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 In 1562, Juan V�squez de Coronado--the true conquistador of Costa Rica--arrived as governor. He treated the surviving indigenous people more humanely and moved the few existing Spanish settlers into the Cartago Valley, where the temperate climate and rich volcanic soils offered the promise of crop cultivation. After the initial impetus given by its discovery, Costa Rica lapsed into a lowly Cinderella of the Spanish empire. Land was readily available, but there was no indigenous labor to work it. Thus, the early economy lacked the conditions that favored development of the large colonial-style hacienda and feudal system of other Spanish enclaves. The colonists were forced to work the land themselves (even the governor, it is commonly claimed, had to work his own plot of land to survive). Without gold or export crops, trade with other colonies was infrequent at best. The Spanish found themselves impoverished in a subsistence economy. Money became so scarce that the settlers eventually reverted to the indigenous method of using cacao beans as currency. All this had a leveling effect on colonial society. As the population grew, so did the number of poor families who had never benefited from the labor of encomienda indigenous people or suffered the despotic arrogance of criollo (Creole) landowners. Costa Rica, in the traditional view, became a "rural democracy," with no oppressed mestizo class resentful of the maltreatment and scorn of the Creoles. Removed from the mainstream of Spanish culture, the Costa Ricans became individualistic and egalitarian.

Independence of Central America from Spain on 15 September 1821. Independence had little immediate effect, however, for Costa Rica had required only minimal government during the colonial era and had long gone its own way. In 1823, the other Central American nations proclaimed the United Provinces of Central America, with their capital in Guatemala City, while a Costa Rican provincial council voted for accession to Mexico. The four leading cities of Costa Rica felt as independent as had the city-states of ancient Greece, and the conservative and aristocratic leaders of Cartago and Heredia soon found themselves at odds with the more progressive republican leaders of San Jos� and Alajuela. The local quarrels quickly developed into civic unrest and, in 1823, to civil war. After a brief battle in the Ochomogo Hills, the republican forces of San Jos� were victorious. They rejected Mexico, and Costa Rica joined the federation with full autonomy for its own affairs.

From this moment on, liberalism in Costa Rica had the upper hand. Elsewhere in Central America, conservative groups tied to the church and the erstwhile colonial bureaucracy spent generations at war with anticlerical and laissez-faire liberals, and a cycle of civil wars came to dominate the region. By contrast, in Costa Rica colonial institutions had been relatively weak and early modernization of the economy propelled the nation out of poverty and laid the foundations of democracy far earlier than elsewhere in the isthmus. While other countries turned to repression to deal with social tensions, Costa Rica turned toward reform.  Juan Mora Fern�ndez, elected the federalist nation's first chief of state in 1824, set the tone by ushering in a nine-year period of progressive stability. He established a sound judicial system, founded the nation's first newspaper, and expanded public education. He also encouraged coffee cultivation and gave free land grants to would-be coffee growers.

The reins of power were taken up by nouveau elite, the coffee barons, who vied with each other for political dominance. In 1849, the cafetaleros announced their ascendancy by conspiring to overthrow the nation's first president, Jos� Mar�a Castro, an enlightened man who initiated his administration by founding a high school for girls and sponsoring freedom of the press. They chose as Castro's successor Juan Rafael Mora, a powerful cafetalero. Mora is remembered for the remarkable economic growth that marked his first term and for "saving" the nation from the imperial ambitions of the American adventurer William Walker during his second term. Still, his countryfolk ousted him from power in 1859; the masses blamed him for the cholera epidemic that claimed the lives of one in every 10 Costa Ricans, while the elites were horrified when Mora moved to establish a national bank, which would have undermined their control of credit to the coffee producers.

The 1860s were marred by power struggles among the coffee elite, supported by their respective military cronies. General Tom�s Guardia, however, was his own man. In April 1870, he overthrew the government and ruled for 12 years as an iron-willed military strongman backed by a powerful centralized government of his own making.  True to Costa Rican tradition, Guardia proved himself a progressive thinker and a benefactor of the people. His towering reign set in motion forces that shaped the modern liberal-democratic state. Hardly characteristic of 19th-century despots, he abolished capital punishment, managed to curb the power of the coffee barons, and, ironically, tamed the use of the army for political means. He used coffee earnings and taxation to finance roads and public buildings. And in a landmark revision to the Constitution in 1869, he made "primary education for both sexes obligatory, free, and at the cost of the Nation." Guardia's enlightened administration was a watershed for the nation. The aristocrats gradually came to understand that liberal, orderly, and stable regimes profited their business interests while the instability inherent in reliance on militarism was damaging to it. And the extension of education to every citizen (and the arrival of thousands of European immigrants bringing notions of liberalism) raised the consciousness of the masses and made it increasingly difficult for the patrimonial elite to exclude the population from the political process.

