Civil Wars in 1948: State Formation and National Imaginings in Costa Rica and Colombia

In 1948 Costa Rica and Colombia, two seemingly very dissimilar countries, both experienced the outbreak of a civil war.   In the case of Costa Rica the civil war concluded after six weeks with a death toll of only two thousand whereas in Colombia the civil war continued officially for another ten years causing the death of approximately 100,000 in this first phase of the civil war commonly known as La Violencia.  The interpretation of what transpires in 1948 in both Colombia and Costa Rica is generally grounded in the assumptions that scholars hold about Colombia and Costa Rica.

This paper is part of a larger research project that challenges these assumptions by adopting a comparative framework and by grounding the outbreak of these two conflicts in a careful study of the decades that preceded 1948.  The paper for the AHA will focus on the reformist presidencies of Rafael Calderon Guardia (Costa Rica) and Alfonso Lopez Pumarejo (Colombia). The questions that this presentation will seek to answer are the following: why did the process of state formation in Costa Rica in the 1940s and Colombia in the 1930s (both established democracies) unleash a breakdown in formal and electoral politics? Why did the state sponsored programs of moderate reform not only antagonize elites, but also cause a crisis in terms of national identity?  Finally, what institutions and groups played a key role in terms of aggravating and expanding the political conflict?

My paper will offer a twentieth century and comparative viewpoint of civil wars in Latin America thus allowing for a broad comparison with other studies that focus on other Latin American countries (presented on the panel).