The question of why Costa Rica has no army is worth asking this week more than most.
The world is currently spending $2.4 trillion a year on defence. That is the highest figure ever recorded in human history, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Governments across Europe and Asia are revising their military budgets upward in real time. War has returned to the front page and shows no sign of leaving.
Costa Rica is not participating in any of this.
It has not had an army since 1948. No air force. No navy. No conscription. No defence ministry. Its constitution bans a standing military permanently. And seventy-seven years into that experiment, it has a 97 percent literacy rate, universal healthcare, and one of the highest happiness scores in the world.
The experiment, it turns out, worked.
December 1, 1948
The answer to why Costa Rica has no army begins with one man and one building.
José Figueres Ferrer had just won a 44-day civil war. The conflict began because the ruling party tried to annul a presidential election it had lost. Figueres led the opposition, won the war, took power, and then did something no one predicted.
He called a ceremony. He walked into the Bellavista Barracks in San José, the headquarters of the Costa Rican military, with a sledgehammer in his hands. He swung it into the wall in front of cameras and witnesses. Then he handed the keys of the building to the Ministry of Education.
The barracks became a national museum. It is still a museum today. The wall is still there.
The following year, the new constitution made it official. Article 12. The army as a permanent institution is proscribed. For the maintenance of order there will be the necessary police forces.
Only by continental agreement or for national defence may military forces be organised, both shall be always subordinate to civil power and may not deliberate, make demonstrations or manifestations or declarations individually or collectively.
No loopholes. No exceptions. The decision was permanent by design.
What the Money Built
The more instructive question is not why Costa Rica has no army. It is what happened to the money once the army was gone.
Defence budgets do not disappear. They get redirected. In Costa Rica, they went into education and public health with an consistency that most governments only promise during election campaigns.
Today Costa Rica spends approximately 7 percent of its GDP on education. The global average sits at 4.5 percent. The difference, sustained across seven decades, compounds into outcomes that are difficult to argue with. A literacy rate above 97 percent. Life expectancy among the highest in Latin America. A university system that is free and public. A healthcare infrastructure that treats citizens regardless of their ability to pay.
In 1987, President Oscar Arias Sanchez was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering peace agreements in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. While those countries fought civil wars funded by Cold War superpowers, Costa Rica was quietly expanding its national park system.
It now protects 25 percent of its land. It generates over 98 percent of its electricity from renewable sources.
It is the safest country in Central America. In a region that has historically not been safe, that distinction carries real weight.
What This Was Not
Understanding why Costa Rica has no army also requires understanding what the decision actually was in 1948, stripped of the mythology that has grown around it.
Costa Rica was not abolishing a superpower military. Its army was small, poorly funded, and had just been defeated in a 44-day war by a paramilitary group with no formal training. Figueres was also disbanding a military that had factions hostile to him personally, one of which had recently attempted a coup.
The idealism was genuine. The pragmatism was equally genuine. This was not a pure act of pacifist philosophy. It was also a solution to a specific political problem, one that happened to produce extraordinary long-term results.
What transformed the decision from clever politics into something larger was what came after.
The choice that began as convenience became identity. Within a generation, the absence of a military had stopped being a policy and become a cultural value.
Today, most Costa Ricans find the idea of having an army genuinely strange. It is not a debate they are having. It is settled ground.
The Criticism Worth Taking Seriously
Any honest account of why Costa Rica has no army has to include the criticism that its model is not straightforwardly exportable.
Costa Rica has no oil. It controls no major shipping lanes. It sits between two oceans and commands neither strategically. It is not a country that powerful states have historically needed to control, which means it has not faced the kind of existential military pressure that other small nations have.
Its pacifism is partly a product of geography and geopolitical irrelevance.
It also benefits, implicitly, from the security umbrella the United States maintains across the Western Hemisphere. Costa Rican foreign policy thinkers are honest about this. The country is not surviving on principles alone.
These are fair points. They do not, however, explain away 77 years of outcomes. The literacy rates are real. The healthcare system is real. The Nobel Prize was real.
The absence of military coups, which have occurred in nearly every other country in the region, is real. Whatever the reasons the model has been able to survive, it has survived, and the results are measurable in ways that matter to actual human beings living actual lives.
What This Week Makes of It
The world this week is spending more on weapons than at any point in recorded history. Wars are active. Defence budgets are growing. The logic of military deterrence is being cited by governments on every continent as the only responsible response to the current moment.
In 1948, José Figueres Ferrer looked at that same logic and swung a sledgehammer through it.
The building he demolished became a place where people go to learn about their history. The money he redirected built schools and hospitals and a democracy that has held continuously for three quarters of a century. The wall he broke is still standing, preserved behind glass, in a museum that schoolchildren visit on field trips.
Why Costa Rica has no army is a question with a complicated answer rooted in politics, pragmatism, and one decisive moment in December 1948. What Costa Rica built in the 77 years since is a simpler story.
It decided that the best defence was an educated, healthy, and stable population. Then it spent 77 years finding out if it was right.
The answer, so far, is yes.
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