Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,

the past brought to life by those who were there.

This week Patty Hurst kidnapped American heiress turned revolutionary.

Seeing this image of this woman with a Kalashnikov and a beret

saying that she was a member of a radical organization stuck with me for my whole life.

Also how psychologists discovered in the 1980s that moving your eyes can help ease the effects of trauma.

What eye movements do is they cause certain changes in the communication between the cortical

hemispheres.

The client starts thinking about the memory differently, the perspective on its shifts.

Plus we've got the story of Sweden's most spectacular tourist attraction and one of the

great American memoirs, Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird sings.

In 1931, when I was three and my brother Bailey four, we arrived wearing tags on our

wrists.

To whom it may concern.

That's all coming up later in the podcast.

But first to Costa Rica, famed for its eco-tourism, its rainforests and volcanoes, and for being a beacon of peace and stability in a turbulent region.

Much of that reputation is built on the fact that 70 years ago, Costa Rica became the first and only country in Latin America to abolish its

own armed forces following a brief but bloody war.

To this day it is still one of the few nations in the world without a standing army.

Mike Lanchen has spoken to a 94-year-old man who served in the capital San Jose that President Jose Figueres,

wielding a large hammer symbolically knocked down one of the walls of the Bea Vista Army barracks.

Enrique Obragon was a sergeant in the Costa Rican Army at the time.

...