VII
Costa Rica is not only the most charming country in Central America, but usually the best-behaved.
So stable is its government that land upon the Costa Rican side of the San Juan River is far more valuable than the same sort of property on the Nicaraguan side.
It is one of the few countries south of the Rio Grande which can elect a new president without shooting the old one. Its leading families are so interrelated that the chief executiveship is largely a household affair. As a general rule, they take turns at it. Now and then, when they do quarrel about it, each family separates, half of it taking one side and half the other, so that everybody always wins. And whoever gains the office rules ordinarily with consideration for the rest of the populace.
In many recent years there has been but one period of rough-house in its ordinarily tranquil history. It was my fortune, on my first visit to the republic, to arrive just in time to witness its conclusion—the conclusion of such a series of events as might have sprung from the pages of a novel by Richard Harding Davis. I landed at Puerto Limón just in time to see Ex-President Federico Tinoco, the last of the Central-American tyrants, walk across the dock between two lines of fixed bayonets, and embark for Europe, carrying with him the national treasury.
The story of Tinoco would be much more typical of Honduras than of Costa Rica.
As in Tegucigalpa there were three contestants for the presidency in the elections of 1919. No one of them gained an absolute majority. Congress, forced to decide, bickered as Congresses will. The president in office, scenting possible trouble, undertook to smooth the path of his own favorite by building up a stronger army. At the head of it was Federico Tinoco, a man of prominent family, himself little known in Costa Rica except as a devotee of pleasure who spent most of his time in Paris.
When the army was well organized, Tinoco cleared the whole situation by capturing the palace and declaring himself president. Thereupon he reorganized Congress with his own personal friends, and was constitutionally elected. There were rumors—as always in these countries—that an American concession hunter financed the whole coup. It is more probable that Tinoco’s family influenced the move.
A MACHINE-GUN TOWER BUILT BY THE TYRANT TINOCO
Federico, the Dictator, was himself a weak, timid, vacillating man. The real power behind the throne was a younger brother, Joaquín, who became the Secretary of War. Young, cultured, charming, the handsomest man in a nation of handsome men, Joaquín was a striking figure everywhere. Magnetic beyond description, he could, in a five-minute conversation, bring his worst enemy to his own point of view. He had traveled throughout the world, had been received in the most exclusive salons of many European capitals, and spoke fluently several languages. He could outride, outwrestle, outbox, outfence, and outswim any youth in the Republic. At philandering he was supreme. Now and then some outraged husband challenged him to a duel, but Joaquín could outshoot them all. When there were murmurs against the high-handed methods by which the Tinocos had attained office, he announced in Congress:
“If any citizen disapproves of it, he can meet me man to man with revolvers.”
Secure in his power, Joaquín led the life of a young prince. He designed strikingly beautiful uniforms for himself. He gave many gay parties. He himself never drank, but there was always plenty of champagne for his friends. He made costly presents to his women, and not content with the local beauties, he imported occasional high-class courtesans from overseas.
His extravagances proved a drain upon the national treasury. When President Federico protested, Joaquín quickly overruled him. And Federico, despite his desire to execute honestly the duties into which family ambition had forced him, proceeded to tax the country exorbitantly. When the peons had no money left, he took their oxen. He confiscated the beasts under pretense of using them for the army, but sold them to cattlemen in the West Indies. The reserves in the local banks he seized to pay the interest on the national debt. At length, he commenced to sell some of the art treasures in the national theater.
It was his one remaining hope to secure a foreign loan. Before capitalists would listen to his pleas, however, he must secure the recognition of the American government. In his efforts to win the favor of Washington, he used every possible device. He extended every courtesy to American citizens. He joined the United States in declaring war on Germany. He offered our War Department the use of Costa Rican territory in the fortification of the Canal Zone.
His stumbling block was Benjamin F. Chase, American Consul in San José. In the absence of a Minister, Mr. Chase was reporting to Washington the current political history of Costa Rica. Being a stubborn sort of Yankee, he was reporting the truth, even though the Tinocos tried to make a pet of him. Having failed to bribe the Consul, according to rumors afloat at the time, the Dictator is said to have hired another gringo to shoot him. Several of the more loyal Americans formed themselves into a guard at the Consulate, and the Consul continued to send home unfavorable reports on the Tinoco régime.
