Civil War Repercussions
Despite the fact that this civil war alone was relatively small in scale - its duration was short and about two thousand casualties - its consequences have had lasting results on the country and the region as a whole.
- The strong ties that came about due to US aid helped to lift Costa Rica out of the economic instability that it had been facing in the years before the revolution.
- The new articles of the constitution rewritten by Figueres' regime eliminated the fraudulent aspect of elections that had been an identifiable part of Costa Rica's electoral processes in the past. Note. This assertion is thoroughly disputed by Picado in his book Memorias, ISBN 9968-31-164-2, published in 2001 by Editorial Estatal a Distancia, San José, Costa Rica. The new constitution also abolished the army, and gave Blacks and women the right to vote.
Read more about this topic: Costa Rican Civil War
Famous quotes containing the words civil war, civil and/or war:
“One of the greatest difficulties in civil war is, that more art is required to know what should be concealed from our friends, than what ought to be done against our enemies.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“The principle of majority rule is the mildest form in which the force of numbers can be exercised. It is a pacific substitute for civil war in which the opposing armies are counted and the victory is awarded to the larger before any blood is shed. Except in the sacred tests of democracy and in the incantations of the orators, we hardly take the trouble to pretend that the rule of the majority is not at bottom a rule of force.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to “feel good” about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)