If You Really Want a Civil War, This is How to Do It.

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Really? You want to do this again? Well, history tells us: be careful what you wish for, and don’t presume you know how it will turn out.

When I visited Costa Rica in 1988, on assignment for a national wildlife magazine, it happened to be the 40th anniversary of the country’s civil war, so there were commemorations and recollections everywhere, all the time. Otherwise I would not have learned the story that provided one of the major political and historical epiphanies of my life.  I did not know that any country had done what Costa Rica had done, indeed it had never occurred to me that any country could do what Costa Rica did. 

Then when I revisited the story this year in connection with something I was writing, details I had not especially noticed before ignited like fireworks and illuminated in an entirely new way the presidency of Donald Trump and the events of January 6, 2021, in Washington D.C.

The Costa Rican Civil War began because, in March of 1948, the legislative assembly voted to reject the results of the democratic elections held the previous month, because the governing coalition (this is a parliamentary form of government) lost, and decided it would very much rather stay in office. Oddly, the rebellion that ensued was not led by an opposition candidate or party, but by a businessman, Jose Figueres Ferrer, who had not taken any part in the election. He was simply fed up with the people in power. Also oddly, most of the military force arrayed against the rebels was wielded not by the army, which was not very effective, but by the Communist militias. The Communist Party was part of the ruling coalition in the assembly, and they too very much wanted to remain in power. 

(See, it’s not what they profess to believe that matters; it’s what they will do to remain in power. Please make a note.)

The first shots were fired on March 11, 1948. On April 11, the government gave up and on April 24 Ferrer’s forces entered the capital of San Jose. If you’re going to do a civil war, this is the way to do it — 30 days and done, 2,000 people killed (about two-thirds the number of people we lost on 9/11), and democracy is re-established. 

But wait, there’s more, and here is where events took a course that I never would have believed possible.

Figueres, upon the capitulation of the government, marched his victorious army to the national army headquarters in San José, assembled them, and disbanded them. Forever. Armies, he said, were used not to defend the people but to subjugate them, and Costa Rica did not need one. To this day, it does not have one. Think of it — a country sandwiched by armed-to-the-teeth Nicaragua and Panama, existing and prospering without an army. For three quarters of a century Costa Rica has been by far the most stable democracy in Central America, if not most of the world.

On the day of his triumph, the story goes, Figueres pledged that the money previously spent on the army would now go for education and health care, and he decreed that the citadel that had housed the army would henceforth be a university. Whether all this drama occurred on a single day or not does not detract from the sense of astonishment that it did, in fact, happen, that any revolution ever turned out that way. And there’s more: after 18 months of hammering together a new constitution embodying his reforms, Ferrer and the other members of his junta voluntarily resigned, Ferrer to run successfully for president under the new constitution.

A half century later, as I drove the Inter-American Highway in Costa Rica, I could see everywhere the fruits of the magnificent tree that Don Pepe — as Figueres was called — had planted. It seemed as though every other vehicle I saw was a white Public Health Service van, and every few miles I passed another school. (One of them brought tears to my eyes; a large sign on the roof proclaimed it to be the “Escuela John F. Kennedy.”)

 This was during the presidency of Oscar Arias, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his tireless efforts to spread the peace of Costa Rica to the rest of Central America.

When I crossed the northern border into Nicaragua, the roadside schools vanished and the vehicles were almost all military jeeps with mounted machine guns.

Don Pepe’s revolution, it would seem, is ongoing. In 2018, Costa Rica inaugurated a new president, a 38-year-old journalist named Carlos Alvarado, who in his inaugural address committed Costa Rica to “the titanic and beautiful task of abolishing the use of fossil fuels in our economy to make way for the use of clean and renewable energies.”

He was not talking about electricity generation, Costa Rica already generates more than 99 percent of its electricity from renewable sources. No, what Alvarado now proposes to do is ban the use of fossil fuels for transportation. And his proposal, admittedly a long and difficult process, faces no significant opposition from his countrymen.

So when smiling cynics tell me, as they always do in condescending terms, how human nature and the nature of the world do not permit humans to act, let alone govern themselves, in ethical or sustainable ways, I have two words in response, Costa Rica. And when hyperventilating super patriots declare their intention to fight a civil war and take back their country, or when power-addled politicians bloviate about rejecting the results of an election, I ask them: you ever heard of Costa Rica?