Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Los pasados de la memoria: El origen de la reforma social en Costa Rica (1938 – 1943)

2010; Duke University Press; Volume: 90; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2010-066

1527-1900

Héctor Lindo-Fuentes,

Cuban History and Society

During the 2010 debate on health care legislation in the U.S. Congress, radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, appalled at the prospect of a system of near-universal access to health insurance, vowed to move to Costa Rica. He was not aware that since 1941 Costa Rica has had an excellent social security system with health services that by now cover the vast majority of the population. The creation of the Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social (CCSS) was not an isolated act. It was contemporaneous with the passing of a pathbreaking labor code and the introduction of a chapter on social rights in the constitution. This Limbaughian nightmare contributed to putting Costa Rica on the path to becoming one of the most successful democracies in Latin America with some of the highest welfare standards in the region.As if to confirm the dictum that “success has many parents,” prominent Costa Ricans tried for decades to prove that they were the sole authors of the social reforms. Depending on who told the tale and when he told it, the true father of the social reforms in Costa Rica was any of the three individuals whose alliance was indispensable for the reforms to become law: Manuel Mora, the leader of the Communist Party, President Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia (1940 – 44), and the Archbishop of San José Victor Man-uel Sanabria. A fourth contender in the contest was an ambitious lawyer, Óscar Barahona Streber. This latest book by the prolific Costa Rican historian Iván Molina unpacks the strategies they and their supporters used to establish paternity and in the process offers a revised interpretation of the origins of the reforms.Manuel Mora was particularly successful in constructing a narrative that gave the Communist Party (and himself) a key role in the process. He achieved this by constant repetition of his account of a 1941 meeting when he allegedly offered Communist Party support to a beleaguered president (whose WWII actions against German residents were not well received by the oligarchy) if Calderón promised to advance a package of social reforms. He repeated variations of this story in interviews with academic researchers, newspaper articles, and public speeches.Despite alternative claims that the reforms were really the idea of President Calderón Guardia, Archbishop Sanabria, or Barahona Streber, for the next few decades the Mora narrative was the most widely accepted. In explaining why this was so Iván Molina provides a very insightful and detailed analysis of Costa Rican politics. The widespread acceptance of the communist narrative had to do with political context. The Partido Liberación Nacional, founded after the civil war of 1948 and itself responsible for deepening the social reforms, was happy promoting a version that diminished the stature of President Calderón Guardia. Calderón Guardia lost credibility with his next career moves, which included flirting with Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. The Catholic Church, increasingly conservative by the 1950s, was not pleased with the prospects of highlighting the moment when the Archbishop of San José had made a tacit alliance with the Communist Party. Another reason for the lasting power of Mora’s version is that it made its way into academic writing thanks to his willingness to be interviewed at length by U.S. and Costa Rican doctoral candidates. His story found a place in specialized monographs and from there it travelled easily to the secondary literature and to textbooks.Iván Molina subjects the alternative narratives to careful inspection. He pokes holes in the stories by delving deeply into contemporary sources and checking their plausibility against his deep understanding of the politics of the time when each story was told. In doing so he shows the protean nature of the memory of the events. The meaning of the reforms, the motivations behind them, and the roles of the protagonists were tailored to the needs of each historical moment. Even though not all readers will find the painstaking exercise as fascinating as I did, the effort is worthwhile.The book concludes with a persuasive reinterpretation of the reforms. Molina takes the focus away from individuals. Instead, he puts the story against the background of important political trends in Costa Rican history. The expansion in political participation, the policies triggered by the Great Depression, the decades-old conflict between liberals and the Catholic Church, and the evolution of party politics provided the context in which self-interested politicians found it advantageous to promote a package of social reforms.The Costa Rican case is of particular interest for the study of democratization processes in Latin America. Anyone interested in understanding one of the key moments in the Costa Rican path to democracy ought to read this book. I can see Molina’s work as a point of departure for rich graduate seminar discussions on democratization, Costa Rican politics, and the dangers of uncritically using interviews and memoirs to understand political events.