Commissar in San Jose

In the sandbagged capital of San Jose, a Communist named Manuel Mora was the strong man last week. That was about the most significant result of four weeks of civil war in Costa Rica.

Well-armed rebels, fighting to give rightist Otilio Ulate the presidency to which he was elected last February, sat high in their southern mountains and beat off clumsy government attacks. In San Jose, leftist President Teodoro Picado and ex-President Rafael Calderon Guardia, the men who had provoked the war by getting Ulate's election annulled as fraudulent, had found they could not control Comrade Mora; they had wooed him too long and too earnestly. Their police and troops, weakened by losses in the field, were nothing compared to his 1,500 well-disciplined shock troops.

President Picado, a feckless figurehead in a bright red shirt, was cooped up in the red-roofed Casa Presidencial. It was smart, stocky, 39-year-old Manuel Mora, leader of the Communist Vanguardia Popular, who ran things from the Bella Vista fortress. Last week he reached outside the capital and put one of his men in command of a government battalion which was moving against the rebels from coastal Playa Dominical. His forces had control of United Fruit banana plantations on the Pacific Coast, and were burning and looting. When Archbishop Victor Manuel Sanabria crossed the lines to bring a compromise proposal to the rebels, it was Communist Mora who furnished him protection.

During the week, Mora visited the Casa Presidencial to discuss strategy with Picado and Calderon, rode to La Sabana airport to inspect supplies arriving from Nicaragua, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, made speeches all over town. But each day he included a visit to the same small cottage on the edge of San Jose. Manuel Mora is a single man. "I was too poor to get married," he says. "Anyway, I wouldn't want to ask a wife to share the kind of life I lead." Daily he brought his problems to grey-haired Carmen Lyra, a writer of children's books, who sat in her book-lined front parlor and dished out the rocking-chair Communist advice that Mora has followed for years.

Mora, the moody, humorless son of a carpenter, has fought all his life. He had to struggle to get his lawyer's education. Since 1932, he has fought in Congress for a Communist program. Now, in the civil war, he has his chance to put it over. To do so, he is prepared to turn the rebellion into a class war. "The people must seal their social gains with blood," he cried last week. "I will not compromise or throw away anything for which I have fought for 25 years."

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