Ulate Blanco, Otilio (1891–1973)
Ulate Blanco, Otilio (1891–1973)
Otilio Ulate Blanco (b. 25 August 1891; d. 27 October 1973), president of Costa Rica (1949–1953) and founder of the National Union Party (PUN).
Otilio Ulate Blanco came early to an exciting and sometimes turbulent life of journalism and politics when he left high school at age seventeen following his father's premature death. He worked for and invested in a number of daily newspapers until he became the owner and publisher of the premier Costa Rican newspaper El Diario de Costa Rica. He was the founder of La Hora.
His long involvement in political affairs came to dominate his life from the time he was chosen (1947) as the presidential candidate of the united opposition parties (made up of the National Unification Party, the Democratic Party, and the Social Democratic Party) to oppose the progovernment candidate, former president Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia (1940–1944). The government's effort to deny Ulate's victory in the 1948 election served as the catalyst for revolution. Ulate was inaugurated in 1949 following eighteen months of de facto government by the Junta Fundadora de la Segunda República headed by José Figueres Ferrer.
Ulate's administration emphasized fiscal restraint and pacification. He ran unsuccessfully in the presidential election of 1962. In 1965 Ulate allied the PUN with Calderón Guardia's National Republican Party to support what was to be the successful candidacy of José Joaquín Trejos Fernández (1966–1970).
See alsoCosta Rica; Trejos Fernández, José Joaquín.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Charles D. Ameringer's, Don Pepe (1978).
John Patrick Bell, Crisis in Costa Rica (1971).
Olga Marta Ulate, A la luz de la moral política (1976).
Additional Bibliography
Milner, Judy Oliver. "Otilio Ulate and the Traditional Response to Contemporary Political Change in Costa Rica." Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University, 1977.
Torres Rodríguez, José Luis. Otilio Ulate, su partido y sus luchas. San José: Editorial Costa Rica, 1986.
John Patrick Bell