Are you proud of anything in your country?
Don “Don Martin” knows me well, and knows that I am very critical of Costa Rica. I am very critical of everything and everybody. He knows I have very little tolerance for Costa Rican non- sense. I developed a business trying to make sense out of it and explaining it to others.
So anyhow, Don Don asked me one day: “Are you proud of anything in your country?”. I had to give it a thought and then I said: 子供が兵士にならないことがわかっているコスタリカの母親は幸せである。Well, I actually did not say that in Japanese, but in English it says “Blessed is the Costa Rican mother who knows that her son at birth will never be a soldier”.
This famous phrase was said by Mr. Ryoichi Sasakawa during one of his visits to Costa Rica. Mr. Sasakawa was a well-known Japanese politician and philanthropist born on May 4, 1899 in Osaka, Japan. On one of his trips to Costa Rica, Mr. Sasakawa went to visit the campus of the United Nations University for Peace located in Ciudad Colón, and it was there that he said the famous phrase.
To me, it was odd to see the military complex in other countries. It was just not a part of us. At the same time it was troubling to see the strife in other countries. In my early years I remember seeing the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the war in the Malvinas Islands (Falkland Islands for Anglophones), the dictatorship in Chile, the Israeli-Palestine conflict, the Civil War in Central America, and Noriega Mess in Panama. The list goes on and on. It is still on.
We did not have any of that. I have to say that I was very lucky to be born in Costa Rica, there was no Berlin Wall, no Tiananmen Square, no Iron Curtain, to Lockheed Martin.
It was not always like that. My uncle “Pelos” fought in the CR Civil War in 1948 when he was just a teenager. That was the last war fought in Costa Rica. Between 1823 and 1870, there were several political conflicts in Costa Rica that were resolved militarily. During these years, armed groups were generally organized and then dissolved after the conflict ended. However, in the main cities of the country there were different barracks and commanders in charge of maintaining order and where the army artillery was guarded. At the end of the 19th century, the number of contingents in the Costa Rican army rose from around 15,000 in 1874 to around 50,000 in 1900.
Between the months of March and April 1948, the Civil War broke out, caused mainly by the annulment of the 1948 elections by Congress, which did not recognize the triumph of the opposition candidate Otilio Ulate Blanco. This led to the revolution that brought José Figueres Ferrer to power.
At the end of the civil war and when the Government Junta assumed power, Figueres found himself with an army in total disarray, without war materials, and the few weapons they had were useless and rather constituted an imitation of an army and not a true military force. In this way, on December 1, 1948, he made the decision to dissolve the army in a symbolic act carried out at the Bellavista Barracks, where he demolished a battlement on the west wall of the barracks with a sledgehammer.
The land of missed opportunities
As Don Don said, I am very critical of Costa Rica. While it is a beautiful country, and spared me from military service or a life of armed conflicts, there is lot to get done. The great thing about Figueres is that he invested in education and infrastructure, and this process was continued with the succeeding presidents during the following decades. Between 1948 and 1981, Costa Rica enjoyed a lot of prosperity and was able to develop and implement progressive policies that moved the country forward. One of them was the creation of the National Park System which allowed the protection of the natural resources in the country, which at the end of the day is the reason why you are here.
People decide to make Costa Rica a home because of this tradition of peace, progression and wilderness. Unfortunately, the prosperity only lasted until 1981 when the country defaulted its debt. Three decades of spending and plundering with very little private enterprise and low tax revenue resulted in a financial crisis that changed the country to the worse. I remember by father got fired from his job as an accountant in LACSA, the defunct Costa Rican airline. The financial crisis affected thousands of families at the time. It was not until the early 90s that signs of recovery brought relief to lower income families.
The country did not really recover from that. The poverty rate is at about 20%, unemployment is very high, and the system is very broken. Still, while the country has a lot to offer, there are a myriad of issues that needs attention.
Jose Figueres had the foresight to understand that it was better for the future of the country to abolish the army. Currently, we need a leader that has the foresight and will to take action on the matters that will benefit Costa Rica in the long run.
