The Logos Scripture · The Stoa · Dialectic
David Bai · 2026-08-21 · hangs on The Book of Figueres 1.1
I
If a man comes to Costa Rica for the first time, what reaches him first is not politics but a kind of almost careless ease.
The country sits in Central America: Nicaragua to the north, Panama to the south, the Caribbean on one side and the Pacific on the other, the capital San José set in the central highlands. It has volcanoes, cloud forest, rainforest and a long coast on both seas; sloths, monkeys, birds in improbable colours, and green wherever you look.
It also has a phrase that has become something close to a national character: Pura Vida.
Literally, pure life. In Costa Rica it is more than the words. It is a greeting, a farewell, and an answer to "how are you." It is a posture toward living: things need not be perfect, and life itself is still worth having.
The phrase now taken as the emblem of the Costa Rican spirit did not begin there. It came from a Mexican comedy that reached the country in the 1950s, whose hero meets one misfortune after another and keeps facing life cheerfully. Pura Vida worked its way into ordinary speech and ended as a cultural sign of its own.
That is not to say Costa Rica met one misfortune after another and kept cheerful. Rather the opposite. Its economy is small beside Europe's or North America's, but within Central America its income per head, its social provision and its Human Development Index have sat near the top for decades. Literacy runs at about ninety-eight per cent. A universal health system means ordinary people are not ruined by illness. Life expectancy and general health are high.
Strangest of all, they have no army. There is a saying there: here a mother is happy when her child is born, because she knows her son will never be a soldier.
How did they manage it? Is the ease, the optimism, the sense of peace some inborn trait of Costa Ricans?
No.
A country's peace is sometimes not character but institutions. And institutions are built by people — sometimes by one particular person.
II
Costa Rica became one of the world's best-known countries without an army not because it never had a war, but because after it had one it put a question to itself seriously:
How much violence does a country actually need in order to protect its freedom?
In 1948 a man gave that question a startling answer.
When the civil war ended, José Figueres Ferrer — the politician people later called, with affection, Don Pepe — was the victor. He held the highest power in the revolutionary government, and he could have walked the road so familiar to Latin American politics: build personal authority, strengthen the army, clear away opponents, and turn a revolutionary leader into a long-term ruler.
He did close to the opposite.
He knocked a hole in the thick wall of the barracks with his own hands — not figuratively; he really took a hammer to it — and with that ended Costa Rica's standing army. Eighteen months after taking power, he handed that power back to an elected government. The 1949 constitution then made the choice institutional: no permanent army may be established, and forces raised by law for particular defence needs must answer to civilian power.
What this meant cannot be summed up in the word "peace."
Costa Rica did not make the decision inside a vacuum with no military tradition. It sits in Central America — a region torn through the twentieth century by coups, dictatorships, civil wars and armed conflict, one after another.
In that setting, a revolutionary leader fresh from winning a war chose to weaken the most direct instrument of his own power.
That is the genuinely incredible thing about José Figueres Ferrer.
It is not that he had no sword.
It is that having one, he chose to break it.
This is the José Figueres Ferrer we are going to speak of — Don Pepe. Don is the honorific; Pepe is what people called him.
III
Great politicians are usually remembered for the institutions they built, the ground they took, or the monuments that carry their names. In modern political history Don Pepe is a rare exception.
What defines him is not what he built but what he took down.
He took down the barracks. He took down the possibility of the army as political arbiter. He took down the road along which his own power could have kept expanding. He even took down the illusion a political leader falls into most easily — that his own presence is irreplaceable to the country.
And the choice did produce long institutional consequences.
The historical record of the Organization of American States notes that Costa Rica's social reforms and its building of health, education and social insurance came on gradually through the 1940s; the direction in resources and institutions that the abolition of the army stood for became an important symbol of Costa Rican social policy afterwards.
Here the credit has to go to the right man. The social insurance fund and the labour code were built between 1941 and 1943 by the government of Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia — the very side Don Pepe later took up arms against. He did not found that welfare system. What he did was keep it and push it further. That deserves more notice, not less: a man who had just won a civil war did not pull down his opponent's institutions along with everything else.
Later Costa Rica developed the thought — less money on weapons, more on people — into something like a national idea. In the 2000s President Óscar Arias pressed what he called the Costa Rica Consensus at the Organization of American States, urging developing countries to cut military spending and put more into education, health and housing.
