THE EMERGENCE OF A NATION
Independence
Independence of Central America from Spain on 15 September 1821 came on the coattails of Mexico's declaration earlier in the same year. Independence had little immediate effect, however, for Costa Rica had required only minimal government during the colonial era and had long gone its own way. In fact, the country was so out of touch that the news that independence had been granted reached Costa Rica a full month after the event. In 1823, the other Central American nations proclaimed the United Provinces of Central America, with their capital in Guatemala City, while a Costa Rican provincial council voted for accession to Mexico.
After the declaration, effective power lay in the hands of the separate towns of the isthmus, and it took several years for a stable pattern of political alignment to emerge. The four leading cities of Costa Rica felt as independent as had the city-states of ancient Greece, and the conservative and aristocratic leaders of Cartago and Heredia soon found themselves at odds with the more progressive republican leaders of San José and Alajuela. The local quarrels quickly developed into civic unrest and, in 1823, to civil war. After a brief battle in the Ochomogo Hills, the republican forces of San José were victorious. They rejected Mexico, and Costa Rica joined the federation with full autonomy for its own affairs. Guanacaste voted to secede from Nicaragua and join Costa Rica the following year.
From this moment on, liberalism in Costa Rica had the upper hand. Elsewhere in Central America, conservative groups tied to the church and the erstwhile colonial bureaucracy spent generations at war with anticlerical and laissez-faire liberals, and a cycle of civil wars came to dominate the region. By contrast, in Costa Rica colonial institutions had been relatively weak and early modernization of the economy propelled the nation out of poverty and laid the foundations of democracy far earlier than elsewhere in the isthmus. While other countries turned to repression to deal with social tensions, Costa Rica turned toward reform. Military plots and coups weren't unknown--they played a large part in determining who came to rule throughout the next century--but the generals usually were puppets used as tools to install favored individuals (usually surprisingly progressive civilian allies) representing the interests of particular cliques.
Early Liberalism
Juan Mora Fernández, elected the federalist nation's first chief of state in 1824, set the tone by ushering in a nine-year period of progressive stability. He established a sound judicial system, founded the nation's first newspaper, and expanded public education. He also encouraged coffee cultivation and gave free land grants to would-be coffee growers. The nation, however, was still riven by rivalry, and in September 1835 the War of the League broke out when San José was attacked by the three other towns. They were unsuccessful and the national flag was planted firmly in San José.
Braulio Carrillo, who seized power as a benevolent dictator in 1835, established an orderly public administration and new legal codes to replace colonial Spanish law. In 1838, he withdrew Costa Rica from the Central American federation and proclaimed independence. The Honduran general Francisco Morazán invaded and toppled Carrillo in 1842. Morazán's extranational ambitions and the military draft and direct taxes he imposed soon inspired his overthrow. He was executed within the year.
Coffee Is King
The reins of power were taken up by a nouveau elite, the coffee barons, who vied with each other for political dominance. In 1849, the cafetaleros announced their ascendancy by conspiring to overthrow the nation's first president, José María Castro, an enlightened man who initiated his administration by founding a high school for girls and sponsoring freedom of the press. They chose as Castro's successor Juan Rafael Mora, a powerful cafetalero. Mora is remembered for the remarkable economic growth that marked his first term and for "saving" the nation from the imperial ambitions of the American adventurer William Walker during his second term (see special topic, The William Walker Saga). Still, his countryfolk ousted him from power in 1859; the masses blamed him for the cholera epidemic that claimed the lives of one in every 10 Costa Ricans, while the elites were horrified when Mora moved to establish a national bank, which would have undermined their control of credit to the coffee producers. After failing in his own coup against his successor, he was executed--a prelude to a second cycle of militarism, for the war of 1856 had introduced Costa Rica to the buying and selling of generals and the establishment of a corps of officers possessing an inflated aura of legitimacy.
The Guardia Legacy
The 1860s were marred by power struggles among the coffee elite, supported by their respective military cronies. General Tomás Guardia, however, was his own man. In April 1870, he overthrew the government and ruled for 12 years as an iron-willed military strongman backed by a powerful centralized government of his own making.
True to Costa Rican tradition, Guardia proved himself a progressive thinker and a benefactor of the people. His towering reign set in motion forces that shaped the modern liberal-democratic state. Hardly characteristic of 19th-century despots, he abolished capital punishment, managed to curb the power of the coffee barons, and, ironically, tamed the use of the army for political means. He used coffee earnings and taxation to finance roads and public buildings. And in a landmark revision to the Constitution in 1869, he made "primary education for both sexes obligatory, free, and at the cost of the Nation."
Guardia had a dream: to make the transport of coffee more efficient and more profitable by forging a railroad linking the Central Valley with the Atlantic coast, and thus with America and Europe. Fulfillment of Guardia's dream was the triumph of one man--Minor Keith of Brooklyn, New York--over a world of risks and logistical nightmares.
Guardia's enlightened administration was a watershed for the nation. The aristocrats gradually came to understand that liberal, orderly, and stable regimes profited their business interests while the instability inherent in reliance on militarism was damaging to it. And the extension of education to every citizen (and the arrival of thousands of European immigrants bringing notions of liberalism) raised the consciousness of the masses and made it increasingly difficult for the patrimonial elite to exclude the population from the political process.
Democracy
The shift to democracy was manifest in the election called by President Bernardo Soto in 1889--commonly referred to as the first "honest" election, with popular participation (women and blacks, however, were still excluded from voting). To Soto's surprise, his opponent José Joaquín Rodríguez won the election. The Soto government refused to recognize the new president. The masses rose and marched in the streets to support their chosen leader, and Soto stepped down.
During the course of the next two generations, militarism gave way to peaceful transitions to power. Presidents, however, attempted to amend the Constitution to continue their rule and even dismissed uncooperative legislatures. Both Rodríguez and his hand-picked successor, Rafael Iglesias, for example, turned dictatorial while sponsoring material progress. Iglesias's successor, Ascensión Esquivel, who took office in 1902, went so far as to exile three of the contenders for the 1906 elections, then imposed his own choice for president: González Víquez. Subsequently, Congress declared the winner of the 1914 plebiscite ineligible and named its own choice, noncontender Alfredo González Flores, as president.
Throughout all this the country had been at peace, the army in its barracks. In 1917, democracy faced its first major challenge. At that time, the state collected the majority of its revenue from the less wealthy. Flores' bill to establish direct, progressive taxation based on income and his espousal of state involvement in the economy had earned the wrath of the elites. They decreed his removal. Minister of War Federico Tinoco Granados seized power. Tinoco ruled as an iron-fisted dictator, but Costa Ricans were no longer prepared to acquiesce in oligarchic restrictions. Women and high-school students led a demonstration calling for his ouster, and Tinoco fled to Europe.
There followed a series of unmemorable administrations culminating in the return of two previous leaders, Ricardo Jiménez and González Víquez, who alternated power for 12 years through the 1920s and '30s. The apparent tranquility was shattered by the Depression and the social unrest it engendered. Old-fashioned paternalistic liberalism had failed to resolve social ills such as malnutrition, unemployment, low pay, and poor working conditions. The Depression distilled all these issues, especially after a dramatic communist-led strike against the United Fruit Company, which had attained inordinate political influence, brought tangible gains. Calls grew shrill for reforms.
