Costa Rica declares war on Germany

On 23 May 1918 Costa Rica found itself at war with the German Empire. That day Congress passed a resolution authorising the government to take this step, and President Federico Tinoco Granados signed a decree declaring that a state of war existed with the German government. Both acts were published in San José the following morning. The decree stated that Costa Rica was entering the war in the name of humanitarian principles, but gave no specific reasons. The government also officially announced that Germans living in the country would not be molested either in their persons or in their property. Unlike Nicaragua, which two weeks earlier had declared war on both empires, Costa Rica acted only against Germany.

After Panama, Guatemala and Nicaragua, it was the fourth Central American state to go to war on the side of the United States. Nobody in Washington, however, thanked it for doing so. Tinoco’s government had sought American recognition from the start and never obtained it.

A government without recognition

Tinoco, Minister of War in the cabinet of President Alfredo González Flores, overthrew him together with his brother Joaquín on 27 January 1917, and in April had himself elected president. President Woodrow Wilson, who refused to recognise governments that had seized power by force, made it clear to the Costa Ricans as early as February 1917 that he would not recognise their new authorities. Tinoco hoped the war would change this. He offered the Americans a naval base and the use of the country’s ports, and in September 1917 he broke off relations with Germany. Washington did not change its mind.

By the spring of 1918 the dictatorship was growing ever weaker. On 22 and 23 February a rising broke out on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. The army quickly suppressed it, and on 15 March near Buenos Aires, not far from the Panamanian border, one of its leaders, the deputy Rogelio Fernández Güell, was killed together with several companions. The government claimed they had fallen in combat, but public opinion regarded their deaths as murder. At a requiem Mass in the cathedral, before a crowd of three thousand, a speech was delivered calling the Tinoco brothers murderers, and it was greeted with applause. In April many people were again arrested, nearly a thousand men were forcibly conscripted into the army, and Congress, at the government’s demand, suspended constitutional guarantees for 30 days because of a “threatened invasion from abroad”.

The Tinoco brothers still deluded themselves that Washington was only waiting for 8 May, when the constitutional term of the deposed González ended. On 23 April Secretary of State Robert Lansing dispelled these hopes. He instructed the American chargé d’affaires, Stewart Johnson, to hand Tinoco a statement that the position of the United States on recognition “has not changed” and “will not change in the future”, and to try to have it made public. Tinoco resisted for a long time, claiming that publication would be a death sentence for himself and his brother, but when the text appeared in the Panamanian press, on 3 May he had to announce it himself in his manifesto. The compliant Congress, made up exclusively of men chosen by the dictator, responded on 7 May with a resolution stating that the statement had caused “surprise and a painful impression”. On 8 May González, who was in New York, announced the extension of his term and the nullity of all the acts of the usurpers.

War under threat

In May Costa Rica carried out its third mobilisation of the year. After many desertions and in the face of strong resistance about three thousand men were gathered, and the danger from Nicaragua, where Costa Rican political exiles had taken refuge, was given as the justification. In San José rumours circulated about demands that the President of Nicaragua, Emiliano Chamorro Vargas, was said to be making on Tinoco. On 21 May the ceremonial presentation of a medal to the opposition politician Carlos Durán turned into a great demonstration against the dictatorship, and Tinoco himself was booed as he left the theatre.

On 22 May Tinoco appeared before Congress in person and demanded a declaration of war on Germany. According to Johnson seventeen members of Congress opposed it, and in the afternoon the deputies rebelled and refused to pass the declaration. They gave way only when they were threatened with the dissolution of Congress if war was not declared the next day. The Minister of the Interior, Amadeo Johanning, preferred to resign rather than sign the decree, and his resignation was accepted. On the morning of 23 May Joaquín Tinoco, Minister of War and the president’s brother, informed Johnson of this. He assured him that, to prove the brothers did not wish to enrich themselves from the war, the government would announce that German property would not suffer. In the same conversation he declared that he had persuaded his brother to leave the country with him within a month, and asked who would be acceptable to the Americans as a successor.

Johnson had no illusions about the dictator’s intentions. He reported that public indignation was immense, because everyone understood that the war was meant to be a pretext for obtaining money, not only through the confiscation of German property but also through forced loans and levies. At the same time the government intended to break its contract with the Bank of Costa Rica, which collected revenues for the state and held the security for the silver certificates, because the bank had refused to touch that security. According to the American diplomat, war with Germany, with which Costa Rica had no real quarrel, was for Tinoco above all an instrument of domestic policy and yet another attempt to win over Washington.

No answer from Washington

The attempt failed. When Nicaragua declared war, Wilson sent President Chamorro his personal congratulations. Costa Rica received nothing. At the end of May Chamorro told Tinoco’s envoy that he could not recognise his government and that his position was the same as the American one. On the dictator himself, however, the war had a bracing effect. At the beginning of June Johnson reported that it had strengthened the Tinoco brothers’ self-confidence and that their departure had become less likely, and Joaquín had stopped mentioning it. According to Johnson, Tinoco stayed in power not thanks to public opinion but thanks to the army, and considered stepping down only when he felt threatened.

The dictatorship survived for more than another year. In the summer of 1919, weakened by a revolt in Guanacaste province led by Julio Acosta García, by riots in the capital and by American pressure, Tinoco stepped down. On 10 August his brother Joaquín was shot dead in San José, and two days later Federico left for Europe. The declaration of war did not earn Costa Rica a place among the victors. Because the victorious powers did not recognise Tinoco’s government, it did not take part in the Paris Peace Conference and did not become a party to the Treaty of Versailles. It was admitted to the League of Nations only in December 1920.