CHAPTER 8 NATIVE MESOAMERICANS IN THE MODERN ERA 325Box 8.4 The Figueres Reforms in Costa RicaIn Costa Rica, a powerful populist president, Rafael Angel Calderón, managed to form alliances
with both radical plantation workers and conservative coffee barons during the years leading up
to 1948. This unusual coalition made it possible for Calderón to push through important social
reforms, such as a labor code, social security program, and universal education. However, as
Calderón began to move toward greater control of the state, opposition coalesced against him
among members of the urban middle class. When Calderón and his followers attempted to annul
the 1948 election results, an uprising took place under the leadership of José (“Pepe”) Figueres,
a mid-level coffee farmer with connections to the U.S. State Department (see Figure 8.10).
The Figueres-led rebels initiated a two-month civil war, or “revolution” as they called it,
with backing from the United States (the U.S. government considered the revolt to be an anti-
Communist movement). The victors went on to create a new constitution that modified the labor
and electoral codes, outlawed the Communist Party, nationalized the banks, and, most dramatic
of all, abolished the army. The leaders of this reform movement soon organized the National
Liberation Party (PLN), and in 1952, Figueres was elected president under the new party’s ban-
ner. During the years following 1952, opposition parties managed to win presidential elections
from time to time, but the PLN reformers clearly dominated the political field through a series of
economic, political, and social welfare reforms. As a result, Costa Rica experienced almost thirty
years of relative peace, growth, and prosperity. By the 1970s, Costa Rica had surpassed not only
the other Central American countries but Mexico as well, with respect to most developmental in-
dices such as in health, education, and economic well-being. In February 2006, the former Nobel
Peace Prize winner, Oscar Arias, was re-elected president of Costa Rica under the PLN banner.tegrate the Indians into national life by means of culturally sensitive community de-
velopment programs, the military governments of Guatemala favored the total erad-
ication of the native cultures as quickly as possible and their replacement by a national
ladino culture (a process known as “ladinoization”). Guatemala’s approach to the In-
dian problem was assimilation with a vengeance. The government’s actions toward
the Indians were driven not so much by nationalist ideas as by the need to provide
the country’s export industries with cheap, easily available labor while at the same
time maintaining strict control over the potentially rebellious Indian and ladino
working classes.
The Indians of Guatemala were also subjected to extremely powerful modern-
ization forces in the form of highly exploitative capitalist plantations and aggressive
religious leaders, especially reform-minded priests imbued with the social gospel of
the “Catholic Action” program. These two forces complemented one another, the
plantations proletarianizing the Indians and the Church providing them with a col-
lectivist rationale for their new social condition. By the 1970s, more than 20 percent
of the Indians had joined peasant cooperative and labor organizations, many of them
Church-sponsored. Other Indians residing close to large towns and cities found al-
ternatives to work on the plantations in artisanry, especially weaving, and trade.
Despite these changes, the Indians of Guatemala, like those of Mexico, fiercely
resisted the breakdown of their communities and the loss of cultural identity as
Mayas. The same debate taking place in Mexico over whether the Indians should be