States do not typically give up their armies. When a military disappears, it is usually because it lost a war, got dissolved by an occupier, or collapsed along with the government that ran it. A country deciding, on its own terms, to abolish its army and then keeping that decision for more than three-quarters of a century is close to unheard of.
But Costa Rica did exactly that.
The decision that almost never happens
The story starts with a war, not a peace movement. Costa Rica’s 1948 civil war was short and bloody, a 44-day conflict that killed roughly 2,000 people. The man who won was José Figueres Ferrer, who then led the junta that ran the country afterward. A victorious rebel leader with a fresh army behind him is not the person you expect to disband the military.
He did it anyway. On December 1, 1948, Figueres took a sledgehammer to a wall of the Bellavista Barracks in San José, a piece of theater meant to mark the army’s end. His stated philosophy was that winning was never the point. Figueres put it this way: “The military victories themselves are of little value. What is built upon them is what matters.” That’s his reflection, not a law of history, but it captures the logic of the whole experiment.
What the constitution actually says
The sledgehammer was symbolic. The permanent part came the following year, written into the 1949 Constitution. Article 12, in the text quoted by UNESCO’s Memory of the World, states that “The Army as permanent institution is outlawed.”
That language is narrower than the popular version. The ban is on a permanent standing army, not on all armed force. The constitution still allows military forces to be organized for national defense. That exception mattered in 1955, when armed opponents invaded with covert assistance from Nicaragua and Venezuela before intervention by the Organization of American States ended the threat.
What Costa Rica gave up was the permanent institution, not the right to defend itself.
Where the money went
Here’s the part that makes the decision more than a symbol. Money a state would normally sink into barracks, weapons, and salaries went somewhere else instead, mainly education and healthcare.
The results are measurable. Costa Rica’s adult literacy rate was 98.04% in 2021 The OECD reported in 2025 that 93% of the population was covered for a core set of medical services. Public education spending reached about 6.25% of GDP in 2021.
I’d be careful about drawing a straight line from “no army” to “great schools.” Plenty of countries with big education budgets still keep militaries, and many things besides defense policy shaped Costa Rica’s outcomes over more than seventy years.
What we can say is more modest and still striking: a state chose to spend on people rather than firepower, held that priority for generations, and the numbers followed.
The electricity story
The renewable-power piece is a separate achievement that often gets folded into the same story, so it’s worth keeping them distinct: the army and the electricity grid aren’t directly linked.
Costa Rica generates almost all of its electricity from renewable sources, mostly hydropower, backed by geothermal, wind, biomass, and solar. In 2025 it closed the year at 98.6% renewable generation. Sylvia Larrea, an energy specialist at the Inter-American Development Bank, summed up the normal pattern plainly: “99% of our electricity comes from renewable resources.”
That figure moves with the weather, though. In 2024, an El Niño-driven drought cut hydropower and forced the country to fall back on fossil-fuel plants, dropping renewable generation to 89.4%. A grid leaning this hard on rivers is a grid exposed to dry years, which is a real vulnerability.
What the model can and can’t tell us
The clean-electricity headline hides a bigger, messier picture. Nearly all the power being clean does not mean the country is clean. Transport and industry still run on fossil fuels, and together those sectors account for about three-quarters of total energy use. Transport alone produces nearly 40% of the country’s emissions. The electric grid is genuinely green; the cars, trucks, and factories mostly are not, at least not yet.
There’s a security caveat too. Costa Rica is not simply undefended: it maintains armed police and border services, and it belongs to the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, a regional collective-security pact. Whether the model would survive a sustained attack without outside help is a question the country has mostly not had to answer, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
So what does the experiment prove? Probably less than the tidy version suggests, and more than the cynical version allows.
It doesn’t prove that any country can drop its army and get schools and hospitals in return, because circumstance, geography, and timing did some of the work. But it does show that a state can make an unusual choice, hold it across generations, and reorganize its spending around people.
A veteran of a 1955 border conflict, Carlos Alberto Ramirez, told The Tico Times, in his own blunt words, “God save us from an army.” That’s one man’s opinion, not a verdict. After more than three-quarters of a century without one, though, it’s an opinion the country seems fairly comfortable keeping.
