The Costa Rican Civil War was the bloodiest event in 20th-century Costa Rican history. It lasted for 44 days (from 12 March to 24 April 1948), during which approximately 2,000 people are believed to have died. The conflict was precipitated by the vote of the Costa Rican Legislature, dominated by pro-government representatives, to annul the results of the presidential elections held in February, alleging that the triumph of opposition candidate Otilio Ulate had been achieved by fraud. This caused a rebel army under commander José Figueres to rise up against the government of President Teodoro Picado, which it quickly defeated. After the war, Figueres ruled for a year and a half as head of a provisional government junta which abolished the military and oversaw the election of a Constitutional Assembly in December, which subsequently produced the new 1949 constitution. The junta then stepped down and handed power to Ulate. Costa Rica has not experienced any significant political violence since.
Read more about Costa Rican Civil War: Background, Figueres and The Caribbean Legion, 1948 Elections and Violent Aftermath, Beginning of Civil War, Ideological Context, Fall of Cartago, Figueres and United States Policy, Surrender of Picado, Civil War Repercussions
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“Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries in a thousand years have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover in their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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Theater business, management of men.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)