How Costa Rica put the vote count beyond Congress and the army

Why a vote count started the civil war

Costa Rica went into 1948 with an electoral tribunal already in place. The government of Teodoro Picado, fearing that the ruling party would be accused of fixing the result for Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia, had placed that year's presidential election under the control of an independent tribunal, the first time an election in the country had been run that way.

The vote was held on 8 February 1948. By a split decision of two to one, the tribunal declared that the opposition candidate, the journalist Otilio Ulate of the National Union Party, had won. A study of the conflict published by the United States Army War College in 2023 gives his share as 55.28% of the vote.

The tribunal had the power to declare the result and no power to make it stick. Calderón called the result fraudulent and petitioned Congress, where his National Republican Party and its ally, the communist Popular Vanguard Party, held a majority. On 1 March 1948 the legislature voted to annul the election. That same day police surrounded the house of Carlos Luis Valverde, Ulate's acting campaign manager, and Valverde was shot dead on his own doorstep. Ulate was later captured and imprisoned.

José Figueres Ferrer, a landowner who had taken no part in the election, had been preparing for a war before it. On 12 March his National Liberation Army exchanged fire with government forces. It faced a regular army of about 1,000 men in 1948, according to the War College study, along with some 3,000 communist militia and 500 soldiers sent from Nicaragua. Cartago fell on 12 April, Picado signed the Pact of the Mexican Embassy on 19 April and Figueres's forces entered San José on 24 April. About 2,000 people died in the 44 days.

The electoral record behind the war was a long one. Britannica's history describes the election of José Joaquín Rodríguez in 1889 as the first entirely free and honest election in Central America, and the country adopted direct suffrage for the election of 1913, a literacy test for voters in 1920 and the secret ballot in 1925. The one military government of the century, Federico Tinoco Granados's, ran from 1917 to 1919. What 1948 showed was a gap in that record: the vote could be cast in secret and counted by a tribunal, and a legislature could still set the count aside.

What the new constitution took away from Congress

Figueres governed for 18 months at the head of a provisional junta, which oversaw the election of a Constituent Assembly in December 1948. That assembly adopted the constitution of 1949, and the junta handed power to Ulate on 8 November 1949. It is still in force, and the English translation cited here is of its 2020 revision.

The new constitution addressed the gap directly. Article 9 vests government in three powers, the legislative, the executive and the judicial, and then adds a fourth body: a Supreme Tribunal of Elections, "with the rank and independence of the Powers of the State", with exclusive responsibility for organising, directing and supervising every act of suffrage. The BTI country report of 2026 describes it as functioning as an autonomous fourth branch of government. In Spanish it is the Tribunal Supremo de Elecciones, and it is generally called the TSE.

The articles that follow close every route by which the 1948 result was overturned. Article 102 gives the tribunal the definitive count of the vote for president, vice presidents, deputies, municipal councils and constituent assemblies, and the definitive declaration of who was elected president, within thirty days of the vote. Article 103 says its decisions have no recourse except an action for prevarication. Article 10, which assigns constitutional review to a specialised chamber of the Supreme Court, excludes the tribunal's declaration of an election from constitutional challenge. Article 121, listing the legislature's powers, gives it the authority to make and interpret laws "except" in electoral matters.

The tribunal sits in three titular magistrates and six substitutes, appointed by the Supreme Court of Justice by a vote of at least two thirds of its members. From one year before a general election to six months after it, two substitutes join to make a tribunal of five. Magistrates serve six years, one titular and two substitutes are renewed every two years, and they hold the immunities of the members of the supreme powers.

The legislature keeps its hand on electoral law, under a brake. Article 97 obliges it to consult the tribunal on every electoral bill, and to override the tribunal's opinion takes two thirds of the 57 deputies. In the six months before and the four months after a popular election, a bill the tribunal has opposed cannot become law at all.

The same constitution, in Britannica's summary, established women's suffrage, abolished institutionalised racism, nationalised the banking system and gave great powers to the state corporations known as autonomous institutions. Suffrage itself is defined in Article 93 as a "primordial and obligatory civic function". Wikipedia's account of Costa Rican politics notes that the obligation is not enforced.

Why the electoral tribunal can direct the police

The constitution of 1949 left the tribunal without an army to fear. Article 12 reads: "The Army as a permanent institution is proscribed." Its second sentence provides "the necessary forces of police" for public order, and its third allows military forces to be organised only by a continental agreement or for national defence, always subordinate to civil power and forbidden to deliberate or make declarations.

The two decisions are dated differently in the sources. Wikipedia dates the abolition to 1 December 1948, when Figueres struck a wall of the Cuartel Bellavista barracks with a mallet in San José. UNESCO's Memory of the World register, which inscribed the documents in 2017 on Costa Rica's nomination, dates the abolition to decree 249 of the founding junta and gives 11 October 1949. Article 12 then put it into the constitution. Costa Rica: history covers the morning at the barracks.

