Central America seen from Costa Rica

Abstract

Collective identities are always built in relation to others, that is, they define themselves in reference to others, more or less close, establishing comparisons that seek to define the specificity that would characterize them.
In the Costa Rican case, those “others” are, firstly, Central Americans; close in geography, culture and history, with whom it shared colonial administration and projects of union and integration throughout its republican history. Its national identity is, therefore, marked by that region. The corpus that makes up this essay is made up of the sections: “Race” as a positive difference, Central America: a violent region, Central America: a region of the poor, Central America: the reign of authoritarianism seen from the “demoperfectocracy” and Remarking the difference: the independence of Central America is not the same as that of Costa Rica, who opt for a pejorative view of Central America that has been forming throughout the country’s republican history, based on real events, processes and situations, sometimes magnified or increased to promote ideological cohesion around the national project promoted by the dominant groups in the country.