The shift to democracy was witnessed in the election called by President Bernardo Soto in 1889 commonly referred to as the first "honest" election, with popular participation; women and blacks, however, were still excluded from voting. To Soto's surprise, his opponent José Joaquin Rodriguez won. The masses rose and marched in the streets to support their chosen leader after the Soto government decided not to recognize the new president. The Costa Ricans had spoken, and Soto stepped down.
During the course of the next two generations, militarism gave way to peaceful transitions to power. Presidents, however, attempted to amend the Constitution to continue their rule and even dismissed uncooperative legislatures. Both Rodriguez and his hand-picked successor, Rafael Iglesias, for example, turned dictatorial while sponsoring material progress. Iglesias's successor, Ascension Esquivel, who took office in 1902, even exiled three contenders for the 1906 elections and imposed his own choice for president: Gonzalez Visquez. And Congress declared the winner of the 1914 plebiscite ineligible and named its own choice, noncontender Alfredo Gonzalez Flores, as president.
Throughout all this the country had been at peace, the army in its barracks. In 1917, democracy faced its first major challenge. At that time, the state collected the majority of its revenue from the less wealthy. Flores's bill to establish direct, progressive taxation based on income and his espousal of state involvement in the economy had earned the wrath of the elites. They decreed his removal. Minister of War Federico Tinoco Granados seized power. Tinoco ruled as an iron-fisted dictator and soon squandered the support of U.S. business interests. More importantly, Costa Ricans had come to accept liberty as their due; they were no longer prepared to acquiesce in oligarchic restrictions. Women and high-school students led a demonstration which called for his ouster, and Flores stepped down.
There followed a series of unmemorable administrations culminating in the return of two previous leaders, Ricardo Jimenez and Gonzalez Visquez, who alternated power for 12 years through the 1920s and '30s. The apparent tranquility was shattered by the Depression and the social unrest which it engendered. Old-fashioned paternalistic liberalism had failed to resolve social ills such as malnutrition, unemployment, low pay, and poor working conditions. The Depression distilled all these issues, especially after a dramatic communist-led strike against the United Fruit Company brought tangible gains. Calls grew shrill for reforms.
The decade of the 1940s and its climax, the civil war, mark a turning point in Costa Rican history: from paternalistic government by traditional rural elites to modernistic, urban-focused statecraft controlled by bureaucrats, professionals, and small entrepreneurs. The dawn of the new era was spawned by Rafael Angel Calderón Guardia, a profoundly religious physician and a president (1940-44) with a social conscience. In a period when neighboring Central American nations were under the yoke of tyrannical dictators, Calderón promulgated a series of farsighted reforms. His legacy included a stab at land "reform" (the landless could gain title to unused land by cultivating it), establishment of a guaranteed minimum wage, paid vacations, unemployment compensation, progressive taxation, plus a series of constitutional amendments codifying workers' rights. Calderón also founded the University of Costa Rica.
Calderon's social agenda was hailed by the urban poor and leftists and despised by the upper classes, his original base of support. His early declaration of war on Germany, seizure of German property, and imprisonment of Germans further upset his conservative patrons, many of whom were of German descent. World War II stalled economic growth at a time when Calderon's social programs called for vastly increased public spending. The result was rampant inflation, which eroded his support among the middle and working classes. Abandoned, Calderón crawled into bed with two unlikely partners: the Catholic Church and the communists (Popular Vanguard Party). Together they formed the United Social Christian Party.
In 1944, Calderón was replaced by his puppet, Teodoro Picado, in an election widely regarded as fraudulent. Picado's uninspired administration failed to address rising discontent throughout the nation. Intellectuals, distrustful of Calderon's "unholy" alliance, joined with businessmen, campesinos, and labor activists and formed the Social Democratic Party, dominated by the emergent professional middle classes eager for economic diversification and modernization. In its own strange amalgam, the SDP allied itself with the traditional oligarchic elite. The country was thus polarized. Tensions mounted.
Street violence finally erupted in the run-up to the 1948 election, with Calderon on the ballot for a second presidential term. When he lost to his opponent Otilio Ulate by a small margin, the government claimed fraud. Next day, the building holding many of the ballot papers went up in flames, and the calderonista-dominated legislature annulled the election results. Ten days later, on 10 March 1948, the "War of National Liberation" plunged Costa Rica into civil war.
The popular myth suggests that José María ("Don Pepe") Figueres Ferrer 42-year-old coffee farmer, engineer, economist, and philosopher raised a "ragtag army of university students and intellectuals" and stepped forward to topple the government that had refused to step aside for its democratically elected successor. In actuality, Don Pepe's revolution had been long in the planning; the 1948 election merely provided a good excuse.
Don Pepe had been exiled to Mexico in 1942 the first political outcast since the Tinoco era after being seized halfway through a radio broadcast denouncing Calderín. Figueres formed an alliance with other exiles, returned to Costa Rica in 1944, began calling for an armed uprising, and arranged for foreign arms to be airlifted in to groups being trained by Guatemalan military advisors.
Supported by the governments of Guatemala and Cuba, Don Pepe's insurrectionists captured the cities of Cartago and Puerto Limín and were poised to pounce on San José when Calderín, who had little heart for the conflict, capitulated. (The government's pathetically trained soldiers aided and armed by the Somoza regime in Nicaragua included communist banana workers from the lowlands; they wore blankets over their shoulders against the cold of the highlands, earning Calderon supporters the nickname mariachis.) The 40-day civil war claimed over 2,000 lives, most of them civilians.
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