So the Pura Vida Costa Rica we see today is not a tropical paradise that happened to dodge the storms of history.
It looks much more like the long result of a political experiment.
A country once asked, and asked seriously: if the army no longer decides politics, what does politics become?
If the national budget no longer buys weapons first, and puts more into schools and clinics, what happens?
If a political leader withdraws of his own accord after gaining power, rather than trying to prolong his rule, can the institutions outlive him?
These questions all point back to the same man: Don Pepe.
IV
None of what Don Pepe did was utopian. It was a restrained realism.
To understand what he did about ordinary people's lives, we first have to drop an over-simple modern category: the habit of filing every state intervention in the economy under communism or socialism.
Don Pepe's economic thinking was not Soviet central control. It was gradual social democracy, marked by European Fabianism. He saw the danger at both extremes: capitalism left to itself can throw the weak out of the market, while total state control of economic life strangles individual initiative, creativity and responsibility.
He chose neither end. He drew a line between them.
The banking system was placed under state control; water, electricity and other critical infrastructure became public monopolies, so that the state held the most important economic levers and ordinary farmers and small proprietors could reach credit that had been out of reach before. And at the same time, private property and free enterprise were not abolished.
In his conception, the state should hold up the floor beneath a person's existence: health, education, water, power, and basic social security. Above that floor, as much room as possible should be given back to the individual, so that human creativity can grow in relatively free conditions.
Why call this a restrained political judgement?
Because the state should make sure no one loses their dignity through poverty, and should not decide for anyone how to live.
This is perhaps the institutional background most worth noticing behind the later Pura Vida spirit.
"Pure life" is not only sun, beaches, rainforest and leisure.
For it to become a real social culture, one thing has to come first: ordinary people have to believe that tomorrow will be broadly like today — that children can go to school, that illness can be treated, that political power will not suddenly be seized by soldiers, that the government will not push the whole society into violence over a single election.
Behind ease there is usually a security that institutions supply.
What Don Pepe actually did was try to make that security institutional.
V
The abolition of the army was the true revolution: the breaking of the sword.
It is the most brilliant and most symbolic stroke in his political legacy.
In most political traditions of that era, the army was taken as the most direct symbol of national sovereignty. A country without an army looks easily like a country without any real capacity to defend itself.
What Don Pepe saw was a different layer of reality.
In a Central America of chronic instability, the standing armies of small republics were often not there to keep out foreign enemies. They became the instrument by which political elites fought each other for power. Once the army becomes the arbiter of national politics, the coup becomes an institutionalised possibility; and once the gun holds politics, the ballot easily becomes decoration.
So Don Pepe made a nearly counter-intuitive choice.
Not to strengthen the army, but to take it apart.
On 1 December 1948, at a ceremony at the Bellavista barracks, he announced the abolition of the standing army. What he destroyed in that moment was not only the military institution the building stood for, but a political logic long rooted in Latin America: that a state must rely on guns to hold order, and that political power must have violence behind it in the last instance.
Costa Rica later wrote the decision into its constitution. Article 12 of the 1949 constitution is explicit: the permanent army is abolished as a state institution; the country may keep the police force it needs, and any military force raised in special circumstances must be subordinate to civilian power.
The distinction matters a great deal.
Don Pepe was not naively supposing that the world would have no more wars, nor that a country needs no security forces at all.
His judgement was more specific:
A state needs to protect order. It does not necessarily need an army capable of seizing the state.
So he handed the political standing that had belonged to the military machine back to civilian government.
And a country's real capacity to defend itself does not live only in soldiers drawn up with rifles. It lives just as much in educated citizens, a healthy population, stable institutions, and a society willing to maintain its own order.
Don Pepe seems to have seen earlier than most that for a small republic, the greatest threat to security sometimes does not come from beyond the border, but from the people inside the country who hold the violence.
So he was not simply "against the army." He was redefining national security.
With a broken sword he bought a set of institutions that did not need a sword to hold itself up.
VI
Now look at the man himself: someone who refused mysticism.
Don Pepe's realism did not live only in political institutions. It ran through his private character and his inner life as well.
In a Latin American country saturated with religion, he admitted, with an almost stubborn intellectual honesty, that he was an agnostic.
He said:
"I would rather have frank ignorance — to say 'I do not know' — than to say that I put faith or belief in the place of knowledge."
That sentence may explain his way of thinking better than any political declaration.
He did not like pretending to know what he did not know.