All Costa Rica murmured its discontent at the increasing taxation. Revolutions commenced to brew. In the suppression of the uprisings, Joaquín introduced a reign of terror. His spies were everywhere. Political opponents were thrown into old-fashioned wooden stocks and exhibited in public. The prisons were filled. According to reports, prisoners were frequently beaten with iron rods, and sometimes hung up by the thumbs. Many of the stories have the exaggerated ring of the yarns told about Cabrera in Guatemala. They include those of a man burned in oil, of gold teeth being extracted and resold to dentists, and of a private swimming pool where Joaquín, after depriving his prisoners of water for forty-eight hours, would march them out to see him diving and swimming in gallons of it.
The leading revolutionist, Don Julio Acosta, had a force of two hundred men on the Nicaraguan border, but Joaquín’s army numbered about ten thousand. The revolutionists had neither arms nor ammunition. Washington, following its traditional policy of selling weapons only to constitutionally elected presidents, whether they were crooks or not, refused to sell to Don Julio, insisting that he work out his own salvation.
Indirectly, it was Tinoco’s large army that caused his own destruction. Knowing that all Costa Rica hated him, he had strengthened it with soldiers of fortune from Nicaragua and Honduras, of the type who gravitate wherever there is trouble. They must be paid. All other government employees could wait. The school teachers, in protest, left their schools, and marched through the streets with their pupils. Emboldened by their example, the letter carriers and the street cleaners followed. When the police sought to disperse them, the women cried:
“We are your friends! We are protesting against the cutting of your salaries to pay foreign soldiers!”
And the police stood back, while all San José surged through the streets, shouting, “Down with the Tinocos!” Joaquín at the time was absent from the city. Hearing of the disturbance, he hastened back, and led his troops in person, riding fearlessly into the mob. Some of the women and children were forced into the American Consulate, and surged upstairs to the balcony. A young boy attempted a speech. Tinoco soldiers drew their rifles and fired. The crowd fled back inside the building, leaving Consul Chase alone on the balcony. Eleven bullet holes dented the stucco behind him, but he was not harmed.
This was the beginning of the end. Joaquín quickly pacified the city, for no one dared to face him. But—the Old-Timers suspect—a little note came down from Washington. Federico, the nominal Dictator, made plans for an exit. He handed his resignation to the Vice-President, who appointed him “Ambassador-at-Large” to Europe, with a salary of $100,000 a year, payable in advance. All of his cohorts received similar appointments—by a procedure which, if unethical, was quite proper according to international law—until their salaries exhausted what little cash remained in the country.
Joaquín, the real Dictator, had no intention of fleeing with them. Whatever might be said of him, he was no coward. He meant to fight to the end. But the end came unexpectedly. He was strolling nonchalantly down the street one evening when a man saluted him. Always military, Joaquín snapped his own hand to his hat-brim. He did not observe that the other man had saluted with the left hand, or that the right concealed a revolver. As Joaquín’s fingers touched the hat-brim, the man shot him. Then he turned and ran up the street, blazing into the air, and shouting:
“Joaquín is dead! Costa Rica lives!”
The elder Tinoco was at home in the castle when the news reached him. Seizing the telephone, he called up the prison.
“Shoot every political prisoner!” he ordered.
But with the death of Joaquín a change had come over the Republic. It was Joaquín the people feared, and not Federico. The order was not obeyed. Surrounded by foreign soldiers of fortune, the ex-Dictator emerged from the castle only to attend his brother’s funeral. Then, in a heavily-guarded train, he fled to Puerto Limón, and sailed for Europe.
As was my usual fortune in Latin-American travel, I arrived just in time to hear the shouting. And all Costa Rica was shouting. When I drew any young man aside to ask who it was that shot Joaquín, he would glance hastily about to see that he was not overheard. Then he would whisper:
“Sh! Don’t tell any one! I did it!”
But Joaquín had his mourners. Every day several young ladies would visit his grave to deck it with flowers, each glaring jealously at the others who loved his memory.