Costa Rica: Democracy and Antimilitarism

The Central American countries won their independence in 1821 as a by-product of the Spanish defeat in Mexico. All were part of a loose Central American federation, which fell apart in 1838 because of regional and ideological conflicts between anticlerical, commercially oriented liberals and more traditional conservatives. The Costa Ricans didn’t take these disputes quite so seriously as their neighbors in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, largely because they were too po...