7 A Brief History of Costa Rica

Pre-Columbian Era

Northwestern Costa Rica has been viewed as the frontier between Mesoamerican and South American spheres of cultural influence; it was dubbed the northern sector of a so-called Intermediate Area.… However, Costa Rica is better viewed as a ‘buffer zone,’ where cultural traits mingled and were exchanged and adapted.^[1]

Archaeological evidence, such as discarded tools and fire pits, has shown that groups of hunter-gatherers arrived to the Turrialba Valley about 10,000 to 7,000 years BCE. The main Indigenous groups and cultural influences on the region were the Nahuatl to the northwest, the Chibcha in the center and south, and the Diquís, who flourished from 700 to 1530 CE. The Indigenous groups in this region were part of a cultural complex called the “Intermediate Area,” as it lies between the Mesoamerican and Andean cultural areas.

While it is believed that the first peoples in the region were mainly nomadic, following prey animal migration in order to hunt them; around 5,000 BCE agriculture began to emerge, and the nomads slowly became sedentary farmers. These first peoples harvested native tubers such as yucas and sweet potatoes as well as fished and hunted. Evidence of the village communities that were established have been found all across Costa Rica, from the Isla del Caño off the Pacific coast to the Coto Colorado River Basin. One of the most famous—and mysterious—archaeological finds in this area is over three hundred large stone spheres, found on the Disquís Delta to the south. Though there is no definitive answer to the significance of these stones, it is thought that they were lined up to create a path leading to chiefs’ houses.

Colonization and Spanish Rule

The reasons for Costa Rica’s democratic tradition are in part at least to be found in her earlier history. The Spanish conquerors, finding a country devoid of rich deposits of gold and silver and of a large Indian population which they might exploit, had no incentive to acquire large holdings of land. As a result, Costa Rica is essentially a country of small landowners and middle-class farmers.^[2]

Christopher Columbus landed on the Costa Rican Caribbean coast during his fourth voyage in 1502. The first Spanish colony was established in 1524. The Costa Rican territory was part of the Captaincy General of Guatemala, a section of the larger Viceroyalty of New Spain. Unlike many of the other areas the Spanish had conquered, Costa Rica did not have ore deposits for mining; ironically, the country was named Costa Rica (“The Rich Coast”) because of initial reports about the Indigenous peoples wearing large quantities of gold jewelry. The territory did not have a large Indigenous population that the conquistadores could enslave because many of them succumbed to the disease and violence the Spanish brought, which meant that any settlers had to work their own land. This prevented the establishment of plantations, like had been built in most of Spain’s other colonies.

Overall, Costa Rica as a colony was poor and far away from the capital in Guatemala. Consequently, the territory was largely left alone during the early colonial era; the Spanish turned their focus to other parts of the Viceroyalty with resources they were interested in exploiting. Costa Rica’s relative isolation fostered a racially homogenous population in the region: “Costa Rica’s homogeneous social structure . . . was composed almost exclusively of Spanish descendants (creoles and mestizos).”^[3] Relative isolation also allowed Costa Rica the opportunity to implement a semblance of a rural democratic system thanks to not being oppressively managed by the Spanish Crown. Eventually, though, Spanish settlers discovered that Costa Rica’s hills had rich volcanic soil and this, paired with a mild climate, perhaps set the stage for the development of Costa Rica as a coffee-producing country.

Independence

Costa Rica did not inherit a latifundio system from colonial times, nor the semi-feudal social structure related to it. The Costa Rican peasant was free, usually very poor, and mainly engaged in subsistence farming. The military was not needed for mobilization of forced labor to enforce land expropriation [as in other Central American countries]. Coffee production became based on hired labor and purchases of additional land.^[4]

Costa Rica gained independence from Spain in 1821, along with Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua.^[5] In 1823, these five states formed the Federal Republic of Central America, also called the United Provinces of Central America, under General Manuel José Arce of San Salvador. In 1838, Costa Rica left the United Provinces and gained full independence. In 1840, the United Provinces dissolved entirely.

