The product of a 2015 University of Costa Rica conference, this pathbreaking collection of articles promises to inspire future Costa Rican scholarship on domestic Cold War-era politics, culture, and society. This arguably long overdue volume seeks to insert Costa Rica into a well-established conversation in the field of Latin American studies over how the interplay between US foreign policy interests and the aims of regional elites molded national political landscapes.
As a forerunner in the field of Costa Rican Cold War studies, this work promises to become required reading for Costa Rican political historians. This compilation's eight articles are all well-researched stand-alone pieces that highlight the agency of domestic politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and women activists, who embraced Cold War frameworks to further their political, social, and economic goals. This collection makes good use of Costa Rica's rich archival resources, including domestic newspaper articles, political pamphlets, presidential addresses, and other primary sources. Historians and political scientists who wish to better understand how key Cold War events in the region were understood and politicized within Costa Rica will find this collection riveting. These include the Cuban Revolution (1959), the landing of US marines in the Dominican Republic (1965), and the US-backed military coups in Guatemala (1954) and Chile (1973).
Scholars of these events, however, may be disappointed. Although the collection's authors make note of key secondary sources on these incidents, none of the articles examine foreign primary sources, which might have inspired a true transnational conversation. This approach makes it hard to measure how much Costa Rica's domestic cultural politics aligned with those of the rest of the region. This is most clear in a fascinating article on the history of a Costa Rican paramilitary group, the Movimiento Costa Rica Libre, which makes no attempt to link this group to broader paramilitary mobilization in this era throughout Latin America.
Although the collection's articles each touch on a number of thematic threads, the book lacks an overarching analytical essay that highlights these themes and situates them and the articles within a broader Cold War narrative. Without an analytical examination of the collection as a whole, it is difficult to assess how the editors hoped that the various chapters would collectively influence the field of Costa Rican studies, let alone the broader field of Latin American Cold War studies.
Despite, the fact that the Cold War is presented as the only connective tissue linking the assembled articles, several themes run throughout the book, creating a greater sense of cogency for this volume when read as a whole. Perhaps the most obvious is the development of a fierce, mainstream, anticommunist rhetoric that seemingly defined Costa Rican Cold War politics. As the collection's first article establishes, this anticommunism emerged internally in the 1940s and reached its apex after the nation's 1948 civil war. The successful insurgents not only stripped the communists of the right to organize politically, but communists throughout the nation were socially stigmatized, beaten, and unjustly arrested by the war's victors well into the 1950s.
Subsequent chapters suggest that this domestically born anticommunism was bolstered externally in the 1950s as the Cold War heated up. As the collection's various writers document, Costa Rican policymakers consistently sought to ensure that their nation remained in the capitalist, democratic, and pro-US camp. This, however, became increasingly difficult over time, especially when the United States supported military coups that overthrew democratically elected governments to establish anticommunist dictatorships.
Notwithstanding the lack of a much needed introductory essay to pull out key themes and place these works more squarely into a broader Latin American Cold War narrative, this is an engaging and well-researched collection of articles that will unquestionably influence the field of Costa Rican studies in the years ahead.
