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Abstract
The Civil War of 1948 brought sweeping social and political changes to Costa Rica, and transformed the uses and nature of public accusations of corruption. Prior to the war, corruption allegations were personalist affairs that suited traditional oligarchical patronage practices. Afterwards, the discourse surrounding corruption shifted. This transition can be examined in the coverage of La Nación, a newspaper founded in 1946 to propagandize on behalf of the National Liberation Movement that became the dominant political party in Costa Rica following its victory in the Civil War of 1948. La Nación’s evolution from favorable, neutral-seeming coverage of one set of potentially corrupt acts in the early postwar period, to sharply critical accusations of dishonesty and corruption around the nationalization of banks that was the culmination of the new government’s reforms, offers a model of the cyclical, opportunistic corruption discourse in Costa Rican politics that would follow in the nascent 2nd Republic.