On 1 December 1948 Costa Rica Decided It Would No Longer Have an Army

On December 1, 1948, José Figueres Ferrer, head of the temporary junta then governing Costa Rica, walked into Bellavista barracks in San José carrying a sledgehammer. He climbed onto a parapet and struck a piece of wall, symbolically beginning the demolition of the building that had housed the country's army. He gave the structure to the education ministry — it later became the National Museum — and announced that Costa Rica would no longer maintain a standing armed force.

The context was a short, vicious war. The disputed 1948 presidential election had ended in fighting that ran 44 days and killed roughly 2,000 people, the worst Costa Rican violence of the twentieth century. Figueres's National Liberation forces won and installed a junta. Many in the region expected the usual Latin American sequel: a military-backed strongman, a coup risk every few years. Figueres opted in the opposite direction. The army was the institution that had ratified the dispute and produced the dead; if it ceased to exist, the next election dispute could not be settled the same way.

The Constituent Assembly enshrined the decision the next year. Article 12 of the 1949 Constitution prohibits "the army as a permanent institution" and allows only a non-permanent civilian force authorized by Congress for collective defense. In practice the country has a Public Force — a national gendarmerie of about 14,000 doing policing, border control, and coast guard work — but no infantry, no air force, no tanks, no military rank structure.

The money the army would have absorbed was redirected to education and health. Costa Rica's literacy is over 97 percent, life expectancy is comparable to the United States', and it has consistently topped the region in human-development indicators. Other Central American neighbors that have spent the past 75 years funding militaries have not.