In 1930 Costa Rica, with a landmass of 50,000 square kilometers (more than twice the size of El Salvador), had a population of scarcely half a million inhabitants. The capital, San José, had 50,000 inhabitants; no other town had a population of more than 8,000. More than 60 per cent of the economically active population of some 150,000 worked in agriculture. Production revolved around the cultivation of coffee, which was exported principally to the United States and the United Kingdom. The cultivation of bananas, the second most important export product, was controlled by the United Fruit Company. The country also exported cocoa beans, although in smaller quantities, to practically all of Europe. These three crops accounted for 94.3 per cent of Costa Rica's total income.

The traditional coffee economy had produced a social pyramid with the plantation workers at the base and the growers and exporters, the latter primarily of German descent, at the apex. The coffee growers and merchants also controlled credit, directly or indirectly, through the private banking institutions. Between the two extremes of the pyramid was an important group of small and medium-sized producers who maintained a relative social and economic independence, which had great significance in the national political system.

The development of banana production from the end of the nineteenth century on the Atlantic coast, together with the economic impact of the First World War, had produced some social and economic differentiation, but this was still of a secondary order. A new stratum of waged labour clearly began to take shape during this period, although it remained diversified and could not be strictly described in terms like ‘working class’ or ‘proletariat’ more appropriate to developed societies.