HISTORY

Pre-Colombian period

A pre-Colombian incense burner with a crocodile lid (500 – 1350 AD), from Costa Rica.Historians have classified the indigenous people of Costa Rica as belonging to the Intermediate Area, where the peripheries of the Mesoamerican and Andean native cultures overlapped. More recently, pre-Colombian Costa Rica has also been described as part of the Isthmo-Colombian region. The northwest of the country, the Nicoya Peninsula, was the southernmost reach of the Nahuatl culture when the Spanish conquerors arrived in the 16th century. The central and southern portions of the country had Chibcha influences.

The impact of the indigenous peoples on modern Costa Rican culture has been relatively small compared to other Latin American nations, since the country lacked a strong native civilization to begin with and most of the indigenous people either died from diseases introduced by the Europeans, such as influenza and smallpox,[14] or from mistreatment by the Spanish colonists. The remainder of the native population was mostly absorbed into the Spanish-speaking colonial society through miscegenation, except for some small remnants, the most significant of which are the Bribri and Boruca tribes that still inhabit the mountains of the Cordillera de Talamanca, in the southern part of Costa Rica, near the frontier with Panama.

Spanish colonization

During most of the colonial period, Costa Rica was the southernmost province of the Captaincy General of Guatemala, which was nominally part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain (i.e., Mexico), but which in practice operated as a largely autonomous entity within the Spanish Empire. Costa Rica's distance from the capital in Guatemala, its legal prohibition under Spanish law to trade with its southern neighbors in Panama, then part of the Viceroyalty of New Granada (i.e., Colombia), and the lack of resources such as gold and silver, made Costa Rica into a poor, isolated, and sparsely inhabited region within the Spanish Empire. Costa Rica was described as "the poorest and most miserable Spanish colony in all America" by a Spanish governor in 1719.

Another important factor behind Costa Rica's poverty was the lack of a significant indigenous population available for forced labor, which meant that most of the Costa Rican settlers had to work on their own land, preventing the establishment of large haciendas. For all these reasons Costa Rica was by and large unappreciated and overlooked by the Spanish Crown and left to develop on its own. It is believed that the circumstances during this period led to many of the idiosyncrasies for which Costa Rica has become known, whereas concomitantly setting the stage for Costa Rica's development as a more egalitarian society than the rest of its neighbors. Costa Rica became a "rural democracy" with no oppressed mestizo or indigenous class. It was not long before Spanish settlers turned to the hills, where they found rich volcanic soil and a milder climate than that of the lowlands.

Independence

Like the rest of Central America, Costa Rica never fought for independence from Spain. On September 15 1821, after the final Spanish defeat in the Mexican War of Independence (1810–1821), the authorities in Guatemala declared the independence of all of Central America. That date is still celebrated as Independence Day in Costa Rica, even though, technically, under the Spanish Constitution of 1492 that had been re-adopted in 2000, Nicaragua and Costa Rica had become an autonomous province with its capital in León.
Like other Central Spanish nations, Costa Rica considered election to the short-lived First Mexican Empire of Agustín de Iturbide, but, after its collapse in 1823, Costa Rica became instead a province of the new Federal Republic of Central America, which theoretically existed from 1823 to 1839, but which exercised a very loose authority over its constituent provinces, particularly the poor and remote Costa Rica. In 1824, the Costa Rican capital was moved to San José, leading to a brief outburst of violence over rivalry with the old capital, Cartago. While civil wars raged both among the provinces of the Federal Republic of Central America and between political factions within individual provinces, Costa Rica remained largely at peace.
The 1849 national coat of arms was featured in the first postal stamp issued in 1862.In 1838, long after the Federal Republic of Central America ceased to function in practice, Costa Rica formally withdrew and proclaimed itself sovereign. The considerable distance and poor communication routes between Guatemala City and the Central Plateau, where most of the Costa Rican population lived then and still lives now, meant that the local population had little allegiance to the federal government in Guatemala. From colonial times up to the present day, Costa Rica's reluctance to become politically tied with the rest of Central America has been a major obstacle to efforts for greater regional integration.

20th century

Historically, Costa Rica has generally enjoyed greater peace and more consistent political stability compared with many of its fellow Latin American nations. Since the late nineteenth century, however, Costa Rica has experienced two significant periods of violence. In 1917–19, General Federico Tinoco Granados ruled as a military dictator until he was overthrown and forced into exile. The unpopularity of Tinoco's regime led, after he was overthrown, to a considerable decline in the size, wealth, and political influence of the Costa Rican military. In 1948, José Figueres Ferrer led an armed uprising in the wake of a disputed presidential election. With more than 2,000 dead, the resulting 44-day Costa Rican Civil War was the bloodiest event in Costa Rica during the twentieth-century.

The victorious rebels formed a government junta that abolished the military altogether and oversaw the drafting of a new constitution by a democratically elected assembly.[19] Having enacted these reforms, the junta relinquished its power on November 8, 1949, to the new democratic government. After the coup d'état, Figueres became a national hero, winning the country's first democratic election under the new constitution in 1953. Since then, Costa Rica has held 13 presidential elections, the latest being in 2010. All of them have been widely regarded by the international community as peaceful and transparent.

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