Costa Rica in Focus: A Guide to the People, Politics and Culture / Edition 2

by Tjabel Daling

Overview

This new series of country guides is designed for travellers and students who want to understand the wider picture and build up an overall knowledge of a country. Each In Focus guide is a lively and thought-provoking introduction to the country's people, politics and culture.The In Focus guides will brief you on: The history: Conquest, life as a colony, quest for independence and the building of a modern nation. How history can help explain today's society and politics.The people: Who lives where, how they live. The different worlds of the poor and the rich; blacks, Indians and whites; Arabs and Jews; indigenous, disenfranchised and dispossessed peoples; human rights.The culture: What to read, what to see, what to hear. Who's who in literature, music, dance, theater and cinema. Roots and rites of different religions. Folk traditions and indigenous cultural celebrations.The politics: Who runs the country, who wants to run the country. Power and conflict between political parties, the military, guerillas and grassroots organizations. Historical ties to the U.S.The economy: What the country produces and exports, how the economy has developed, the impact of foreign debt and free market reforms, who gains and who loses, presence and role of U.S. corporations.Where to go, what to see: Must-see landmarks, lists of monuments and historical sites as well as the author's expert tips on what to see and do to get the most out of a short trip to the country.Plus...
— Facts and figures
— Chronology
— Practical advice
— Nontourist travel
— Further reading
— Useful addresses
— Color and b&w photos
— Maps

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566563970
Publisher:	Interlink Publishing Group, Incorporated
Publication date:	11/28/2001
Series:	In Focus Guides
Edition description:	2nd Edition
Pages:	100
Product dimensions:	4.26(w) x 8.62(h) x 0.22(d)

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

HISTORY AND POLITICS: A COUNTRY DISARMED

Indians and Spaniards

At the beginning of the sixteenth century various groups of Indian peoples were living in what is now Costa Rica, the most developed and important of whom were the Chorotegas. To avoid enslavement by their enemies, their ancestors had fled from Mexico and Guatemala in the eighth century to the Nicoya peninsula and Guanacaste on the Pacific coast.

According to the sixteenth-century Spanish explorer and historian Gonzalo Fernando de Oviedo, the Chorotegas (meaning literally "the people who escaped") were culturally related to the Aztecs and the Mayas and excelled as potters and farmers. They introduced cotton, beans, and cocoa to Costa Rica and traded a range of products, including honey and cotton. The land was under communal ownership and the harvest was distributed according to need. Oviedo also reported that they placated their gods by hurling slaves and virgins at prescribed times into the craters of the country's volcanoes. Some 250 Chorotegas are still living today in the Matambú reserve on the Nicoya peninsula.

Along the Caribbean coast and in the mountainous region where Costa Rica's capital, San José, is now situated, lived the Huetares and their close relatives, the Guatusos, Votos, and Talamancas. It is thought that these indigenous peoples originated from the Caribbean islands and the Amazon region. A third people, the Bruncas, had migrated northwards through the isthmus from modern-day Colombia and Ecuador. They lived from agriculture, hunting, and fishing in the southeastern part of the country. Their metal and gold artifacts can still be admired in many museums throughout the world.

Around 1500 an estimated total of 27,000 people lived in Costa Rica, which was much less densely populated than other areas in the Central American isthmus. The three groups of indigenous peoples frequently waged war against each other. There were other tribes, but very little is known of them.

Columbus and Spanish Colonization

On his fourth journey to the New World, Christopher Columbus landed on September 18, 1502 in the vicinity of modem-day Puerto Limón and was warmly welcomed by the Indians. During his seventeen-day stay Columbus discovered that some of the Indians were wearing articles made of gold, from which the Spaniards assumed that much more gold was to be found further inland, and they accordingly, and optimistically, named the region Costa Rica, meaning "rich coast."

From 1506 the Spaniards tried to colonize the region from Panama but they met with fierce resistance from its indigenous inhabitants. Many colonists died of tropical diseases, lack of food, and from attacks by the Indians. At the same time, many Indians were also dying as a result of diseases such as smallpox and influenza which the Spaniards introduced to the new continent.