Agriculture soon became the country’s main economic sector, with the coffee industry in particular experiencing rapid growth throughout the 1830s.^[6] In the beginning, harvesting coffee was based on family labor due to Costa Rica’s sparse population: these groups were minifundistas, peasants who worked small plots and farms. The scarcity of labor “impeded the appearance of the ‘servitude’ that abounded in the rest of Central America. Not a system of domination but a new structure was fortified in Costa Rica.”^[7] Soon, a coffee-based oligarchy came into existence, a “coffee aristocracy” that “searched for diverse ways to perfect political institutions and to expand its commercial economy.”^[8] Coffee was a “new commodity that generated significant profits (and) encouraged . . . growth of a new middle class of business leaders, lawyers and other professionals who eventually came to challenge the modernizing elite for power.”^[9]

In 1856, William Walker, an American filibuster, landed in Nicaragua and declared himself president. He had the plan to extend his rule into Costa Rican territory and consequently engaged Costa Ricans in battle, later called the Filibuster War. Under Commander in Chief of the Army, President Juan Rafael Mora Porras, the Costa Rican troops forced the filibusters to fall back, pushing them into Rivas, Nicaragua, where Walker and the filibusters were eventually defeated. A drummer boy by the name of Juan Santamaría was turned into a national hero after he sacrificed his life by volunteering to burn down the tower William Walker’s filibusters were using as a shooting base.^[10]

Justo Rufino Barrios of Guatemala attempted to reunite the United Provinces of Central America in 1885. At first, he had the support of Honduras, El Salvador, and his home country of Guatemala; later, El Salvador withdrew and allied with Mexico in order to overthrow Barrios. Costa Rica mobilized against Guatemala, but before they could get through Honduras to the Guatemalan front, El Salvador had already defeated them, and Central America remained separate sovereign states.^[11]

The presidency of Tomás Guardia, from 1870 to 1882, “put an end to the incessant coups whereby, between 1840 and 1870, competing clans within the coffee oligarchy intermittently deposed one another to gain personalistic access to the spoils of state power.”^[12] Guardia imposed many liberal reforms such as abolishing the death penalty and encouraging citizens to attend secondary school. His main focus was on the construction of the Atlantic Railroad. In 1871, Guardia signed a contract with U.S. entrepreneur Henry Meiggs for the construction of the railway—Meiggs was the uncle of Minor Cooper Keith, one of the founders of the United Fruit Company, who would take over the project after Meiggs’ death in 1877. The Soto-Keith agreement, as it was called, “gave a vast amount of land to the railway builder and exempted his company from paying export taxes for a period of 99 years.”^[13] Keith also brought the banana industry in to Costa Rica, starting to export the crop in 1880.^[14] Bananas, along with coffee, quickly became the dominant agricultural exports for the country.

There are records of Chinese immigrants arriving in Costa Rica as early as 1635 to trade silk and other products.^[15] However, the majority of Chinese immigrants are recorded to have been brought in as laborers starting in 1847, with a large migration occurring in 1873 with the impending construction of the Atlantic Railroad.^[16] Many of these laborers were brought over from Panama, where they had been working on the trans-isthmus canal.

Like the Chinese, West Indians share a similar history of immigration in Costa Rica. They were brought in to work on the railroad in the 1870s, with as many as fifty thousand West Indians making the migration to the Limón province between 1870 and 1930.^[17] There are records, though, of Africans and Afro-descendants in the country from as early as 1827.^[18] Following the completion of the railroad in 1890, many of these laborers stayed in the country, forming a community on the Caribbean coast in Limón. While the Costa Rican population had ambivalent feelings about the growing number of West Indians in the country, the “Costa Rican government allowed West Indian immigration to continue because the Atlantic coast region [where the province of Limón is located] was considered too unhealthy for people of European descent.”^[19] West Indians also tended to be favored by companies such as the United Fruit Company due to their familiarity with harvesting fruit and their ability to speak English.

