This Country Has NO Army! How is This Possible?

In this video will explore the situation of a country with no military!

The questions are:
How did they get here?
What are the benefits and Dangers of this policy? and…
Can a country exist in such a unique position?

Despite its current lack of a standing military, the country of Costa Rica actually has had a tumultuous history that
involved a lot of war and bloodshed.
I mean, there is a reason why the country's flag has the color red on it, to symbolize the heroes who died defending the territory and its people.

Under the Spanish Empire, the Spanish saw Costa Rica as a colony without a strategic advantage and so as a consequence, there were not a lot of armed forces stationed there.

However, economic decisions made in Spain in the 19th century didn’t sit well with the people of Costa Rica, which led to a “cultural awakening” that resulted in Spain losing popularity not just in Costa Rica, but all across Central America. This unrest sparked various civil wars fought for independence from the Spanish Empire. The war against the Spanish was eventually won in 1821, but that didn’t spell the end of bloodshed just yet.

After the independence, the United Provinces of Central America was formed.
In a few years, this new nation saw a host of regional conflicts, largely between Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. This caused a civil war which was hard fought by all sides.

The war and conflict lasted for a significant amount of time and it ended with Costa Rica finally declaring independence from the United Provinces of Central America.

However, after all of that, the country still had more conflict to come. In the year 1850, an American lawyer named William Walker tried hard to annex the countries of Costa Rica and Nicaragua in the name of the United States.

This resulted in the country fighting to drive away Walker’s forces until 1856 when Walker’s fort was burned to the ground by a Costa Rican named Juan Santamaria.

Let’s jump forward to 1947 when The Rio Treaty or TIAR by its Spanish acronym, was signed by Latin America and the US, the mutual security agreement created during the Cold War, an instrument invoked mainly against perceived communist menaces.
The Organization of American States (OAS) was established a year later in Bogotá, with the purpose of increasing cooperation among the American states and strengthening their territorial integrity.
In this geopolitical circumstance, the Costa Rican elites counted on these mechanisms to ensure their security vis-à-vis their neighbors, in particular their northern neighbor, Nicaragua. As a matter of fact, the OAS was called to mediate between the two countries in 1949, 1955, and during the Central American conflicts of the 1980s.
Finally, here we are in 1949 when President Jose Figueres Ferrer took the, abolishing the military, proposal to the constitutional assembly, who approved it and drafted it into the constitution.
Since then, Costa Rica has not had a military, instead, they have had a special police force.

Today we can see the advantages and disadvantages of the decision.

The first and most obvious benefit is the savings. There are a lot of countries in the world that spend the majority of their funding on the military, and this can be costly. By abolishing the military, Costa Rica saved a lot of money which they could use to invest in other sectors of society. And that’s exactly what they did.
The money saved from removing the military was then used for the education, social security, and healthcare of the country’s citizens. The result of this is political, economic, and social stability that is largely unseen in that region of Central America.