Carlos Luis Fallas

Who was Carlos Luis Fallas?

Carlos Luis Fallas Sibaja, also known as Calufa, was a Costa Rican author and political activist.

Born in Alajuela to a single mother, Fallas completed only the first two years of secondary schooling before emigrating to Limón, in the Costa Rican Atlantic coast, where he worked in the banana plantations of the United Fruit Company. Finding conditions there intolerable, he returned to Alajuela at the age of 22 and found work as a shoemaker.

Fallas became active in the organized labor movement and in the Communist Party of Costa Rica. After a bloody clash between striking workers and the police, a judge sentenced him in 1933 one year of banishment in the Atlantic coast. There, Fallas became the leader of the 15,000-strong banana workers' strike of 1934. In 1942, Fallas was elected city council representative and in 1944 he became a national congressman. He fought in the Costa Rican Civil War of 1948 on the side of the government forces, to which the communists were then allied.