Both the Chinese and West Indians faced discrimination from the broader mestizo population, who felt threatened by the prospect of losing their jobs to the immigrants moving in. Costa Rican president Otilio Ulate, for example, spoke on “the problem of the predomination of workers from the coloured race which prejudices the creole worker.”^[20] In 1862, the Costa Rican Law of Immigration was passed that “specifically prohibited Chinese and African immigration.”^[21] Immigration continued despite this, and in 1897, a second law attempting to stop the migration of Chinese people to the country was passed, and then a third in 1906; the immigration bans did not succeed in stopping Chinese migration.^[22] Chinese migrants were also targeted for having a strong presence in the liquor industry: efforts were made to ban Chinese business owners from being able to sell liquor. Chinese merchants had to petition the Costa Rican government twice—in 1908 and in 1917—to stop this discrimination against their economic well-being.^[23]

Twentieth Century

Costa Rica has been home to a stable democracy for about sixty years and has a well-educated, healthy, and relatively prosperous population. In 1950, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in Nicaragua and Costa Rica were approximately $188 and $254 respectively (in 1950s currency) (Mitchell 1998). By 1998 gross national product (GNP) per capita had grown to $370 for Nicaragua and $2,770 for Costa Rica (Population Reference Bureau 2).^[24]

In January 1917, Minister of War Federico Tinoco Granados staged a coup to usurp President Alfredo González. This was one of the few instances of violent upheaval in Costa Rica’s history. Tinoco ruled with a military dictatorship until 1919, when his brother, who had aided his coup, was assassinated. Shortly after that, Tinoco resigned and fled into exile. Juan Bautista Quirós succeeded him in office.

In 1921, war broke out between Costa Rica and neighboring country Panama: “The so-called Coto War between Panama and Costa Rica in 1921 was provoked by two competing banana companies that took advantage of a border dispute in order to obtain more favorable land concessions.”^[25] Colonel Héctor Zúñiga Mora of Costa Rica sent out an expedition to the south of the country, and founded a caserío—essentially, a small settlement surrounded by farmland—near the border with Panama, in Pueblo Nuevo de Coto. A two-month war broke out in response to this perceived encroachment on territory. “The conflict was settled after two months of intermittent fighting, by U.S. military intervention, on terms of Costa Rican sovereignty.”^[26]

Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia was elected president in 1940. He was notably focused on social issues such as poverty eradication, and aimed to enact reforms to the taxation system and expand housing for the poor. He established a minimum wage and protections for workers with the Work Code, implemented a national social security program, and instituted a healthcare program. He developed close ties with the Communist Party, which was created in 1932 and led by Manuel Mora. Succeeding Calderón Guardia was Teodoro Picado Michalski in 1944, who was backed by both Calderón Guardia, Manuel Mora, and the Archbishop of the Catholic Church.^[27] Although he received some backlash, with claims of election fraud coming to the forefront, Picado’s presidency was relatively calm, especially in comparison with his predecessor, who was often at odds with the Costa Rican coffee elite. The Picado administration did enact the Electoral Code of Laws in 1945, which ensures the democratic nature of elections in Costa Rica, and is still in place today.

In 1948, a forty-four-day civil war broke out in the country. Tensions regarding a contested presidential election led to the outbreak. Picado threw his support behind his predecessor and supporter, Calderón Guardia, who was running for a second term. Against him was Otilio Ulate of the National Union Party. The campaign season was tumultuous: “Assassination attempts were made on Calderón Guardia, on Picado and on Manuel Mora. There were strikes, riots and several deaths.”^[28] At last, when the election results came in, Ulate had won the race with a 54 percent majority. Immediately, the opposition—Picado’s National Republic Party—claimed that the results were falsified, and on those grounds the congress annulled the results. Shortly after this announcement, the war began in the name of rightfully instating Ulate as president. Combatting Ulate’s supporters was “a small regular army of maybe 1000 men, who were reinforced by 500 soldiers from Somoza-governed Nicaragua.”^[29] Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza had substantial interest in Costa Rica, and wanted to support Calderón Guardia by sending troops across the frontier.^[30] Anti-communist José Figueres Ferrer, who had been exiled to México in 1942, had been waiting for his opportunity to oppose Calderón Guardia and Picado. He joined the fight, leading an armed force, the National Liberation Army, against “a Government which had allowed the Communists to infiltrate the civil service, the army, and the police.”^[31] The war raged on, with Figueres defeating the government troops, until Picado insisted to Manuel Mora and Calderón Guardia that they all surrender, as they were running low on supplies and support. After just over a month of fighting and with more than two thousand casualties, the Costa Rican civil war came to an end. Immediately following the war, in 1949, the government dissolved the military and outlawed the Communist Party with the Ulate-Figueres Pact.^[32] In accordance with Figueres’ demands, Ulate was finally declared president.^[33] Figueres won the presidency under the new constitution in 1953, ushering in an age of working closely with the United Nations and the Organization of American States.^[34]

