The (Alternate) History of Costa Rica

In May of 1948, Costa Rican general Jose Figueres engaged in a successful coup against President Picado. The legitimacy of Picado's election having been called into question, Figueres was able to call on both military and popular support to overthrow the government, including conservative military leaders such as Edgar Cardona. Nobody could have predicted that this marked the beginning of an over 30 year long conflict which would devastate Costa Rica for generations.

Once in power, Figueres almost immediately began a project of dramatic political and social reforms, but did not, as many observers had suspected would happen, outlaw the People's Vanguard Party--perhaps believing that doing so would stifle Costa Rican freedoms just as much as Picado and Calderon had. In December, he made an ambitious gamble - to abolish the military, entrusting defense of the country to the generosity of the United States, while freeing up vast government funds for new welfare programs, preventing future state-violence against Costa Ricans, and reducing the chance of a future coup.

But whatever the president's intentions, it is impossible to deny that it was the greatest mistake of his career. Having come to power by military coup, pursued an agenda perceived as left-wing by the American government, and having been unwilling to suppress the increasingly zealous Vanguard Party, many within Truman's administration had come to view Figueres as little more than another socialist, and worse yet, a socialist willing to violently attack his own people to pursue his own political aims. The American stance on the Costa Rican junta had greatly deteriorated in the months after the revolution.

Upon hearing intelligence reports that exiled ex-president Calderon hoped to lead an invasion from Nicaragua, US officials privately negotiated with him. The United States would not intervene against Calderon's plans, provided that he was willing to outlaw the Vanguard after the invasion had completed. Truman even agreed to provide limited armaments to Calderon's small army to forge a closer geopolitical alliance.

When the rebel forces of exiled president Calderon invaded, backed by Nicaragua and the United States, they rapidly overwhelmed the country. Seizing Liberia and the Nicoya peninsula in a day, the hastily organized and poorly trained Costa Rican militias proved no match. A week later, San Jose was fully under the control of Nicaraguan soldiers. Figueres himself was dead, as were dozens of members of the Carribean Legion that had brought him to power. Among the dead was a radical left-wing Cuban law student named Fidel Castro, elder brother of the infamous Raul Castro who led a brief, failed rebellion against Cuba’s Batista government in 1956.

Calderon re-entered San Jose on New Years Day, 1949. Hailing himself the savior of the Republic, he restored the old constitution. But he made the damning error of calling Truman's bluff. He did not outlaw the Vanguard, even under increasing US diplomatic pressure, and even as Nicaragua under Somoza's government increasingly veered to the right. Whether this is due to Calderon having communist sympathies himself, or out of fear that communists may react violently to their suppression, remains an open question among historians. Calderon’s coup was highly unpopular within Costa Rica, as Figueres had rapidly built popular support for himself during his brief administration. The rebuilt Costa Rican military soon suppressed right-wing and even more moderate opposition demonstrations. Soon, Calderon was forced to make provocative political maneuvers against foreign investment to keep communists supportive of his increasingly unstable and unpopular government.

Both Truman and Somoza increasingly viewed Calderon as a communist dictator in the making, or at best, the prelude to a worse leader directly affiliated with the Vanguard. Costa Rica’s diplomatic relationship with the behemoth to the north continued to sour, and within just a few years would prove too badly deteriorated for the Eisenhower administration to tolerate. Following the death of Figueres, the martyred general’s supporters had been forced into a low-intensity guerilla conflict. With much of the Carribean Legion being destroyed, the remaining armed resistance was significantly more conservative and virulently anti-communist than Figueres himself had been. Informally, the small guerilla force came to be known as the “Cardonistas”, after rebel commander Edgar Cardona, who had taken a dominant role within the faction.

Following the conclusion of Operation PBS Success, Calderon lost a crucial regional ally in Guatemala. Seizing upon the success of their operations, the Guatemalan and American governments began covertly arming the Cardonistas in 1953. Though never intervening as directly as in Guatemala, American support for Cardona ramped up as his movement gained more success.

At this point genuinely terrified of the threat Cardona posed to his government, Calderon allowed independent units of the Vanguard to organize and attempt to defeat the right-wing rebels. These Vanguard units were dubbed the Moristas after communist political leader Maneul Mora. They adopted a strategy of infiltrating Cardonist controlled territories to spread political dissent and destruction, and attempt to sabotage the rebels from within. They became notorious for violent attacks on Americans and destruction of American-owned property. Cardonist reprisals against villages suspected of harboring Moristas led to their own notoriety, and the deaths of thousands.