Facing death, he equally refused the consolations of mysticism. He compared a man's death to a tree drying up:
"When I die, it will be as when a tree dries up. That is the end of it."
And he went on in something close to black humour: after death he would not be seeing his friends again, and when they did wrong he would not be turning up to pull at their legs.
It sounds cold, and it is exactly his character.
He would not use the promise of a next world to explain the suffering of this one, and he would not use divine will to lend his political judgements some transcendent authority. He refused to claim he knew the final answers of the universe, and so had nowhere to put his attention but this actual world.
Not knowing is not knowing.
And precisely because of that, his sense of responsibility for this world became more serious, not less.
If there is no afterlife to compensate us, fairness here matters more. If there is no mysterious power to correct our mistakes, then people have to carry the responsibility themselves.
It is a nearly severe realism.
VII
His character shows even in trivia.
Studying in Boston as a young man, he tried a pipe for a while and soon gave it up. The reason was not any theory about health. He found the pipe too much trouble.
He remembered later that smoking a pipe meant carrying three things about with you — the pipe, the matches and the tobacco — and he was forever leaving one of them behind.
More to the point, he thought the habit interfered with long stretches of study and concentration.
When he explained this to his father, a doctor, his father pointed out, half joking, that an explanation about "obstructing concentration" had a faintly mystical flavour to it.
The anecdote looks trivial and says a great deal about the shape of his mind.
Toward abstractions that cannot be verified, cannot be operated, cannot be brought down into actual life, he was instinctively wary. He liked problems that could be observed, tested, solved.
Even before the largest questions a life has — death, faith, meaning — he preferred to admit ignorance rather than manufacture a beautiful answer.
It is a rare discipline of mind:
Better to accept an imperfect reality than to wrap it in fantasy to make it easier to take.
VIII
Thrift as political ethics, not a performance of virtue
That realism came back around, in the end, to how he lived.
Don Pepe lived quite plainly. This had to do with his family's history — they had known poverty and hunger in the Napoleonic wars — and with a plain principle he held to for a long time:
So long as anyone lacks what is necessary, no one has the right to take the superfluous for granted.
The weight of that line is not that it pities the poor. It is that it binds the rich.
To him, governing was not a profession for acquiring wealth, position and glory. It was work carrying responsibility to a common life.
The idea continued a household tradition. His grandmother used to say something extremely plain: better it should burst you than be thrown away.
There is no grand political theory behind it, and there is a deep ethic of living: resources are not a given, and abundance is not a natural right.
Don Pepe even defined comfort unusually simply. He recalled warmly that for many years a roof that did not leak was already a great luxury to him — at least at night he did not have to keep shifting his bed around to get out from under the drips.
This way of living was not the moral theatre of an ascetic.
It was closer to a self-restraint.
Because a political figure who lives long in luxury will sooner or later begin looking for reasons to prove the luxury justified; and once he needs political power to protect his way of life, public power has quietly started turning into private interest.
Don Pepe seems to have understood that early.
IX
Don Pepe and Lee Kuan Yew: opposite roads, the same realism
There is an interesting and somewhat counter-intuitive comparison between Don Pepe and Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew.
Their institutional choices were almost exactly opposed.
Don Pepe abolished the army. Lee built a highly modern, well-equipped military force.
But put each choice back into the history and geography the man faced, and the thinking behind them turns out to be extremely alike.
Neither was a doctrinaire about institutions. Both were realists.
Lee faced a small island state with limited resources in a complicated geopolitical setting. He understood clearly that without sufficient deterrence, Singapore's survival could not be guaranteed.
Don Pepe faced a different problem.
For Costa Rica the real danger was not a powerful external enemy but a domestic army with political ambitions. Keep that force, and soldiers may end as the final arbiters of political power.
So Lee strengthened the state's violence to ensure the state survived; Don Pepe abolished the state's violence to ensure the democracy survived.
This is not a simple difference of values. It is a different response to different real conditions.
There is a deeper thing they share: neither was willing to let race, religion or identity become the ruler's permanent instrument for mobilising society. Both tried to build a secular and relatively tolerant order in which different groups could live together for a long time inside one national frame.
What they were really after was not the permanence of a leader but a set of institutions that could outlive one.
That may be the hardest work in politics.
Not to hold power forever, but to leave a country that still runs after you have gone.
X
The hardest political choice is to step back
Don Pepe once said something worth turning over more than once:
"If a man does not live as he thinks, he will end by thinking as he has lived."
