) had he heard me say this, but I think Costa Rican historians will in time conclude that he was the third founding father, ranking just behind Dr. Calderón and Don Pepe in the making of Costa Rican democracy. I say this not so much because of his extraordinary résumé, but because – just as with Dr. Calderón and Don Pepe – it is impossible to imagine the Costa Rica of today had it not been for the life and works of Jorge Manuel Dengo. And because he embodied to the nth degree the old Costa Rican ideal of education, hard work and unselfish service, coupled with a sophisticated appreciation of technology, international affairs and what we now call globalization.
More than a few Costa Ricans (see Julio Rodríguez’s excellent column in La Nación) have concluded that he was Costa Rica’s version of the noblest Roman. I might too, except that even a cursory reading of Tacitus and Gibbon tells the reader that noble Romans do not seem to have had a sense of humor. Jorge Manuel was wildly funny.
About 10 days before his death, I had coffee with him and his daughter Amalia at his house. Frail but lucid – more so than this writer anyway – he gave me a hard time about how I had been described to him as a “gringo loco.”
We talked about current affairs and about his first exposure to the University of Minnesota, trudging through snow in clothing suitable for San José, looking for student
lodging, only to be greeted by a woman who would not take in a boarder from “down there” or some such phrase. He kept going, found a family who treated him as their own, and went on to get a civil engineering degree and do graduate work in hydraulics and economics, all of which served him
well as he pioneered one endeavor after another in the new Costa Rica that emerged after the 1948 revolution.
Dengo was a patriot and internationalist all at once. For 11 years and three administrations, beginning in 1949, he drove Costa Rica’s most important industrial policy, its electrification from coast to coast and up and down the mountains, relying on hydro-power. (An argument can be made that Dengo pioneered sustainable energy in the tropics.) Seeing that old-line private American and European electric power companies, in ill repute in Latin America, were not up to the task, he drew his U.S. experience to set up the Costa Rican Electricity Institute along the lines of FDR’s Rural Electrification Administration and Tennessee Valley Authority, modified to Costa Rican realities.
In the mid-1980s, after we had left the U.S. Embassy, Dengo became, under President Luis Alberto Monge, minister for exports (then known as MINEX) to help the private sector move from an import substitution model, which had run out of steam in the 1981 economic collapse, to expanding non-traditional exports. Our daughter Kathi worked for him then. As she said to me a few hours ago, “Don Jorge didn’t do tunnel vision; he saw how things fit together and where to go next.”
Like any true friend, Dengo told the U.S. what he thought, not what we wanted to hear, particularly useful when, as Oscar Arias’ vice president, Dengo supported President Arias and his foreign minister, Rodrigo Madrigal, in their dramatic effort to push the Central American peace process over the opposition of the Iran-Contra crazies in the second Reagan administration. Those were tough days for Costa Rica and I am certain that Arias, who plainly deserved his Nobel Prize, knew how fortunate he was to have Dengo handling a good portion of domestic affairs while Arias drove the negotiations to a successful conclusion and kept Costa Rica out of the cauldron of war.
I recall walking with Jorge Manuel across cooling lava on what he and I called Costa Rica’s reverse-aid program, hosting American experts from the State of Oregon and the National Forest Service who had come to learn, after the Mt. Hood explosion, how Costa Rica had coped with the Irazú and Arenal eruptions, years apart. Later, he would help Paul Bell set up what became USAID’s regional office of Foreign Disaster Assistance in San José and was one of the first in Latin America to recognize that nations needed to deal with risk in advance – to mitigate risk by such measures as strengthening building codes or moving at-risk structures from flood zones.
Through it all, Jorge Manuel remained a terrific human being, a great family man and a superb boss, a constant refrain among those who knew him. Long ago, I wrote in a cable prepping Washington for consultations with Costa Rica on how to structure the Caribbean Basin Initiative, that Dengo was “one of Latin America’s three nicest statesmen,” and I wasn’t sure who the other two were. Still true.
Frank McNeil is a former U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica in the Carter and Reagan administrations. McNeil’s friendship with Dengo began 30 years ago, when the newly inaugurated President Monge asked McNeil to drop by the president’s residence to meet one of his most important economic advisers.