The shift to democracy was manifest in the election called by President Bernardo Soto in 1889--commonly referred to as the first "honest" election, with popular participation (women and blacks, however, were still excluded from voting). To Soto's surprise, his opponent Jos� Joaqu�n Rodr�guez won the election. The Soto government refused to recognize the new president. The masses rose and marched in the streets to support their chosen leader, and Soto stepped down. During the course of the next two generations, militarism gave way to peaceful transitions to power. Presidents, however, attempted to amend the Constitution to continue their rule and even dismissed uncooperative legislatures. Both Rodr�guez and his hand-picked successor, Rafael Iglesias, for example, turned dictatorial while sponsoring material progress. Iglesias's successor, Ascensi�n Esquivel, who took office in 1902, went so far as to exile three of the contenders for the 1906 elections, then imposed his own choice for president. Subsequently, Congress declared the winner of the 1914 plebiscite ineligible and named its own choice, noncontender Alfredo Gonz�lez Flores, as president.

Throughout all this the country had been at peace, the army in its barracks. In 1917, democracy faced its first major challenge. At that time, the state collected the majority of its revenue from the less wealthy. Flores' bill to establish direct, progressive taxation based on income and his espousal of state involvement in the economy had earned the wrath of the elites. They decreed his removal. Minister of War Federico Tinoco Granados seized power. Tinoco ruled as an iron-fisted dictator, but Costa Ricans were no longer prepared to acquiesce in oligarchic restrictions. Women and high-school students led a demonstration calling for his ouster, and Tinoco fled to Europe.

The decade of the 1940s and its climax, the civil war, marked a turning point in Costa Rican history: from paternalistic government by traditional rural elites to modernistic, urban-focused statecraft controlled by bureaucrats, professionals, and small entrepreneurs. The dawn of the new era was spawned by Rafael Angel Calder�n Guardia, a profoundly religious physician and a president (1940-44) with a social conscience. In a period when neighboring Central American nations were under the yoke of tyrannical dictators, Calder�n promulgated a series of farsighted reforms. His legacy included a stab at land "reform" (the landless could gain title to unused land by cultivating it), establishment of a guaranteed minimum wage, paid vacations, unemployment compensation, progressive taxation, plus a series of constitutional amendments codifying workers' rights. Calder�n also founded the University of Costa Rica.

In 1944, Calder�n was replaced by his puppet, Teodoro Picado Michalsky, in an election widely regarded as fraudulent. Picado's uninspired administration failed to address rising discontent throughout the nation. Intellectuals, distrustful of Calder�n's "unholy" alliance, joined with businessmen, campesinos, and labor activists and formed the Social Democratic Party, dominated by the emergent professional middle classes eager for economic diversification and modernization. In its own strange amalgam, the SDP allied itself with the traditional oligarchic elite. The country was thus polarized. Tensions mounted. Street violence finally erupted in the run-up to the 1948 election, with Calder�n on the ballot for a second presidential term. When he lost to his opponent Otilio Ulate (the representative of Acci�n Democr�tica, a coalition of anti-calderonistas) by a small margin, the government claimed fraud. The next day, the building holding many of the ballot papers went up in flames, and the calderonista-dominated legislature annulled the election results. Ten days later, on 10 March 1948, the "War of National Liberation" plunged Costa Rica into civil war. The 40-day civil war claimed over 2,000 lives, most of them civilians.

Popular myth suggests that Jos� Mar�a ("Don Pepe") Figueres Ferrer--42-year-old coffee farmer, engineer, economist, and philosopher--raised a "ragtag army of university students and intellectuals" and stepped forward to topple the government that had refused to step aside for its democratically elected successor. In actuality, Don Pepe's "revolution" had been long in the planning; the 1948 election merely provided a good excuse.  Don Pepe became head of the Founding Junta of the Second Republic of Costa Rica. As leader of the revolutionary junta, he consolidated Calder�n's progressive social reform program and added his own landmark reforms: he banned the press and Communist Party, introduced suffrage for women and full citizenship for blacks, revised the Constitution to outlaw a standing army (including his own), established a presidential term limit, and created an independent Electoral Tribunal to oversee future elections. Figueres also shocked the elites by nationalizing the banks and insurance companies. Then, by a prior agreement that established the interim junta for 18 months, Figueres returned the reins of power to Otilio Ulate, the actual winner of the '48 election. Costa Ricans later rewarded Figueres with two terms as president, in 1953-57 and 1970-74.

Social and economic progress since 1948 has helped return the country to stability, and though post-civil war politics have reflected the play of old loyalties and antagonisms, elections have been free and fair. With only two exceptions, the country has ritualistically alternated its presidents between the PLN and the opposition Social Christians.