3
A Short History

Here are some paradoxes:

Hardly a building survives in Costa Rica from the colonial era, though such relics abound elsewhere in Central America. There are few public historical monuments. Yet Costa Ricans, unlike their neighbors, refer almost constantly to the past to explain why they are the way they are; hardly a visitor escapes acquaintance with the country's post-Conquest history.

In museums and shops, exquisite ceramics and wrought gold recall pre-Columbian Indian cultures. Yet virtually no Costa Rican feels a link to the first inhabitants of the land.

The proudest moment in Costa Rica's history was a military intervention in a neighboring country. Yet Costa Rica claims a peaceful tradition of non-interference that sets it apart from other Latin American nations.

In densely settled parts of the Americas, the Spanish conquest followed a set pattern. The Spaniards made hesitant contacts with the natives of the coast, learned of a ruling civilization inland, marched to the interior, made war and alliances along the way, and finally subjugated the capital of the native empire, along with everything it ruled. Gold was sought by adventurers, souls by the Church, and glory by both. A new order was imposed, as Indians were parceled out to Spaniards to be converted, resettled, and put to work. Slaves were imported as necessary to replace those who did not survive war, disease, abuse and outrage. Spaniard married native, and a new set of classes, with the native-born Spaniard clearly on top, replaced in a few decades what had existed before.

In Costa Rica, events took a somewhat different turn, though not for want of effort on the part of the Spaniards. Indian battled Spaniard, but there was no empire to be subdued, and usually no surrender. Riches were elusive, and few slaves were imported. Soldiers and fortune-hunters gave way to subsistence farmers. With the passage of time, the settlement came to have more in common with English and French colonies in North America than with other Spanish dominions.

It was Christopher Columbus himself who discovered Costa Rica, and whose sailors were the first Europeans to be discovered by the natives of Costa Rica. The encounter took place on or soon after September 18, 1502, when Columbus, on his fourth voyage to the New World, took shelter from a storm at what is now Uvita Island, just off the port of Limón. No account survives of the impression that the intruders, with their white skins and huge ships, made upon the natives. But the Spaniards noted straight off the golden disks and animal-form decorations worn by the inhabitants, and acquired some of them in exchange for junk jewelry. And through native playfulness or cunning, or faulty interpretation, or wishful thinking on the part of the newcomers, the Spaniards departed with the impression that there were treasures aplenty in all landward directions. Thus, and with similar exchanges on succeeding expeditions, did the nickname of Costa Rica—the Rich Coast—become applied to the land that the Spaniards officially called Veragua.

Attempts to subdue the land and its peoples, and appropriate its reputed treasures, however, faltered. A party led by Diego de Nicuesa in 1506 explored the Atlantic coast of present-day Costa Rica and Panama. But the close-knit native bands viewed all outsiders with mistrust, and none made the fatal mistake, so common elsewhere, of allying itself with the newcomers against traditional enemies. Attacked by Indians who vanished into the jungle, ravaged by heat, diarrhea, yellow fever and assorted diseases to which they had no resistance, tormented by clouds of mosquitoes, drenched by seemingly inexhaustible rains, bogged down in mud, unable to replenish supplies, the men of the Nicuesa party departed without founding a permanent settlement, and later expeditions likewise came to grief.

Frustrated on the Atlantic side, the Spaniards turned their efforts to the Pacific shore. Here the terrain was less of a morass, the vegetation less impenetrable, the inhabitants more permanently settled and less intractable. Spanish attempts to conquer were less of a failure. The expedition of Gil González Dávila in 1522 succeeded in peacefully converting many Chorotega Indians under Chief Nicoya to Catholicism. Quantities of gold were carried off as well. The price was over a thousand men dead from the familiar trio of hunger, disease and raids. Francisco Fernández de Córdova later founded a town called Bruselas near present-day Puntarenas, but infighting among Spaniards led to its abandonment. Short-lived settlements were established on both coasts, but for more than half a century from the arrival of Columbus, there was no permanent Spanish foothold. Finally, in 1561, Juan de Cavallón, with a party of Spaniards and domestic animals, founded the successful settlement of Garcimuñoz in the Pacific lowlands. For lack of finding gold, however, Cavallón himself withdrew.

It was under Juan Vásquez de Coronado, Cavallón's successor as governor, that Costa Rica's course began to differ from that of the other Spanish provinces. Vásquez moved the main settlement from the lowlands to the temperate Central Valley, and renamed it Cartago, or Carthage. The search for gold was abandoned, and Vásquez attempted to deal with the natives in friendship. Spaniards cultivated crops for their own consumption, lived mostly in peace, but achieved no great prosperity. Cartago was not the sort of outpost that attracted adventurers, but at least it survived. The luck of Costa Rica in being governed by Vásquez, however, did not extend to him personally: he was lost at sea after a voyage to Spain to seek financial aid for the colony.

The topsy-turvy politics of Costa Rica in the nineteenth century were only a sideshow to the economic changes that were taking place. Costa Rica was transformed, as coffee came to be cultivated on a large scale.

Coffee was first grown in Costa Rica toward the end of the colonial period. The plant was so eminently suited to the highland volcanic soil and held such obvious promise that the newly independent republic granted it exemption from a number of taxes. By 1829, coffee was Costa Rica's most important product. In 1831, the government began to give away land on which to plant the crop. Production grew from 50,000 pounds in 1832 to 9 million pounds in 1841, and by the 1880s, annual harvests approached 100 million pounds.

Inevitably, the rewards of coffee cultivation were not distributed evenly. Some families acquired large expanses of land, transformed their wealth into political power, and developed tastes for culture and the finer things in life that the nation had done without for so long. But despite the emergence of a class structure, there appeared to be land and profit enough for all, and no sector of society failed to advance.

