“While countries keep enhancing military budget, Costa Rica has gone for over 70 years without an army. Living in peace and relying on international agreements as its only means of defense, while dedicating larger portions of available public resources, not to prepare for war, but to enhance minds through an ever increasing public education program, to protect bodies by means of a universal health care system, and to protect and strive to assure an ecologically balanced environment.”
Delivered at: “In a Gentle way, you can shake the world” Mahatma Gandhi – The Man of Millennium Event by H.E. Rodrigo A. CARAZO, Permanent Representative of Costa Rica to the United Nations October 1st, 2019