Ricardo Arias Calderón
Panamanian vice president (1933–2017)
Ricardo Arias Calderón (May 4, 1933 – February 13, 2017) was a Panamanian politician who served as First Vice President from 1989 to 1992. A Catholic who studied at Yale and the Sorbonne, Arias returned to Panama in the 1960s to work for political reform. He went on to become the president of the Christian Democratic Party of Panama and a leading opponent of the military government of Manuel Noriega. In 1984, he ran as a candidate for Second Vice President on the ticket of three-time former president Arnulfo Arias, but they were defeated by pro-Noriega candidate Nicolás Ardito Barletta.
Following an annulled 1989 election and the US invasion of Panama later in the same year, Arias Calderón was sworn in as the First Vice President of Panama under President Guillermo Endara. After growing tensions in the ruling coalition, Arias resigned his position on December 17, 1992, stating that the government had not done enough to help Panama's people. He continued to be an active voice in Panamanian politics following his resignation, supporting the Panama Canal expansion project and opposing the extradition of Noriega.
Background
Arias' maternal family was from Nicaragua, having left during political upheaval there before his birth. One of Arias' great uncles ran for president in Panama, while another was a supporter of the Nicaraguan revolutionary Sandino, a family history that gave Arias an early interest in politics. His father, an engineer, died when Arias was two years old, and he was raised primarily by his mother, aunt, and grandmother.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ricardo Arias Calderón” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.