This book is a valuable contribution to the study of social reform in Costa Rica in the 1940s and the civil war of 1948. The author sets out to explain the development within the Partido Republicano (PR, right-wing Liberal) of a Catholic social reform tendency, under the electoral leadership of Dr. Rafael Angel Calderón Guardia and the spiritual guidance of the Archbishop Victor Manuel Sanabria, head of the Catholic Church. According to Molina, the emergence and expansion of this group were accelerated by three key events. Firstly, the establishment of the Costa Rican Communist Party (CRCP) in 1931 and the appearance of its weekly magazine, Trabajo; secondly, the election of Communist legislators and municipal leaders, and; third, the increasing influence of the CRCP within labour unions. The selection of Calderón Guardia as the PR's presidential candidate for the 1940 election, according to Molina, increased the influence of this new tendency. Nevertheless, the PR was soon replaced by a tripartite alliance between the CP, the Catholic Church and Calderon's government. The emergence of the CP increased its right-wing adversaries' fears; but it also provoked the emergence of more sophisticated adversaries, willing to update and improve their strategies, programmes and social commitments. Molina claims that Calderón's approach of Catholic Social Reform was aimed, fundamentally, at combating the CP's electoral successes.
In Molina's opinion, the CP knew how to take advantage of its electoral opportunities in an open political system and capitalised on the social demands made acute by the 1929 world crisis. As with Jorge Volio's Reformist Party, a reformist spirit emerged, only this time not under the Liberal aegis but rather as a new current of Social Catholicism. Molina sees this reaction as a response to the electoral challenge provoked by the CP, through the electoral exploitation in its favour of the so-called social question. Although the initial objective was to electorally defeat the CP, what transpired instead was an alliance between the government and the leaders of Costa Rican communism, with the support of the Catholic Church.
The author rejects traditional approaches that focus social reform solely on three individuals: President Calderón Guardia, the Archbishop Monsignor Sanabria and Manuel Mora, Secretary General of the CP (by then Partido Vanguardia Popular). Nevertheless, his alternative thesis is not very convincing, since it exaggerates the character, identity and role of a supposed sector that did not at that point constitute a defined ideological and political tendency. In addition, there are other accounts that confirm the decisive personal roles played by Calderón and Sanabria.
Paradoxically, one of the book's principal strengths is the source of its weakness. Molina carried out exhaustive research in the newspapers of the time – particularly those of the clergy – and several collections of printed sources, including Comintern documents published by Erik Ching. Jacobo Schifter (1982) had already investigated the US government's documents, but Molina enriches the corpus of documents and his analyses are detailed and systematic. Yet he overestimates the importance of both the Catholic press and the reports sent by the US Legation in San José about the period's social and political processes. The significance of the electoral issue and its effects on the Social Catholic sector that, in his opinion, surrounded Calderón Guardia, is exaggerated. Crucial analytical elements are ommitted. The electoral issue, although significant, was just one aspect, and perhaps not the most important, of a much richer, complex and profound social confrontation in a country affected, first, by the crisis of 1929 and later by World War II.
Molina leaves out almost entirely the powerful social web of the landed commercial oligarchy based on coffee, the dominant social sector closely linked to US interests, with a strong endogamic structure as described by Samuel Stone in his book La dinastía de los conquistadores. La crisis del poder en la Costa Rica contemporánea, published in 1976. One main component of that structure was the German colony, connected by marriage with the main Costa Rican families. For this reason the war with Germany was a key factor. The black lists, especially of Germans, provided by the American and British Legations, had serious effects. German immigrants were detained and sent to concentration camps in the USA. Their possessions were confiscated and numerous abuses were committed.
Calderón had been the favoured candidate of large coffee growers. But he lost their support once they were affected by the declaration of war and the enforcement of the black lists. Personal and family relations were shattered and the government was subsequently reviled by these elites. Decades later, Calderon's wife at the time, Ivonne Clays, remembered how her former friends and supporters crossed the street to avoid her. Even though Molina knows these facts, he omits them, despite their significance in elucidating Calderón's urgency in making a pact with the Communists. Calderon's social isolation is relevant because it mirrors the government's loss of political support amongst domestic elites.
Another fact is the nepotism in Calderón's government that not only isolated him, but also revealed the absence of a capable and organised political team with a common social vision. Corruption followed suit. None of this was mitigated by the existence of an ideological sector in favour of a structured and identifiable Social Catholicism. On the contrary, this corroborates its non-existence or, at most, its frailty.
Molina also fails to reveal an agenda for Catholic social reforms in the campaign that Calderón overwhelmingly won. Rather, he recognises that the subject was overlooked in the campaign, but attributes it to the forced ‘caution’ which the calderonistas had to have ‘in order not to face the cortesistas, who were presumed to be opposed to intervening in favor of the workers’. Nevertheless, he insists that there was a ‘Catholic wing of the PRN … ready to face its Liberal counterpart … so as to guarantee the endorsement of the Catholic Church.’ Yet the reader is left totally unenlightened on the identity of participants in that sector. Their names remain a mystery and Calderón seems solitary at all times and far ahead of his own party.
It is impossible to deduce from Molina's documents that even the weakest political organisation, inspired by Social Catholicism, with its own well defined and publicised programme and ideas existed, much less any indication of who its possible members were. Indeed the two most important government advisors in labour law and the implementation of the Labour Code were Oscar Barahona and Enrique Benavides, both outstanding former militants of the PC.
In short, while this book is based on excellent research using original sources and documentation, the author is far from proving his central thesis and the volume raises more questions than it answers.
