Demoperfectocracia. La democracia pre-reformada en Costa Rica (1885-1948) (review)

This book brings together ten of the author's previously published papers on Costa Rican electoral processes during the last decades of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth. In spite of the cross references that Molina carefully introduces through footnotes and statistical graphics, the book is still not an edited volume but a half-baked succession, occasionally repetitive, of short essays on diverse aspects of the 1885-1948 period.

This flaw is even more significant, because the author has decided to use the volume to introduce a revisionist interpretation of Costa Rican democracy at the time, in opposition to an abundant body of literature on the subject, summarized in the ironic term "demoperfectocracia," used to characterize democratic insufficiencies and oligarchic abuses. Novelist Yolanda Oreamuno, the one who coined the term, metaphorically defined Costa Rican democracy as "a tropical myth," and added that it was a question of a "passive democracy . . . self applied without a foundation," as Molina quotes (p. 21). In a similar vein, Mario Sancho drew attention to the continual manipulation of the will of the people in the electoral processes during a significant part of that period by the oligarchic sectors. Molina, labeling the "demoperfectocracia" notion and its derivatives "a black legend," assumes the task of refuting them both, as well as numerous other thinkers who have emphasized the burden, blackmail and use and abuse of the patronage system, that characterized that long period of Costa Rican electoral history.

To prove his assertion, the author uses a set of remarkable statistical instruments, still relatively unstudied, that he applies in a rigorous, modern and creative way. The far-reaching conclusions that he draws, nevertheless, cannot be inferred from the graphics.

For example, based on the size of the electoral register and attendance at the ballot box in first degree elections carried out between 1893 and 1913, he tries to demonstrate "that ethnic group and class did not become sources of electoral exclusion and that the participation in the elections was comparable or superior to that of other European and Latin-American countries" (p. 35).

As he focuses exclusively on the charts, he omits most evident facts, like the exclusion of the Indian and African-Caribbean communities—who did not even have identity documents—, as well as the multifarious means for exploitation and manipulation of the peasantry on the part of caciques and landowners.

One of the most provocative essays in the book is "Second-degree electors in Costa Rica: social origin and political participation (1897-1909)." Powerful coffee families did not control elector-delegates, the author concludes, but these rather "played the role of intermediaries between popular politics in first degree elections and the subsequent 'high' politics, where these voters, reunited in electoral assemblies, chose the principal authorities of the nation" (p. 92). For the sake of his argument, he minimizes constitutional suffrage requisites. Pushing it to the limit, he concludes that there were even family ties between those voters and the poorest segments of the population and eliminates that group's own economic and social interests from the panorama, as well as their dealings with the wealthiest sectors.

The term that he coins to baptize his theory, "democracia pre-reformada," is somewhat ambiguous, to say the least. From his perspective, several decades of Costa Rican political, electoral and social history are thus transformed into a sort of social cohabitation in the limbo. A never ending dress rehearsal, awaiting the final opening for the "reformed democracy" that follows the 1948 Civil War.

In sum, Molina's thorough and detailed research does not support the forcibly innovative and ambitious conclusions that he tries to derive from it, despite his own warnings about the limitations of his data.