In 1524 the first Spanish settlement, "Villa de Bruselas," was established on the Gulf of Nicoya, but after only a few years the colonists had to abandon it, starvation, disease, and attacks from the Chorotegas forcing them into retreat. Some time later, the Spanish virtually wiped out the Chorotegas and sold most of the survivors into slavery in Panama.

It was not until 1563 that Governor Juan Vâsquez de Coronado established the first permanent settlement in the Central Plateau: Cartago. The climate there is temperate and much healthier than on the humid Pacific coast, yet for a long time the township remained a very small settlement, and in 1723, when a large part of the town was destroyed by an eruption of the Irazii volcano, there were only some 70 houses there. In 1719, it was recorded that the capital had no barber, doctor, or pharmacist. This backwater remained officially the main town until 1823, when San José became the capital. Earthquakes in 1841 and 1910 further reduced its importance and prosperity.

Colonial Backwater

As part of the Spanish empire, Costa Rica was administered from Guatemala City, where the Captaincy General of Guatemala, a province of the Vice-Kingdom of New Spain (Mexico), was based. For a long time the area was the poorest and most isolated part of Spain's imperial territory. Unlike in Mexico, there were no precious minerals and no mining industry. The Indian population had been almost annihilated as a result of disease and war, and there was no money to buy slaves. As a result, Guatemala's colonial administrators largely left Costa Rica in peace, and there was hardly any communication with the capital, the coasts, or the most important trade routes in the region. These were determining factors for the future of Costa Rica. Large-scale land ownership, which was the norm elsewhere in Central America, only developed to any real extent around Matina, not far from the Caribbean coast, where a number of cocoa plantations were set up to provide the colony's sole export product. The availability of land and the absence of large landowners meant that Costa Rica was spared the sharp inequalities which characterized other Spanish colonial societies.

Some historians maintain that these factors formed the basis for a particular type of rural egalitarianism, for "a nation of equals." Instead of huge estates, small family farms came into being, and the colonists, mostly originating from the Spanish regions of Andalusia and Extremadura, worked their land themselves. In general they were poor and lived isolated lives; a lack of roads ensured that the colonists hardly ever left their own smallholding or village. Not until the eighteenth century did the colony expand and new settlements were established in the central high valley, the Meseta Central: Heredia (1706), San José (1737), and Alajuela (1782). The port of Puntarenas on the Gulf of Nicoya was completed about 1800.

The Coffee Aristocracy

Having lost a ten-year fight to keep Mexico, on September 15, 1821 Spain declared its colonies in Central America to be independent; it took a month for the news to reach Costa Rica. Augustin de Iturbide, a former Spanish loyalist general who had crowned himself Emperor of Mexico in 1822, leapt into the power vacuum and proclaimed his rule over all of Central America. The conservative and aristocratic leaders of Cartago and Heredia threw in their lot with the Mexicans, whereas the republicans and liberals of San José and Alajuela were in favor of independence or wanted to form a federal union with the remaining countries of Central America. The result was a short civil war which ended in the liberals' favor. San José became the new capital in 1823, but the decision provoked further resentment and conflict between the four cities.

In 1824 Costa Rica joined the Republic of the United States of Central America (Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and Costa Rica). This federation was a loose cooperative association, and in the very same year the Costa Ricans elected their own head of state. Juan Mora Fernández, the first president, built houses and schools and distributed free state land to anybody wishing to grow coffee, introduced to Costa Rica from Cuba in 17%. At that time, nearly all state land was unexploited; at independence only 250 square miles of Costa Rica's territory were estimated to be under cultivation.

The Coffee Boom

Coffee was exported for the first time during the administration of Mora Fernández. The beans were mostly produced by small farmers, who sold their crops to the richer farmers, including the few plantation owners, who in turn took over the processing, distribution, and export networks. The larger farmers and merchants profited most from coffee, but small farmers were nonetheless able to maintain their economic independence and avoid working as waged labor on coffee plantations, as was the practice in neighboring countries.

Coffee was instrumental in opening up the world for Costa Rica and made a significant contribution to the democratization of agriculture, at least initially, as the American Time journalist William Krehm wrote in his book Democracies and Tyrannies of the Caribbean. In the course of the nineteenth century, he observed, coffee was transformed from a mere crop into a national religion.

