Costa Rica Abolishes Its Army
Costa Rica abolished its army on 1 December 1948, six months after winning a civil war. The war had been short and bloody by the country's standards — about six weeks and 2,000 dead — and began when the outgoing government annulled a presidential election it had lost. José Figueres, a coffee farmer who had been exiled for a radio broadcast attacking the government, led the winning side with a force of a few hundred and support from the Caribbean Legion. He then did something that governments which have just won a civil war rarely do. As head of a governing junta for eighteen months, he handed power to the man who had actually won the election, and in the meantime abolished the standing army by decree, symbolically taking a sledgehammer to a wall of the Bellavista barracks, which became the national museum. The abolition was written into the constitution of 1949, which also gave women the vote and full citizenship to Afro-Costa Ricans on the Caribbean coast, nationalised the banks and created an independent electoral tribunal. The reasoning was practical as much as idealistic: the army had been the instrument of every coup in Central America and had just been used to try to overturn an election. Police forces do internal security, and the country has relied since on international law and, implicitly, on the United States. Costa Rica has had uninterrupted elected government since, in a region where almost nobody else has, and spends the money on schools and health care. The decision has been tested. Nicaragua invaded twice in the 1950s and was repelled with the help of the Organisation of American States, and Costa Rica stayed out of the Central American wars of the 1980s while its neighbours tore themselves apart.
- Year: 1948 CE
- Category: Political