Following the 1979 Sandinista Revolution, many migrants arrived to Costa Rica from Nicaragua. There were many reasons why Nicaraguans fled from their home country: some claimed ethnic persecution by the Sandinista government; some were displaced by the U.S.-backed guerrilla group, the Contras; some were afraid of being conscripted into the military; and still others left because of deteriorating economic conditions.^[35] By 1989, the official registered number of Nicaraguan refugees was thirty-four thousand, with unofficial estimates including another one to two hundred thousand.^[36] More than half of the Nicaraguan refugees were of the Miskito Indigenous group.^[37]

Costa Rican Exceptionalism: Characteristics and Contradictions

When international guidebook Frommer’s (Greenspan 2007, p. 367) informs tourists that the country is ‘called the “Switzerland of Central America” . . . a sea of tranquility in a region that has been troubled by turmoil for centuries’ the ideology of exceptionalism and whiteness is metaphorically displayed to distinguish Costa Rica from its perceived inferior country neighbours and tourist competitors. The economic benefits received from tourism development, however, manifest along racial lines.^[38]

“Exceptional” is a term that has often been used to describe Costa Rica, as it is seemingly singular among the Central American states given strong rule of law and good governance practices and extensive investments in education and health across the country. Costa Rica certainly appears to be exceptional, due to political choices such as demilitarization and emphasizing environmental protections, and statistics such as a 94 percent literacy rate. The nation has long cultivated an image of a “country of political virtues: peace, order, legality, harmony, prudence and neutrality in the face of the conflicts of its neighbors and a land of refuge for those fleeing from the discord that plagued their own countries.”^[39] However, Costa Rica’s “exceptionalism” is arguably propagated by a discourse that serves nationalist ideals, one created, according to scholar Benjamín N. Narváez, by elites in the nineteenth century in order to “mask social inequalities, minimise class conflict, and forge national unity.”^[40]

Costa Rica’s mythos of exceptionalism extends beyond socio-political uniqueness—it also purports racial homogeneity, “la leyenda blanca” or the “white legend,” the narrative that to be Costa Rican is to be white in an inherent sense.^[41] This is another claim forged to elevate Costa Rica’s national identity above its regional siblings as whiteness is seen as desirable and good: “Actors in the tourism industry have sought to use whiteness and exceptionalism as ‘symbolic capital’ to separate the nation and give it status because of its perceived position closer to the global North in the ‘global hierarchy of nations.’”^[42] The story of Costa Rica as a “white, classless, peaceful democracy”^[43] also serves to attract international tourists to visit its national parks and coastal vacation spots. However, to achieve this image of a safe haven in the Central American region, it has been necessary to render invisible certain groups that exist within Costa Rica, namely the Indigenous and Black populations; “exclusion is built into the story of Costa Rican exceptionalism.”^[44]

Despite having several distinct Indigenous groups, Costa Rica’s perpetuation of the exceptionalism myth has contributed to the marginalization of the country’s Indigenous people in the national narrative. Indigenous people were not even included in the National Census until 1950.^[45] It took until 1977 for the government to adopt legislation that officially recognized Indigenous peoples and their rights, per International Labor Organization Convention 107—though this was simply a recognition of their fundamental rights. It would take over a decade for the government to adopt legislation that would actually protect Indigenous peoples and their rights.^[46]

Present Day

Costa Rica is a country with substantial advantages over its neighbors, the most apparent of which are its relatively stable government and economy. Over the past few decades the diversity of its flora and fauna and its inviting beaches have combined with the above factors to produce a thriving tourism sector, attracting visitors from around the world.^[47]

Today, Costa Rica’s main economic sector is tourism: “Costa Rica received over one million tourists in 2000, over half of whom visited at least one protected area.”^[48] The tourism sector employed 12 percent of Costa Rica’s labor force by the late 1990s and had overtaken coffee and bananas as Costa Rica’s second-leading source of foreign exchange, after microchips.^[49] Costa Rica has become one of the leading countries in the region in efforts toward maintaining biodiversity, establishing protected areas on more than 25 percent of its territory.^[50]

