Skip to content

5 min read

Costa Rican merchants and bankers strike for electoral reform (Huelga de brazos

Summary

In July 1947, a strike called “huelga de brazos caídos” by opposition candidate Otilio Ulate and led by Costa Rican shopkeepers, bankers, the electric company, and the Northern Railways company shut two-thirds of the country’s normal business and forced President Teodoro Picado to appoint neutral ministers and give assurances of electoral fairness. [source: nv-database] The dispute was ultimately resolved by the 1948 civil war and the constitution of 1949; Ulate won the 1948 election and abolished the army. The campaign is scored as partial: the strike extracted immediate concessions but the deeper conflict continued for another year. [source: nv-database]

Tactics used

Tactics used

Background

In 1946 Teodoro Picado had been elected to the Costa Rican presidency in elections that the opposition widely denounced as fraudulent. [source: nv-database] After his election Picado proposed a new electoral law that was supported by a coalition of communists (Partido Vanguardia Popular) and Picado’s own Partido Republicano Nacional. The law created a bipartisan Tribunal Nacional Electoral that took oversight of elections and ballot-counting out of the president’s hands; it also strengthened protections for the secret ballot [source: nv-database]. For the opposition — a coalition of social-democratic parties — these reforms did not address their fraud fears, particularly because the reforms likely secured further victories for the communist coalition, which had joined Picado to enact a tax reform opposed by wealthy constituencies. [source: nv-database] In December 1946, the Congress had passed a tax reform that made tax collection more progressive. A coalition of wealthy landowners, financiers, and industrialists mobilized against the new laws [source: nv-database]. In early 1947 the opposition coalesced around Otilio Ulate Blanco, a prominent opponent of Picado’s economic policies, who would face former president Rafael Angel Calderón Guardia in the 1948 election. [source: nv-database] Through the spring of 1947, protests and street clashes escalated, with the military — formally peacekeepers — repeatedly fighting on the pro-Calderón side. [source: nv-database]

What happened

Demonstrations intensified in July 1947. On July 19, opposition demonstrators gathered in the old capital of Cartago. The next day, government officers clashed with protesters in Cartago, using tear gas and beating them; multiple people, including police officers, received bullet wounds. The next day, opposition supporters and university students, who had their own grievances against the Picado government, organized a march in defiance of a Picado ban on pre-election marches. The marchers occupied the Plaza Soledad in San José, blocking and harassing official cars; by this point five protesters, reportedly students, had already been killed. [source: nv-database]

At the end of the march, Ulate called a strike, which the opposition approved and which began on July 23. News of the strike traveled via national newspapers and spread down the Costa Rican Central Valley from San José. [source: nv-database]

Shop-owners, bankers, the electric company, and the Northern Railways company closed, in what functioned as a lock-out. Their closures were estimated to disrupt two-thirds of normal business across the country. Opposition supporters distributed leaflets and pressured businesses that remained open to join in. On the first day, police killed eight people and wounded many more with rubber bullets. The next day the government deployed police, military troops, and tanks to forcibly reopen closed shops. [source: nv-database]

The campaign was named “huelga de brazos caídos” — “strike with arms at your sides” — to emphasize its nonviolent character; the same name had been used for the 1944 El Salvadoran strike that forced General Hernández Martínez from power. [source: nv-database]

The strike and the surrounding political conflict were not resolved in 1947. In 1948, Calderón supporters in Congress attempted to annul Ulate’s narrow election victory, triggering a brief civil war; José Figueres’s forces won, Calderón went into exile, and Ulate took office. In 1949 the new constitution abolished the Costa Rican army. [source: nv-database]

Key people & organizations

  • Otilio Ulate Blanco — opposition presidential candidate, the strike’s leader
  • President Teodoro Picado — the target of the campaign
  • Rafael Angel Calderón Guardia — former president and Ulate’s rival
  • Federation of university students — joined the protests with their own grievances
  • Shop-owners, bankers, the electric company, and the Northern Railways company — economic shutdowners
  • José Figueres — opposition military figure who would lead the 1948 civil war

Outcome

Verdict: partial.

The strike did not resolve the underlying conflict; in 1948 the political dispute escalated into civil war, which Figueres won. Ulate took office and the 1949 constitution abolished the army. [source: nv-database] The campaign is scored as partial because the strike extracted immediate tactical concessions (neutral ministers, electoral assurances) but the deeper dispute was settled by armed conflict and a new constitution a year later.

Lessons

  • A business lock-out can become a mass strike when it is launched by major employers (here, the railways and the electric company).
  • Borrowing the name of a recent successful strike (“huelga de brazos caídos”) can transfer morale and tactics across borders.
  • When the underlying electoral dispute cannot be settled by mass action alone, the post-strike settlement tends to require either party capitulation or structural change (here, the army’s abolition).

Sources

Disclaimer: Included as a teaching example of campaign craft, not as endorsement.

Sources & verification

  • nv-database — grounding: primary — license: link-only / all-rights-reserved (ND-style; content paraphrased, not quoted)
  • Verified: 2026-07-04 by human

Last verified: 2026-07-09