The complex dynamic outlined above by Koselleck is actually observable in part because political leaders make rhetorical use of “authorizing figures” – the icons of their nation's history – to bolster their own stature and plans of action. Think of American leaders' frequent invocation of great predecessors such as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. In Nicaragua, however, the notables who built the Regime of the Thirty Years, worthy as they might have been of enduring recognition, were never to become national authorizing figures. By way of contrast, the nineteenth century notables who built the Costa Rican polity are to this day publicly revered by new generations, both at the elite and popular levels. This reverence is especially evident at moments of perceived or real danger. In 1983, for example, as civil wars raged in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, the government of Costa Rica linked its proclamation of “perpetual neutrality” to the country's exceptionalist history. More significantly still, the country's president framed the proclamation as a direct extension of a policy established by the nation's founders – authorizing figures who from the distant past could still speak persuasively to those living in the present. Consider a key passage from the declaration: