$Unique_ID{COW00962} $Pretitle{290} $Title{Costa Rica Chapter 1C. Foundations of Democracy} $Subtitle{} $Author{Robert Rinehart} $Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army} $Subject{costa united government political rica states president jimenez election liberal} $Date{1983} $Log{Figure 6.*0096201.scf } Country: Costa Rica Book: Costa Rica, A Country Study Author: Robert Rinehart Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army Date: 1983 Chapter 1C. Foundations of Democracy After Guardia's death in 1882, Fernandez Oreamuno, the dictator's brother-in-law and commander of the army, assumed the presidency. When he died in 1885, he was succeeded by his brother-in-law, Bernardo Soto Alfaro. The political dynasty founded by Guardia ruled despotically but instituted a number of important reforms. Soto, for example, created Costa Rica's free and compulsory public school system. In 1888 he closed down the University of Santo Tomas, in part because Jesuit influence there was considered so strong, but also to concentrate public expenditures on developing primary and secondary education. He ensured constitutional transition of government when he stepped down as president in 1889 by sponsoring the first election characterized by full freedom of the press, frank debates by rival candidates, and an honest tabulation of the vote. Before 1889 elections in Costa Rica had been indirect and largely noncompetitive. Initially the head of state had been chosen by the congress, and after 1871 the relatively small number of enfranchised citizens voted for local electors who, in turn, chose regional electors, who finally elected the president and members of congress. Up to 1889 there had been 24 presidents, 11 of whom had been indirectly elected and seven who had come to power through force. Six had been designated as "temporary" presidents, appointed for brief periods. Elections remained indirect for some years after 1889, but a much larger section of the population became politically active, and political leaders were compelled to take popular sentiment into account. The Liberal Ascendancy Soto's candidate was defeated in the 1889 election by Jose Joaquin Rodriguez Zeledon, and the first peaceful transition of power from a ruling group to the opposition took place. The passing of Guardia family rule also brought to prominence the group of young liberals-the so-called Generation of '89-who would govern Costa Rica and dominate its political life for all but a short time over the next 50 years. Rodriguez' political lineage reached back to the old liberal establishment that had controlled the country before the Guardia regime. But he soon alienated public opinion by his dictatorial methods and his refusal to cooperate with the congress, which he dismissed in 1892. His handpicked successor, Rafael Yglesias Castro, was strongly challenged in the 1894 presidential campaign by a candidate nominated by the PUC, Jose Gregorio Trejos Gutierrez. Despite voting fraud perpetrated by the government, Trejos Gutierrez still won a plurality of the votes. Because no candidate had a majority, the election was thrown into the newly seated congress, which chose Yglesias as the next president. A revolt in the countryside against the decision compromised the PUC, whose leaders were arrested, and the party was subsequently dissolved. Yglesias approved the construction of a rail line to the Pacific, encouraged agricultural and commercial development, and reformed the currency, placing it on the gold standard. Like Rodriguez, his predecessor and patron, he governed in an authoritarian manner and succeeded in having the constitution amended, allowing the president to succeed himself in 1898. When it became apparent that the 1902 election would be divisive, Yglesias and Soto, as the leader of the opposition, agreed on a compromise candidate, Ascension Esquivel Ibarra. The president initiated an era of democratic reforms and advancement in education that was carried on by his successor, Cleto Gonzalez Viquez, who was elected in 1906 by the congress after a five-way race had failed to produce a majority candidate. Gonzalez Viquez had received the highest number of votes, but his election was made possible only after Esquivel had exiled the three candidates with the lowest count to remove them as contenders. He was followed in office in 1910 by Ricardo Jimenez Oreamuno, who won a large popular majority in a multiparty contest. Jimenez was instrumental in winning approval of a constitutional amendment in 1913 that provided for direct presidential elections and an expanded franchise. Between 1860 and 1910 Costa Rica's population had tripled to 360,000, immigration-principally from Spain, Germany, and Italy-accounting for about one-quarter of the increase. As opportunities for education and for participation in the political process increased, new names had begun to appear on congressional rolls, and a new rural elite composed of prosperous small farmers emerged as a force in local government. Even after the 1913 amendment, however, the percentage of eligible voters taking part in elections was not impressive. Personalistic politics remained the rule, parties being revived at election time as vehicles for the various candidates, all of whom wore the label of "liberal." Although Costa Rica had become a democratic country during the liberal ascendancy, the power of the political families, broken under Guardia, had also reasserted itself. The Tinoco Dictatorship When voters in the first direct election for president in 1914 failed to give any of the candidates a majority, the congress picked, as a compromise, Alfredo Gonzalez Flores, who had not appeared on the original slate of candidates. His government, while attempting to introduce progressive social measures, was confronted immediately by a serious economic crisis. The decline in coffee prices