This most devastating phase of the civil war ended in April 1958, when Calderon’s government finally folded. Calderon himself fled to Venezuela, where he would die of cirrhosis in 1965. Cardona took control of all of the country, besides a few small, rural holdouts controlled by Morista paramilitaries. Whereas in 1948, Cardona’s reactionary tendencies had been restrained by Figueres, now he was emboldened by his success, leadership position, and American backi. He formed a far more conservative and far more violent government than Figueres had. Cardona declared a national emergency and suspended the constitution. Soon he initiated a series of violent purges against Calderonist officials, Calderon supporters, and their families. Many ex-Calderonist soldiers joined the Moristas to save their own lives. In all it is estimated that between 2,000 and 5,000 were killed in mere weeks after Cardona seized control.

Edgar Cardona would rule as the military dictator of Costa Rica for nearly four decades, finally giving up power only in 1995. During the Cardonato, military spending was greatly increased to support the still ongoing war against the Moristas, which would be obtained through large tax increases on the general population and the occasional looting of farming villages on campaign. Healthcare and education expenditures were greatly reduced. To encourage foreign investment, large tax breaks were given to foreign companies such as the United Fruit Corporation, which dominated most agricultural regions of the country.

Continued political instability, as well as occasional instances of Moristas deliberately targeting visitors, crippled the expansion of a tourist industry in Costa Rica comparable to those that grew up in Barbados, Panama, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic in the late 20th century. Economic growth was stifled as foreign investors were wary of the country, while domestic investment was usually rendered impossible by near total lack of economic mobility and Cardona’s stranglehold on local companies which he did not view as supportive of the regime. As Moristas lost much of their strength between 1960 and 1980, the country would become safer for investment, with American corporations in particular taking advantage of lax business and environmental regulations.

Surfers’ discoveries of Playa Grande would begin Costa Rica’s delayed transition to a tourist economy. Known for its excellent surfing conditions, Playa Grande gained substantial popularity between the Late 1970s and 1980s. The nearby town of Tamarindo was developed into Costa Rica’s first major tourist resort town, and it earned international fame. Until very recently, an American visit to Costa Rica was nearly always synonymous with a visit to Tamarindo.

Costa Rica’s tourist economy gradually expanded through the 1980s, especially as Moristas lost power in all but the most remote regions of mountain and jungle concentrated in the southeastern portion of the country. That many Moristas chose to flee to Nicaragua and join forces with the Sandino government likely provided leftists additional strength in the Contra War, but sapped away most of the remaining rebel influence in Costa Rica. As it expanded its tourist outreach program, Cardona’s government promoted “beautiful beaches” with abundant life and emphasized that Costa Rica was no longer the dangerous place that Americans’ had known the country to be in prior decades.

But claims of natural beauty were significantly exaggerated, and masked the truly dire environmental situation of the country. What regulations did exist were very basic, mostly pertaining to waste management, and after 1989, banning the use of ozone-depleting substances. But Costa Rica’s weak restrictions all but encouraged companies to dump waste into its rivers and ocean water, leading to the gradual accumulation of environmental toxins. Coral and mollusc species in particular suffered marked population declines.

Further inland, deforestation had left the once heavily forested country a bland landscape of pasturelands interspersed with various banana, coffee, tea, and sugar plantations. This effect was visible even around Tamarindo itself--travellers’ accounts of riding into the city from Liberia to the coast describe an exceptionally dull journey, comparable not so much as a drive through tropical paradise as one through the middle of Nebraska.

With the ouster of the aging President Cardona by General Julio Jimenez in 1995, Costa Rica began a two year long process of transitioning to democracy, during which a new constitution for the country was composed. Subsequently, a Democratic Socialist-Liberal Coalition government would finally sign the Treaty of Puerto Limon with the largest remaining Morista organization in 2002, ending over half a century of political violence. President Agosto Gonzalez would be awarded the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize for this treaty.

Largely in a rejection of the previous reactionary politics of Cardona, as well as in response to stark economic inequality and poverty, in contemporary Costa Rican politics the left-wing is particularly politically influential. Successive governments have usually discouraged foreign investment in favor of promoting local business. Shrinking the military to enable tax cuts and expansion of public services, while also passing long overdue environmental legislation, quality of life for the average Costa Rican has improved, but the country continues to struggle from the impact of past environmental destruction and the sharp loss of foreign capital. With a GDP per capita of a mere $3,508, Costa Rica still trails many other Central American countries in development, and many Ticos opt to emigrate to Panama, Cuba, or the United States upon completing their education.

Current US-Costa Rican relations are bittersweet. Decades of American support for the Cardonato had left, in the opinions of most Historians and Ticos alike, a war-torn country which was never given the opportunity to develop like its wealthier neighbor to the south. There are nonetheless positive signs for Costa Rica on the horizon. Since 2008, deforestation has been reversed, and new-growth forests and jungles are beginning to reclaim much of the countryside. The beaches of Guanacaste have gained a reputation as being among the best for surfing not just in Central America, but the whole world, such that tourism is projected to surpass agriculture as Costa Rica’s largest employment sector by 2025. Though certainly among the more complicated relationships in Central American geopolitics, the increase in tourism has led to increasingly close collaboration and friendly relations between Costa Rica and the United States.