Like other countries in Central America, much of Costa Rica’s tourism is because of ecotourism. Ecotourism is defined as “traveling to an undisturbed and pristine natural environment with the object of studying, admiring and enjoying the scenery with its wild plants and animals.”^[51] The issue that arises with the commodification of nature is how it encourages, by necessity, the development of isolated places and natural areas to be accessible to tourists, often resulting in land loss and environmental destruction. Indigenous populations are typically the most affected by these changes, as they have fewer protections to prevent development of their land. In Costa Rica, land reserves for Indigenous populations were not established until 1976; today, there are twenty-four reserves for the eight distinct groups.^[52] Despite this, some Indigenous communities did not even officially receive the title to their land, making it all the easier for government and business land development interests to proceed undeterred.^[53] In 1998, a Biodiversity Law was passed with the intent to “implement conservation by recognizing the economic importance of biodiversity as balanced against impacts on the rights of rural communities.”^[54] “Rural communities” refers to both peasant farming communities and Indigenous populations. Although this legislation was a promising step, there are still intrusions on land inhabited by these impoverished and marginalized communities, including continued deforestation and projects that endanger the water supply.

In addition to a growing environmental movement, women’s organizations have been active for more than a century. The evolution of the women’s movement in Costa Rica can be understood in three stages: 1. 1890–1922 the process of redefining women’s roles outside of the domestic sphere; 2. 1923–52 the formation of several women’s organizations and the consolidation of the movement for suffrage; and 3. 1953–85 active participation in politics.^[55] During the first stage, Costa Rican women made gains such as the right to civil divorce, to manage family assets, and to exercise parental authority, as well as benefitting from the General Law of Common Education passed in 1886.^[56] The second stage saw the creation of the Feminist League, the Alliance of Costa Rican Women, and the Feminist Culture League, among others. The Feminist League was at the forefront of the feminist political struggle, with their work aimed at achieving women’s fundamental rights as full citizens.^[57] Women gained suffrage in 1954, segueing the Costa Rican feminist movement into its third stage, where women would begin to have more active and vocal participation in politics.

In 2012, Costa Rica joined the Open Government Partnership (OGP), which was launched in 2011. The OGP brings together countries committed to open government reforms in an effort to encourage improved government effectiveness and policy-making. Costa Rica is using its membership in the OGP to “restart a process halted for 23 years to create a consultation mechanism that will allow Indigenous groups to participate in all policy making decisions that affect them, and the results of the dialogue leading to an improvement in the delivery of public services.”^[58]

In a parallel with the exodus following the 1979 Nicaraguan Revolution, there has been another recent increase in Nicaraguan migration, including asylum seekers fleeing a cross Costa Rica’s borders due to the repression of the Ortega administration. Since April 2018, thousands have crossed Nicaragua’s southern border into Costa Rica to escape Daniel Ortega’s violent police and paramilitary forces, who have been attacking and imprisoning protestors. In comparison to the mere fifty-eight asylum applications in 2017, more than twenty-four thousand Nicaraguans officially applied for protection in Costa Rica in 2018.^[59]

Recommended Reading

Bell, John Patrick. Crisis in Costa Rica: The 1948 Revolution. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971.

Biesanz, Mavis Hiltunen, Richard Biesanz, and Karen Zubris Biesanz. The Ticos: Culture and Social Change in Costa Rica. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rheiner Press, 1989.

Cardona-Hine, Alvaro. Flowering Thistles: An Anthology of Stories and Poetry from Four Generations of a Literary Costa Rican Family. Self-published, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014.

Chomsky, Aviva. West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870–1940. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996.

Edelman, Marc. Peasants against Globalization: Rural Social Movements in Costa Rica. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Evans, Sterling. The Green Republic: A Conservation History of Costa Rica. 1st ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999.

Isla, Anna. The “Greening” of Costa Rica: Women, Peasants, Indigenous Peoples, and the Remaking of Nature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015.

Palmer, Steven, and Ivan Molina. The Costa Rica Reader: History, Culture, Politics. The Latin America Readers. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

Ras, Barbara. Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. Berkeley, CA: Whereabouts Press, 1994.

Sandoval-García, Carlos. Threatening Others: Nicaraguans and the Formation of National Identities in Costa Rica. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014.