This collection of eight articles emerged from a 2016 University of Costa Rica conference on the 1980s. The volume's strong introductory and concluding essays frame this decade of Costa Rican history as deeply shaped by the foreboding shadow of US Cold War militarism in Central America, which fueled and supported brutal civil wars and political violence in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Spared the horrors of war, Costa Rica has been all but ignored by Central Americanists in studies on the 1980s. This work, however, invites historians to consider Costa Rican experiences within this broader context. The editors have assembled a series of articles on Costa Rica which, because of their thoughtful framing, will be of interest to a broad array of Isthmian scholars.
One of the collection's greatest strengths is the range of topics covered by its contributors. The first chapter details how a group of Costa Rican academics imagined the nation's future in the face of a growing national economic crisis and regional political instability. The second chapter considers how the mainstream Costa Rican press's coverage of the Sandinistas changed from support of the FSLN in 1979 to distrustful critique by 1981. The third chapter examines the 1981 assassination of an imprisoned leftist revolutionary. The book's fourth chapter analyzes how and why the Contra War helped split Costa Rica's communist party, Vanguardia Popular, into two parties between 1983 and 1984.
Chapter 5 contemplates how the economic crisis of 1980 and 1981 and its aftermath shaped Costa Rican response to the arrival of tens of thousands of Salvadoran and Nicaraguan asylum seekers. The sixth chapter uncovers how shipments of contaminated blood from US medical firms sparked the nation's AIDS epidemic. Chapter 7 looks at the US-funded Libro Libre, or Free Book Press, in Costa Rica as part of the US's Cold War cultural strategy. The final chapter traces the development of informational technology in Costa Rica during the 1970s and 1980s.
The collection's largest contribution is provided by David Díaz's examination of the infamous 1981 murder of an 18-year old college student and would-be urban revolutionary, Vivian Gallardo Camacho. Gallardo's murder by a jailer, coupled with claims interrogators tortured her in prison and her ties to a homegrown Costa Rican leftist terror network seeking to spark revolution, have inspired paranoia and conspiracy theories ever since. Díaz places this case within a 1980s Central American context to produce an essay that historians interested in leftist mobilization and state violence will want to appraise. Costa Ricanists will also deeply appreciate Sofía Cortés Sequeira's chapter, which walks readers through the internal, national, and regional political events and encounters that split the nation's communists.
This is overall a well-framed and cohesive volume that succeeds in placing Costa Rica into broader discussions by Central Americanists on US empire, state violence, political mobilization, leftist militancy, fears of subversion, and the quest for democratic reform in the 1980s. The collection, however, would have been stronger if the editors had been more committed to their thematic focus. In particular, the essays that look at the Costa Rican state's response to AIDS and the development of informational technology are oddly situated, at best, and serve to dilute the power and unity of this otherwise thoughtfully assembled work.
Despite a pair of thematically weak contributions, this book is a well-researched collection of articles that promises to encourage Central Americanists to consider Costa Rica within broader isthmian studies on the 1980s. It will unquestionably become a “must-read” for Costa Ricanists.