The government of Braulio Carrillo Colina (1835-1842) continued the policies of Mora Fernández, giving even greater impetus to coffee production and also handing out further expanses of state land to small farmers for coffee growing. Yet Carrillo was no philanthropist, and peasants who failed to cultivate their plots satisfactorily were liable to be flogged. Under Carrillo's autocratic and eccentric rule the Central American Federation collapsed once and for all in 1838, and in 1841 he proclaimed himself dictator for life.

Almost all Costa Rica's coffee was sold to Britain, and British money and manufactures poured into the country. The influx of export earnings and the ever-increasing scale of production created a coffee elite (la aristocracia cafetalera), which became more and more powerful, controlling the national economy and winning overwhelming influence in politics. As Richard Biesanz writes in The Costa Ricans, for more than a hundred years the big coffee growers and exporters were the leaders, and in some respects, the owners of the country.

Coffee and Snobbery

"It was the tea-drinking British who were to gild the future of Costa Rican coffee. Right up to 1886, when the Costa Rican railway to the Atlantic was completed, [Captain William] Le Lacheur's sailing vessels made their 140-day voyages from Puntarenas to London via Cape Horn. Costa Rican coffee caught on in England, and the conservatism of the British did the rest. Until the recent war, upper-class families insisted on their Costa Rican coffee because their grandfathers had done so before them. It was largely a private trade to old customers who for flavor and tradition's sake were willing to pay more than world prices. In return Britain became the source of Costa Rica's industrial goods and capital.

Money poured forth from the expanding coffee farms. Clodhoppers wrapped in rags and leaves gave way to opulent planters abreast of Europe's latest fashions. Italian opera companies began arriving. The National Theater of San José, built in the nineties in vague imitation of l'Opéra of Paris, Is a monument to the epoch: overnourished angels cavort in stone and paints amidst ornate gold-leafed columns. Italian artists were imported to do the murals. Given this background, coffee in Costa Rica became a religion rather than a mere crop, it was identified with the good things in life, while the foodstuffs were associated with the period of bumpkin backwardness. Whether it paid or not, coffee was grown out of snobbery."

William Krehm, Democracies and Tyrannies of the Caribbean, 1984

Monoculture

In order to satisfy increasing demand for the commodity (coffee was becoming a fashionable drink throughout Europe, even in tea-drinking Britain) the small farmers had to introduce technical innovations. These innovations often required considerable investment and many farmers were unable to keep pace with bigger, more modernized producers and were forced to sell their land. Social differences, more or less non-existent in the colonial period, now began slowly to become more marked. The coffee boom had a dramatic economic and social impact, leading to development of the infrastructure and the modernization of the harbor towns of Puerto Limón and Puntarenas. Schools and hospitals were built on the proceeds of coffee exports.

But Costa Rica was developing a monoculture, a dangerous development, which was to have far-reaching negative consequences well into the twentieth century as the country became entirely dependent upon revenue from a single agricultural export. The only other significant export product, introduced at a later stage, was bananas. This monoculture made the national economy extremely vulnerable to over-production and other uncontrollable market developments.

A further drawback of the monoculture syndrome was that Costa Rica began to import a wide range of agricultural products which it could equally well have grown itself. In 1943 the country was importing cereals, sugar, rice, beans, and wheat flour on a huge scale, even though Costa Rica enjoys ideal conditions for the cultivation of all such crops. In the first few decades of this century Costa Rica also imported tens of thousands of cattle every year. Krehm stated that the coffee growers preferred food staples to be imported, with low import tariffs, than for them to be grown at home, thereby ensuring a permanent supply of labor for the plantations. A plentiful agricultural labor force, discouraged from subsistence farming, also meant that plantation owners could keep wages low with the threat of unemployment. The banks were in cahoots with the coffee barons, and only with the greatest reluctance did they provide loans for other, smaller farmers.