Although he was autocratic, Tomás Guardia saw himself as a benefactor of his people. Under his government and those of his two successors, roads were built and improved, public buildings erected, capital punishment abolished, and primary education made free and compulsory, and independent of the church. Coffee earnings, and borrowings against future earnings, financed the expenditures.

The problems of shipping coffee led indirectly to the development of a second major export crop. Coffee was sent by oxcart to the Pacific port of Puntarenas, then on a long voyage around South America to markets in the eastern United States and Europe. To shorten the journey, President Guardia ordered the construction of a railroad line to the Atlantic. Bananas were planted as a stop-gap measure to provide revenue for the financially troubled project. The new crop proved immensely profitable, and large areas were soon planted in the fruit.

Costa Rica's modern, democratic tradition started with the election of 1889, the first that was honest, open and direct. No violent revolutionaries clamored for reform at the time. In a typically Costa Rican way, President Bernardo Soto, in response to demonstrations, called for the free election whose time, apparently, had come. José Joaquín Rodríguez, a candidate opposed by Soto, won the election and, against expectations, took office. The course of democracy was to have its ups and downs thereafter. Presidents attempted to amend the constitution in order to succeed themselves, and dismissed uncooperative legislatures. But peaceful transitions of power, and more active participation in politics by all sectors of the population, characterized the years that followed.

The major challenge to the democratic trend came in 1917. Claiming that the government was corrupt, Minister of War Federico Tinoco Granados seized power and ruled as a dictator. Opposition by the United States helped force his resignation after two years, and elections were held for a successor.

In the 1930s, Costa Rica began to show signs of social unrest. Many of the benefits of coffee wealth had gone to relatively few families. An extraordinarily high rate of population growth had led to repeated division of the smaller landholdings, and many workers owned no land at all. A strike in the banana plantations succeeded in obtaining higher pay, and agitation was threatened elsewhere.

The response of those in power was to take the lead in distributing wealth more evenly and improving the security of workers. President Ricardo Jiménez Oreamuno organized a government insurance company, and in 1935 began the distribution of United Fruit Company land to farmers, in small plots. Under Rafael Angel Calderón Guardia, a physician who became president in 1940, the measured pace of reform continued as the first social security legislation was enacted.

Calderón was to be one of the more controversial figures in modern Costa Rica. His social programs—including paid vacations, unemployment compensation and an income tax—and his early declaration of war on Germany, offended many of his original conservative supporters. Calderón sought to broaden his political base by allying himself with the Communist-influenced Popular Vanguard party. The polarization of the country continued under Calderón's successor, Teodoro Picado. Conservatives considered the government radical, while liberals, led by José Figueres Ferrer, felt reform programs were ineffective.

In 1948, Calderón ran again for the presidency, and lost to Otilio Ulate. But the government claimed fraud, and the legislature annulled the results. Tensions rose, and finally broke out into an open rebellion led by José Figueres. Armed by the governments of Guatemala and Cuba, the rebels prevailed in a few weeks over the army. The short civil war was the bloodiest in Costa Rica's history, with more than 2000 killed.

José Figueres led an interim administration that attempted to restore order to a disrupted nation. Banks were nationalized and taxes restructured. Most curiously following a civil war, and amid threats from domestic plotters and opponents in exile, Figueres and his allies chose not to purge and restructure the army, but to abolish it altogether, retaining only those elements of the old security forces that they considered appropriate in the Costa Rican context: a national police force, and the military bands.

A constituent assembly proceeded to write a constitution that rejected some of Figueres' proposals, but extended social welfare programs, gave the vote to women, ended discrimination against blacks, and established an electoral tribunal with broad powers to ensure the honesty of elections. Following the legislative elections of 1949, Figueres stepped aside, and Otilio Ulate, the victor of the disputed 1948 vote, assumed office as president.

Despite the bitterness of the civil war, politics in Costa Rica since 1948 have been remarkably peaceful and democratic. Exiles have threatened invasions on two occasions, but have found no internal support, and their movements have fizzled. José Figueres himself twice served as president, from 1953 to 1957 and from 1970 to 1974, and his National Liberation Party has dominated electoral politics. But it has only twice held the presidency for more than a single term.

Social and economic progress since 1948 has contributed to stability. With revenues growing as a result of high coffee prices and expanded cultivation, the government acted to improve living conditions and modernize agriculture and industry. Social legislation was implemented without the heavy-handed opposition by business interests that plagued Costa Rica's neighbors. By 1981, social security programs—medical care, health services and income maintenance—served 90 percent of the population, took 40 percent of the national budget, and were the largest employer in Costa Rica. Education accounted for 30 percent of the budget, and basic schooling was widespread. Government clinics and private agencies have provided birth-control information to a people concerned not with surviving but with maintaining its standard of living. A population growth rate that was one of the highest in the world at mid-century was reduced from over four percent to well under three percent. Life expectancy has meanwhile risen to 75 years, the longest in Latin America, and a respectable figure for any country.

Economically, Costa Rica has diversified considerably. Industry expanded at phenomenal annual rates of over ten percent in the sixties, as manufactured goods were exported to the new Central American Common Market. Exports to other areas remained largely agricultural, but expanded to include meat, lumber, sugar, cacao, and flower seeds, along with coffee and bananas.

Massive public works have helped to improve living standards. Hydroelectric projects have brought power to most homes in the Central Valley. An intracoastal canal along the Atlantic has improved access to parts of the lowlands. The highway system has been extended even to the once-forbidding Caribbean region. Government land continues to be available to those who are willing to work it. Foreigners and foreign investment have been equally welcome, and tourism has grown to become the second source of foreign exchange, after bananas.