Article 102 puts the police into the electoral system. The tribunal may issue, "with regard to the public force, the pertinent measures for the electoral processes to develop in conditions of unrestricted freedom", and enforce them itself or through delegates. Article 102 also lets it investigate any complaint of political partisanship by a public servant, and a finding of guilt removes that servant from office and bars them from public office for at least two years.

What carries the guns now is the Public Force, created by the Ministry of Public Security in 1996 by merging the Civil Guard, the Rural Assistance Guard and the Frontier Guards. The coast guard reports to the same ministry outside it. A Special Intervention Unit of about 70 members, organised along military lines and officially a civilian police unit, reports to the Minister of the Presidency.

Two other clauses keep force a legislative matter. Article 121 requires the Assembly's assent before foreign troops enter the territory or warships are stationed in its ports, and makes the Assembly authorise any declaration of a state of national defence. In late 2010, when Nicaragua began dredging the San Juan and sent troops to the area around Isla Calero, Costa Rica mobilised members of its police force and filed a brief with the International Court of Justice.

How the constitution keeps the president from staying on

The president is elected directly for four years, with two vice presidents, on the first Sunday of February, and takes office on 8 May. A candidate needs more than 40% of the valid vote under Article 138, and the runoff that follows when nobody reaches it was first needed in 2002, after a new party founded by Ottón Solís took 26% of the vote. Article 132 bars anyone who has held the presidency in the eight years before an election from standing, and it bars the president's close relatives, recent ministers, the TSE's own magistrates and the heads of autonomous institutions. Article 134 calls any act against "the principle of alternation" treason, and makes the liability imprescriptible.

The rule has moved twice. An amendment of 1969 limited presidents to a single term. In September 2000 the constitutional chamber refused a petition from the former president Óscar Arias to rescind it; in April 2003, after two of the four judges in that majority had been replaced, it reconsidered and declared the amendment null. That reopened the eight-year rule of the original text, and Arias won the 2006 election with 40.9% against 39.8% for Solís after a month-long manual recount.

Inside the four years the office is thin. The president cannot veto the budget, so the Legislative Assembly decides the year's main bill alone, and the BTI report of 2026 describes an executive with almost no decree powers and a limited veto. What the president does hold is the right to appoint a cabinet with no confirmation by the Assembly. The BTI report counts three bills approved out of 70 submitted by the government of Rodrigo Chaves between 2022 and 2024, and in June 2025 the TSE barred him from taking part in the 2026 campaign.

What the Assembly and the constitutional chamber decide

The Legislative Assembly is a single chamber of 57 deputies, elected for four years by proportional representation in each of the seven provinces. After every general census, Article 106 has the TSE reassign seats among the provinces by population, so the electoral tribunal also draws the apportionment. Deputies may not serve consecutive terms; a deputy may stand again after sitting one out. The Assembly's own account traces the legislative power to the Ley Fundamental del Estado Libre de Costa Rica of 25 January 1825.

The Assembly elects the 22 magistrates of the Supreme Court of Justice, for eight-year terms, along with the Comptroller General, and by two thirds it can place a president before the Supreme Court for trial. The judiciary's operating budget is protected by a constitutional provision granting it 6% of the state's expected revenue, which the BTI report treats as the guarantee of its independence.

The body that has changed the system most since 1949 is the constitutional chamber of the Supreme Court, created in 1989 and known as the Sala IV. Anyone, including a non-citizen, can bring it a writ of amparo without a lawyer or specialised language, its decisions carry the force of law and they cannot be appealed. Deputies can send it bills before a vote, and the BTI report calls it a key veto player in the legislative process. In the BTI report's assessment it has become the arbiter of quarrels between the executive and the legislature; it twice ruled unconstitutional a package of reforms, the "Jaguar Law", that the government elected in 2022 intended to put to a referendum.

Oversight runs further. A Comptroller General, a Procurator General and an Ombudsman's Office, the Defensoría de los Habitantes, operate autonomously, and the Comptroller's control over public bodies is strict enough that the BTI report counts it as a limit on the executive's flexibility.

How the two-party system came apart

From 1990 to 2002 the party system was a two-party one, held by the National Liberation Party, which grew out of Figueres's rebel army, and the Social Christian Unity Party. The 2002 election broke it, with new parties winning more seats in the Assembly than ever before. The BTI report puts the effective number of parties at an average of 2.3 during the two-party period and 4.9 across the four elections since 2010.