after 1900 had signaled the end of the boom in the country's export trade, which had financed education and public works, but previous governments had been slow to recognize the changed situation. The steady, profitable trade with Germany, which had become Costa Rica's best customer, continued, however, until the outbreak of World War I virtually closed the European markets. The sudden drop in revenues weakened the economy. Wealthy families withdrew their money from Costa Rica and deposited it in United States banks for safekeeping. To curb capital flight, Gonzalez Flores raised taxes on coffee exports and proposed reforms that would have placed a much heavier tax burden on higher incomes. This undermined his backing among wealthy and powerful families. In addition, he drastically reduced government expenditures, including salaries of public employees. Established politicians were alarmed by these necessary but unpopular actions, and the president's support dwindled. He also lost favor among the population at large because of the corruption of his government. In January 1917 Gonzalez Flores was displaced in a military coup led by Federico Tinoco Granados, a general who had served as secretary of war in his cabinet. Tinoco seized power with wide popular support, but public sentiment soon turned against his despotic regime. Tinoco's coup had occurred shortly after United States president Woodrow Wilson had announced a policy of nonrecognition by which Washington refused to maintain relations with any government that had come to office in an unconstitutional manner. In addition to the withdrawal of diplomatic recognition, the action also affected Costa Rica's trade relations with the United States. Although Costa Rica had declared war on Germany and was a cobelligerent in World War I, Wilson prevented its delegates from signing the Versailles Treaty. Repeated coup attempts, armed revolts, student-led demonstrations, and the threat of United States intervention all combined to bring about Tinoco's downfall. After the assassination of his brother, who served him as secretary of war, the dictator was persuaded by the diplomatic corps in San Jose to resign the presidency in order to spare the country more unrest and bloodshed. Tinoco turned over the government to his vice president, Juan Bautista Quiros Segura, in August 1919, but the United States insisted on new elections and a return to constitutional government. Convinced of the seriousness of American intentions by the arrival of the cruiser U.S.S. Denver off the Costa Rican coast, Quiros also tendered his resignation, allowing the presidency to pass to one of the vice presidents in the Gonzalez Flores government, whom the United States accepted as the representative of a legal government. Julio Acosta Garcia, who had been foreign minister under Gonzalez Flores, was elected to a four-year term as president in 1920. Relations with Nicaragua and Panama Despite the 1858 Canas-Juarez Treaty and later agreements on the location of the border, use and navigation of the Rio San Juan remained an unresolved issue between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. The question was revived in 1916 when Costa Rica protested the Bryant-Chamorro Treaty, under which Nicaragua gave the United States perpetual right to build a transisthmian canal through its territory, using a portion of the Rio San Juan. Costa Rica brought the case before the Central American Court, objecting that the treaty was an infringement of its rights to navigation on the river. The court, which sat at San Jose, was a panel of five jurists, one from each of the Central American countries, and had been established at the Washington Conference on Inter-American Affairs in 1907 to settle interregional legal disputes. It ruled in 1918 that, although it had no jurisdiction over the United States, the treaty clearly violated an 1896 agreement between Costa Rica and Nicaragua that had been confirmed by United States president Grover Cleveland. The United States and Nicaragua ignored the decision. Washington's attitude was partly a reflection of United States opposition at that time to the Tinoco regime, against which Nicaragua was actively supporting Costa Rican rebels. American noncompliance with its decision discredited the court, however, and proved to be the main factor in its subsequent demise. The definition of Costa Rica's southern border had also been unresolved, contributing to conflict with Colombia and, after it became independent in 1903, with Panama. Costa Rica rejected an award made in 1900 (as the result of arbitration by French president Emile Loubet) that favored Colombian claims in the Rio Sixaola basin. The matter was subsequently referred to the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, Edward D. White, whose award in 1914 proved unacceptable in turn to Panama. In 1921, Costa Rica attempted to expel Panamanians occupying the disputed Coto region on the Pacific coast. Further hostilities were averted when the United States intervened. Panama evacuated the area but broke relations with Costa Rica, and the dispute continued for 20 years. The Costa Rican congress failed to ratify a compromise settlement in 1938, and it was only in 1941 that an agreement was finally concluded between the two countries delimiting the border (see fig. 6). [See Figure 6.: Border Disputes with Panama, 1900-41 Source: Based on information from United States, Department of State, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Costa Rica-Panama Boundary, No. 156, Washington, July 2, 1976; and A. Curtis Wilgus, Historical Atlas of Latin America, New York, 1967, 299.] The Rise of Ideology Constitutional legitimacy was fully restored in 1919 when Julio Acosta Garcia was elected overwhelmingly to a four-year term (1920-24) as president. (A distinguished public servant who had been in the forefront of the