In 1848 Juan Rafael Mora Porras, a champion of the coffee aristocracy, was elected president (1848-1859). When he put forward the idea of a state bank which would provide credit for small farmers under favorable conditions, he was brought down by a powerful clique of coffee planters. A year later Mora Porras attempted a counter-coup; it failed and he had to face the firing squad.

Richard Biesanz points out that the coffee barons did not always share identical political interests. They were, however, all very close to power or, in some cases, exercised direct political power. Political allies and enemies were very often members of the same family. Members of the armed forces, who in the notorious and politically unstable 1860s carried out a number of coups and deposed presidents, were either members of the coffee elite or subordinated to it.

National Heroes

It was during the presidency of Mora Porras that the bizarre rise of the American adventurer, William Walker, was brought to a halt. In 1855 Walker had arrived in Nicaragua with 58 supporters, at the invitation of the Liberal Party, which at the time was embroiled in a power struggle with the Conservatives, and the same year he had himself crowned "President of the Republic of Nicaragua." In Nicaragua Walker reintroduced slavery and developed a scheme to turn the whole of Central America into a sort of U.S. colony.

In February 1856 Mora Porras declared war on Walker, but not on Nicaragua. Within weeks he had put together a motley army of 9,000 people, men and women, recruited from among farmers, clerks, and merchants, and armed with machetes, old rifles, and farm implements. In 1857 Walker's troops marched into Guanacaste. Although ravaged by a cholera epidemic, Mora Porras' troops inflicted a crushing defeat on Walker's forces. Walker himself escaped, only to undertake further adventures until his execution in Honduras in 1860.

The story goes that a certain Juan Santamaría, a nineteen-year-old drummer, put Walker to flight by setting fire to his wooden fort, but that he lost his own life in the process. This feat of arms brought Santamaría eternal fame as a Costa Rican patriot. The international airport in San José bears his name and Alajuela, the town where he was bom, reveres his memory with a museum and a statue.

On his return home Mora Porras was blamed for the death of thousands of people, principally those who had succumbed to cholera. Almost ten per cent of the then population died in the battle against Walker's megalomania. Nevertheless, Mora Porras was later rehabilitated and despite his execution in 1860 at the hands of his opponents is also regarded as a national hero today.

United Fruit and the Atlantic Railway

The goal of fettering the power of the coffee barons was to some extent achieved by General Tomás Guardia, who came to power in 1870 following a coup and ruled dictatorially until 1882. During his administration, work was begun on laying the railway line from San José to the Caribbean port of Puerto Limón, funded by large loans from a British bank. The decision to build the railway line was made under pressure from the coffee barons, since Costa Rica needed an Atlantic port in order to streamline coffee exports. Shipping the coffee through Puerto Limón meant that the coffee could be on the European markets three months earlier than previously. The Panama Canal was not opened until 1914.

The railway line was built by black workers recruited from the Caribbean, particularly Jamaica, and by Italians and Chinese, taking it through the jungle and high over the mountains. The railway was nineteen years in the making and 4,000 workers lost their lives. Guardia negotiated the project with the American capitalist Henry Meiggs, who had already built railway lines in Chile and Peru. Meiggs' nephew, Minor Cooper Keith, started the work in 1872. When during the course of laying the line the money ran out, Keith hit upon the idea of setting up banana plantations along the track, realizing the export potential of bananas. In 1884 Keith concluded an agreement with President Bernardo Soto whereby he took over the British debt in exchange for large expanses of land along the railway line and the right to use the railway line. He also ensured that he would be exempted from paying tax for twenty years. In 1899 he established the United Fruit Company, which was to wield huge social and political influence in Central America for many years.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Costa Rica"
by .
Copyright © 1998 Tjabel Daling.
Excerpted by permission of Practical Action Publishing Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction: The Switzerland of Central America, 4,
1 History and Politics: A Country Disarmed, 6,
2 The Economy: The Welfare State Under Pressure, 21,
3 Society: First World, Third World, 40,
4 Environment and Eco-Tourism, 56,
5 Culture: The American Way, 66,
Where to Go, What to See, 73,
Tips for Travelers, 76,
Addresses and Contacts, 78,
Further Reading and Bookstores, 78,
Facts and Figures, 79,