Turnout moved with it. According to the TSE's own data as cited by the BTI report, abstention was under 20% for most of the period from 1953 to 1998, rose to 30% in 1998 and reached 40% in the first round of 2022. In that election about 65% of voters chose a different party from the one they had backed in 2018, the Citizens' Action Party, which had won the presidency in 2014 and 2018, took 0.66% of the vote and elected no deputy, and the National Liberation Party took 19 seats against 10 for the new governing party.

Split tickets have become ordinary. Voters choose one party for president and another for the Assembly, and the BTI report finds that the governing party after both the 2018 and the 2022 elections held 18% of the seats. In the 2024 OECD survey of trust in public institutions, 13% of Costa Ricans expressed high or moderately high confidence in political parties and 26% in the Legislative Assembly, against 44% for the courts.

When citizens have overruled the Assembly

The street and the ballot have each stopped a law. During the presidency that began in 1998, a bill known as the "Combo", which would have opened the electricity and telecommunications markets held by the Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad and was backed by both main parties, passed the first of its three required votes and set off the largest protests since 1970. The government shelved it.

Article 105 lets 5% of registered voters call a referendum to approve or repeal a law, and Article 102 sets the turnout for the result to bind the state: 30% of the roll for an ordinary law and 40% for a constitutional reform. Budget, tax, monetary and security matters are excluded. The first national referendum was held on 7 October 2007, on the Central American Free Trade Agreement with the United States, A former presidential candidate had won the TSE's permission that April to gather more than 100,000 signatures, and the president then called the vote himself. The agreement passed with 51.5%.

What the Indigenous Law promised the territories

The Indigenous Law of 1977, Law 6172, recognised the traditional Indigenous organisations, gave Indigenous peoples legal status and set out mechanisms to keep their land from passing to outsiders, along with funds for expropriation and compensation. Its third article makes the reserves inalienable and non-transferable: a non-Indigenous person may not rent, lease or buy land inside them, and any such sale is void. IWGIA's report on 2022 states that the law has never been implemented.

The figures in that report show the distance. It records 24 Indigenous territories covering 3,344 square kilometres, almost 7% of the national territory as of 2022, which it calls the area stated in the founding decrees, since a large part has been occupied by non-Indigenous landholders: 52.3% of the Bribri territory at Kekoldi, 53.1% of the Brunca territory at Boruca, 56.4% of the Teribe territory at Térraba and 88.4% of the Huetar territory at Zapatón. Under the National Plan for the Recovery of Indigenous Lands for 2016 to 2026, the United Nations Special Rapporteur reported in 2022 that no restitution had taken place.

A later regulation gave the territories a form of representation of the state's design, the Indigenous Integral Development Association, supervised by the National Directorate for Community Development. The Special Rapporteur described these associations as imposed state institutions that report to the executive branch, unsuited to representing peoples with their own systems of government.

Costa Rica ratified ILO Convention 169 in 1993, and Article 1 of the constitution, amended in 2015, now calls the republic "multiethnic and multicultural". A bill on the autonomous development of Indigenous peoples was published in the official gazette in 1994, and by 2022, according to IWGIA, the Assembly had gone 28 years without debating it. The Sala IV moved in 2022, ruling that anyone who acquired land inside a territory after the 1977 law came into force had acted in bad faith and that the purchase was void. Indigenous people make up about 3% of the population, by the BTI report's figure in 2026.

Where Costa Rica places itself abroad

A state without an army has put its disputes before courts. Costa Rica and four other republics founded the Central American Court of Justice in the early 20th century, which ruled for Costa Rica against Nicaragua over the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty of 1916 and dissolved in 1918 after Nicaragua withdrew. On 13 July 2009 the International Court of Justice upheld Costa Rica's right to sail the San Juan, which forms the border, for commerce and for tourism. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the United Nations University for Peace are both based in the country, and in 2018 Costa Rica's own request for an advisory opinion to that court led to its ruling on same-sex marriage.

Costa Rica is a member of the United Nations and the Organization of American States. Costa Rica became the 38th member of the OECD on 25 May 2021, after an accession process that began in April 2015, and its third term on the United Nations Security Council, a two-year seat won in the 2007 election, ended on 31 December 2009. It belongs to the Central American Integration System and, according to the BTI report, does not take part in the Central American Parliament or the Central American Court.

Recognition has shifted where it served the country's interest. On 1 June 2007 Costa Rica moved its recognition from Taiwan to the People's Republic of China, a decision the then president described as economic necessity, and on 18 March 2009 it restored relations with Cuba, broken since 10 September 1961. Luis Alberto Monge, president from 1982, faced pressure from the United States to help the Contra forces based in Honduras; Britannica records that he declared Costa Rica officially neutral and cooperated with the United States in secret. His successor, Óscar Arias, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 for his efforts to end the civil wars then running in several Central American countries.