liberal opposition to the Tinoco regime, Acosta remained active as a diplomat after stepping down as president and, as Costa Rica's foreign minister, would be a signatory to the United Nations Charter in 1944.) In the 12 years following his term, the presidency alternated between two elder statesmen, Jimenez Oreamuno and Gonzalez Viquez, both of whom had occupied that office previously. Despite their longtime personal rivalry, these last active survivors of the Generation of '89 both shared the political attitudes and instincts of the liberal establishment. Jimenez Oreamuno-Don Ricardo to his countrymen-was returned for two terms (1924-28 and 1932-36) as the candidate of the Republican Party (Partido Republicano-PR), renamed the National Republican Party (Partido Republicano Nacional-PRN) in 1932 after another faction had preempted the party's original label. Gonzalez Viquez-Don Cleto-was elected again in 1928 as the standard-bearer of the National Union Party (Partido Union Nacional-PUN). Both parties were personalist organizations and devoid of ideological content, except for a similar espousal of anticlericalism and other traditional liberal policies. They were of importance to their patrons only as vehicles for elections and were allowed to languish in the interim. Despite the absence of significant issues dividing the leading contenders for the presidency, electoral campaigns in the 1920s and 1930s were hotly contested affairs, during which candidates invariably exchanged charges of fraud and vote manipulation. After the disputed election of 1923, Alberto Echandi Montero, who trailed Jimenez Oreamuno by only 4,000 votes out of 68,000 counted in a three-cornered race that failed to produce a majority for the front-running candidate, withdrew as a contender in order to avoid possible violence before the contest. Echandi Montero remarked that the presidency was "not worth a drop of blood of even one Costa Rican." His concession, considered to typify the Costa Rican spirit of political compromise, was remembered as an act of great patriotism. Suffrage was broadened during the 1920s and the secret ballot introduced. Don Ricardo, in particular, encouraged the open debate of political alternatives, but the personal popularity that resulted from his affable manner failed to attach itself in 1928 to the Republican candidate, who was soundly defeated at the polls by Gonzalez Viquez. Don Cleto, in turn, was unable to translate his own considerable standing in the public's estimation into support for his party's candidate against Jimenez Oreamuno in 1932. In keeping with the prevailing liberal orthodoxy, the business of government remained for the most part limited to the conduct of foreign affairs, maintenance of law and order, protection of civil liberties, operation of schools, road building, and collection of the duties on imports and exports that constituted the principal source of public revenue. Despite his liberal attachment to laissez-faire economics, Jimenez Oreamuno was compelled at the height of the Great Depression to intervene by regulating coffee production in an effort to stabilize plummeting prices. Under pressure from increasingly militant organized labor, his administration also enacted Costa Rica's first minimum-wage legislation. In 1935 he acquired more than 100,000 hectares of unused property from the United Fruit Company for distribution in 50-hectare plots to landless farmers. In an earlier departure from traditional attitudes, Jimenez Oreamuno had underwritten the establishment of a publicly owned insurance monopoly that offered subscribers low-cost, subsidized coverage. Costa Rican liberalism became in a way a victim of its own success in providing an effective educational system, which over a period of four decades had produced political awareness among a relatively large middle class that now not only saw the possibility of social and economic change but also desired it. Beneath the apparently placid surface that seemed to prevail during the 1920s, there flowed an undercurrent of discontent with business-as-usual, and in the 1930s it swelled into waves of strikes and demonstrations. Workers became organized under competent and determined leadership, and farmers voiced loud demands for assistance. Members of the educated urban middle class openly expressed their uneasiness about disparities in the distribution of wealth and their frustration at the country's backwardness, poor health facilities, housing, and inadequate transportation. Each of these groups focused its disapproval on the concentration of political power in the hands of the liberal elite, dominated by landowning families, and the bureaucratic functionaries who held office through its patronage. The first to exploit this restless urge for change was Jorge Volio Jimenez, a politician, soldier, scholar, and priest who was considered by some the most original thinker of the period. Returning to Costa Rica in 1912 from theological studies in Europe, Volio had published a journal in which he propounded the concept of "social Christianity" inspired by Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum and the teaching of the Belgian prelate Desire Joseph Cardinal Mercier. Volio founded the Reformist Party (Partido Reformista) to contest the 1923 presidential election. In its platform, he called for broad social reforms, legalization of unions, and a tax on large incomes. He also urged an end to monopolies and curtailing the influence of foreign-owned companies. Although he ran a poor third, his 15-percent share of the vote could have been crucial in determining the winner if Echandi Montero had not withdrawn. Despite assurances to his followers that he had not made a deal, many people believed that he had been bought off when he accepted the second vice presidency in the Jimenez Oreamuno administration. A terror to establishment