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Costa Rica - Military Personnel

According to the World Bank, armed forces personnel are active duty military personnel, including paramilitary forces if the training, organization, equipment, and control suggest they may be used to support or replace regular military forces.

At the time of the Costa Rican civil war in 1948, according to then-president Teodor Picado Michaiski, "the army was ridiculously small, it did not surpass 300 men." Other accounts put the strength of the regular army as high as 1,000. but it was not a highly professional force. The officer corps was appointed by each presidential administration from among the ranks of its supporters, who were usually members of local elite groups with little or no military training or experience. When administrations changed, officers were formally promoted and then dismissed. Without a professional officer corps the army had little experience or institutional esprit de corps and was poorly organized and under-disciplined.

Since 1949 the public security forces have not constituted a significant burden to the economy. The approximately 7,500 memnbers of the public security forces amounted to only 1.2 percent of the estimated 619,000 Costa Rican males aged 15 to 49. Because of the small size of the security forces, the relatively high level of literacy and technical competence throughout the economy, and the guardsmen's freedom to leave the force at anytime, the securitv forces were not considered to be a drain on the national pool of skilled manpower, even during times when there was a high demand for workers by the civilian economy.

The nature of the public security forces was defined when, during the 1950s, the custom was established to award positions in the Civil Guard and Rural Guard on the basis of political patronage, as had been the case with the pre-civil war national army. When one administration was replaced by another from an opposing party, most guardsmen submitted their resignations to the new authorities and were replaced by loyalists from the opposing political camp.

It was estimated that the turnover between administrations ranged between 50 and 90 percent of the total guard personnel. Moreover, some of those who were retained were sometimes raised several grades or were promoted from the enlisted ranks to be relatively senior officers. As a result, the efficiency and professionalism of the force suffered. Training courses. including relatively expensive courses abroad, were wasted, and policemen often left the guard carrying their weapons and uniforms with them.

Civil and Rural Guardsmen were all volunteers who were generally recruited from among the poorer and less literate elements of Costa Rica's population. There was no contract or minimum term of duty to bind a guardsman to the service; one could leave whenever one wished. For this reason and because of the low pay, the lack of a housing allowance or barracks, and the virtual impossibility of making a career as a guardsman, turnover within the forces was high. Reportedly, attrition was 10 percent a month in the late 1970s, but in the early, 1980s, given the country's economic difliculties and high unemployment, it aplpe'ared that serving with the Civil Guard or the Rural Guard was becoming more appealing to Costa Ricans.

Little information was available on the scope and structure of Civil Guard training. The curriculum of the Francisco J. Orlich National Police School, established in 1963, was organized to train all Civil Guard companies on a rotating basis. The quality of training, which emphasized law enforcement rather than military skills, reportedly suffered because of a dearth of trained instructors. In the early 1980s selected guardsmen and units also received training from United States and Panamanian instructors. The limitations of Civil Guard training were compounded by the fact that the system of replacing most of the force every four years prevented men and units from gaining experience to supplement their training.

The following graph depicts the confusion of IISS in undersanding Costa Rica's security establisment. From 1985 to 1994 IISS took at face value the assertion that Costa Rica had no army. Then from 1995 to 2005 IISS started counting just about everyone who wore a uniform. Then from 2005 on the headcount was limited to the National Guard.