He was careful about that line: he said it came from a Mexican — not a Frenchman, not an Englishman — and he wanted that made clear. It was also, in effect, the most important political practice of his own life.
Once a man has lived a long time inside power, power will in the end reshape his thinking.
At first he may tell himself he holds power for the sake of reform. Later he concludes he cannot leave, because the reform is unfinished. Later still he begins to believe that only he can save the country.
At the end, power is no longer the instrument for realising the ideal. It has become the ideal.
Don Pepe seems to have stayed wary of that road throughout.
So when he already had everything he needed to establish personal rule, he chose to hand power over.
There is an objection that has to be answered first: the eighteen months had been agreed in advance. In May 1948, before the junta took office, he made a pact with Ulate — power to be handed over after eighteen months, with six more allowed him by the terms. So it can be said that he did not choose to hand over power. He merely handed it over on schedule.
The answer is that a pact can be torn up, and he had the means to tear this one. In April 1949 his own Minister of Public Security, Edgar Cardona, turned troops against the junta — the Cardonazo — and Figueres put it down. That was four months after the wall came down and seven months before the handover. Which is to say that up to the moment he handed power over, he still had armed men who answered to him, and had just demonstrated that he could beat a challenge. Central America in those years tore up heavier agreements than that one.
He did not tear it. At eighteen months he handed the seat to Ulate — the man whose election had been annulled in the first place. What bound him was not the paper. It was that he was willing to hold himself to the paper.
This is probably the most important political decision of his life.
Abolishing an army takes courage. Giving up power takes a deeper self-restraint.
He left no personal dynasty, built no cult of the leader, and did not turn the army into a private inheritance. What he left was an independent electoral system, a well-educated citizenry, and a republic that could keep running without him.
That is also why the name "Don Pepe" never became a personal myth.
His real legacy is exactly this: he meant to act by the institutions.
He was elected president twice more, once in 1953 and once in 1970, with twelve years between the two terms. It was not that he did not want power. It was that he took power the way the institutions provided.
XI
Today, when people talk about Costa Rica, what usually comes to mind is rainforest, volcanoes, beaches, ecotourism, and a phrase so relaxed it seems to carry no politics at all:
Pura Vida.
But there is a question genuinely worth thinking about:
Why could that phrase take root in Costa Rica?
How can a country turn "living" itself into a public culture?
The answer is of course not only the absence of an army, nor only beautiful country. Behind it is a whole set of institutions and historical experience laid down over a long time: political power transferred more by election than by the gun, national resources put more into education and health than into keeping a standing army that might intervene in politics. Writing the abolition of the permanent army into the 1949 constitution was the clearest legal expression of that historical choice.
So what is really interesting about Pura Vida is not how relaxed it sounds.
It is that a fairly serious political proposition is hiding behind it:
Only after a society's basic security is assured does it truly have standing to talk about living at ease.
What is most admirable in Don Pepe may not be that he held some great political ideal, but that he refused to turn himself into the ideal.
He did not believe a country must depend on an army to be safe, so he broke the sword.
He did not believe a leader must hold power for life to finish his work, so he left of his own accord.
He would not claim to know what comes after death, so he accepted the limits of a human being.
He did not think wealth naturally means privilege, so he chose plainness.
He did not think he held the final answers, so he kept the honesty of saying "I do not know."
On the surface these have nothing to do with one another. In fact they come from one character: a continuing suspicion of power, of illusion, and of one's own importance.
He would rather trust institutions that can be seen than myths that cannot be checked; rather accept human limits than cover reality with a grand narrative; rather let a country lose its army than let the army hold the power to decide the country's fate.
That is Don Pepe's realism, with nothing dressed over it.
He understood that people die, that trees dry up, that leaders leave the stage in the end.
What is worth leaving behind is not a man's name but a set of institutions that still runs after the man is dead.
So the two images in the title point to the same answer.
The broken sword is restraint before power.
The drying tree is honesty before death.
And between the two, Don Pepe left the whole responsibility of a politician to the living.
This may be what is most worth the world's looking at Costa Rica again for:
A country's real "pure life" is never an escape from reality.
Exactly the opposite.
It begins with being clear-eyed about it.
The Stoa →The Stoa is not scripture. Everything here is signed, may be wrong, may be refuted, and may never be edited into the scripture. (cf. The Rule 7.3)