politicians when he was in opposition, Volio in office exercised no influence on the government. His party soon disintegrated, but the social Christian philosophy he had preached was accepted as one alternative to traditional liberalism. Volio was an enigmatic figure, brilliant but unstable, mercurial by temperament, often demagogic. A militant nationalist, he had twice been given the rank of "general," once in 1913 fighting alongside Nicaraguan insurgents against the United States Marines and again in 1919 leading an uprising against Tinoco. He was usually addressed by his military title during his political career. While still second vice president, he was implicated in an attempted coup against the government. The president explained that Volio had suffered a mental breakdown and sent him to Europe for lengthy treatment. Constantly in trouble with ecclesiastical superiors because of his political activities, he was eventually defrocked. Volio continued to be active in politics, and at the time of his death in 1952 he was a member of the legislature. The Marxist left was far more successful than the social Christians in creating a political framework for its activities. In 1929 Manuel Mora Valverde, a 19-year-old student and member of a prominent family, began organizing a communist movement in Costa Rica, subservient to Soviet direction, which in the 1932 election fielded candidates from the Workers and Peasants Bloc (Bloque Obreros y Campesinos-BOC). The party made its initial appeal to middle- and upper class students and intellectuals, but the communists quickly made significant inroads in the labor movement, and by the late 1930s they exercised effective control over important sectors of the labor movement. They were particularly successful in organizing Spanish-speaking banana workers. Wages paid to Jamaicans working on the banana plantations in the eastern lowlands were considerably higher than those received by laborers on coffee plantations in the Meseta Central. In the 1920s Costa Ricans had begun to come down to Puerto Limon to take advantage of the better pay there. The less skilled Spanish-speaking workers resented that the better paying jobs were reserved for the more experienced Jamaicans, and they felt that the English-speaking work environment on the plantations put them at a practical disadvantage to foreign workers in their own country. Meanwhile, the appearance of a blight that seriously affected banana crops in the eastern lowlands had caused the fruit companies to begin shifting the major part of their operations to holdings on the Pacific coast. A strike by 10,000 communist-led workers in 1934 shut down plantations on both coasts for several months and, combined with urging from the government, forced United Fruit to agree to equalize wages paid to Costa Rican and Jamaican employees. The strike was also instrumental in compelling the government to introduce a minimum-wage law and persuaded Jimenez Oreamuno to refuse United Fruit permission to employ Jamaicans in the west. Jimenez Oreamuno was followed in office in 1936 by Leon Cortes Castro, the PRN candidate. Cortes intervened, as his predecessor had, to stabilize prices and also encouraged the growth of the banana industry on the west coast by approving an extension of the Pacific railroad. Because of his association with wealthy German families in Costa Rica, Cortes was suspected of being a Nazi sympathizer, and some of his actions in office seemed to bear out the suspicion. For instance, an agency of his administration headed by a German-born official scrutinized immigration applications for the purpose of preventing entry by Jews. The civil liberties of political opponents were frequently abridged, and a crackdown was initiated on communist political and union-organizing activities. To challenge Cortes nominee in the 1940 election, Jimenez Oreamuno formed the Democratic Alliance (Alianza Democratica), a broadly based coalition that included the BOC, but Don Ricardo was forced to retire from the presidential race because of government obstruction of his campaign. Cortes selected a 40-year-old physician, Rafael Angel Calderon Guardia, to represent the PRN in the 1940 election and to hold down the presidency until he could resume office four years later. Calderon, who won a landslide victory against token opposition, soon developed his own following, however,and adopted an entirely independent line. Cortes and Calderon had not come out of the same mold as the traditional liberal politicians. For the first time since Guardia had overthrown the old liberal oligarchy in the 1870s, there was no longer a monolithic elite. During the early 1940s there were four politically articulate groups in Costa Rica. The first comprised the politicians and bureaucrats who stayed in office through their connection with the PRN and were loyal to Calderon; the second was Mora Valverde's tough and disciplined communist organization. In 1940 Victor Sanabria Martinez, the newly appointed archbishop of San Jose, formed Catholic Action (Accion Catolica), which promoted religious education, provided relief for the poor, and in general played a more activist role in public affairs than had any church-related organization since the time of Bishop Thiel. The fourth group was confined to a few hundred professionals, businessmen, and students, identifying themselves as "modern liberals"-as distinct from traditional liberals-who joined together in political clubs and discussion forums. Inspired in part by the New Deal in the United States, their common goal was to foster the reorganization and modernization of government institutions and the economy by democratic means. To achieve this aim, they envisioned the creation of modern political parties, based on distinctive ideologies, that would offer an expanded Costa Rican electorate a choice of policies rather than personalities.