Costa Rica in 1948: Cold War or Local War?

E-ISSN： 1533-6247|52|4|465-493

ISSN： 0003-1615

Source： The Americas, Vol.52, Iss.4, 1996-04, pp. : 465-493

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Abstract

The years following World War Two produced a strong resurgence of U.S. intervention in Central America and the Caribbean couched in Cold War terms. Although the U.S. intervention in Guatemala to overthrow the government of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 has generally been seen as the first case of Cold War covert anti-Communist intervention in Latin America, several scholars have raised questions about U.S. involvement in a 1948 Costa Rican civil war in which Communism played a critical role. In a 1993 article in The Americas, Kyle Longley argued that “the U.S. response to the Costa Rican Revolution of 1948, not the Guatemalan affair, marked the origins of the Cold War in Latin America.” The U.S. “actively interfered,” and achieved “comparable results in Costa Rica as in Guatemala: the removal of a perceived Communist threat.” Other authors have argued, even, that the U.S. had prepared an invasion force in the Panama Canal Zone to pacify the country. The fifty years of Cold War anti-Communism entitles one to be skeptical of U.S. non-intervention in a Central American conflict involving Communism. Costa Ricans, aware of a long tradition of U.S. intervention in the region, also assumed that the U.S. would intervene. Most, if not all, were expecting intervention and one key government figure described U.S. pressure as like “the air, which is felt, even if it cannot be seen.” Yet, historians must do more than just “feel” intervention. Subsequent Cold War intervention may make it difficult to appraise the 1948 events in Costa Rica objectively. Statements like Longley's that “it is hard to believe that in early 1948 … Washington would not favor policies that ensured the removal of the [Communist Party] Vanguard,” although logical, do not coincide with the facts of the U.S. role in the conflict.