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Ricardo Jiménez Oreamuno is a lawyer, politician and current President of Costa Rica.
Biography[]
The son of two-time president Jesús Jiménez Zamora, Ricardo Jiménez Oreamuno rose to prominence before the Weltkrieg. In his first term as president between 1910 and 1914, he oversaw the repayment of the country's crippling national debt. By his third stint as president, the country's national debt had again skyrocketed, and again President Jiménez attempted, less successfully than before, to bring Costa Rica back from the brink of default. Costa Rica’s period of peace and prosperity ended with the New York Stock Market Crash and the onset of the Great Depression in 1925. Without the strong American market, the value of bananas plummeted and the whole country’s economy went into sharp decline. President Ricardo Jiménez Oreamuno attempted to improve the situation by encouraging German investors to take over failing American businesses, forging a new connection between the Central American nation and Mitteleuropa. A major labor strike in 1934 was, as before, defeated by a government crackdown under pressure by the UFC.