LIMÓN, Costa Rica—Once a beacon of democratic stability in a region beset by lawlessness, Costa Rica is facing a surge in drug violence that threatens to upend the country’s political system.
Last year, Costa Rican and European officials announced that they had broken up a criminal network that had been sending cocaine to Europe in containers of frozen yucca. But in July, Chaves’s finance ministry announced tens of millions of dollars in cuts to the judicial branch’s budget. Panama, he added, faces similar challenges, but has much more experience than Costa Rica taking on major criminal organizations. State Department . APM Terminals, which operates the port, declined to comment. Transnational criminal groups pay local Costa Rican affiliates in cocaine, and local gangs then sell the drug domestically. Turf wars over control of this local market have led to the skyrocketing homicide rate, which is more than twice as high in Limón province as the national average. “That’s how we’ve seen a staggering increase in homicides. “Many of the victims are linked to these criminal groups, but the number of collateral victims has also grown exponentially. But two years ago, as violence consumed the city, she stopped. So far this year, two young men have been shot and killed within a few blocks of her house. “And we don’t see law enforcement doing anything about it. Fernández’s party lacks the supermajority in the legislature necessary for any constitutional reforms to the judiciary. The judicial branch includes the attorney general’s office, the courts and the Judicial Investigation Department, which has played a major role in many drug-trafficking cases. International organizations registered concern, with the United Nations special rapporteur for the independence of judges calling the cuts “worrying news. Judicial officials are preparing a legal challenge to the budget cuts.
The growing drug trade has reshaped life in and around Limón, a city of 70,000. For 20 years, Marjorie Hills sold lunches outside of her home in Limón. Because her neighbors didn’t like to linger outside, even during daylight, sales collapsed.
The cold makes the drugs harder for dogs to detect, officials said, while packing the cocaine alongside other white powder helped evade scanners. “Larger cargoes are a godsend to smugglers,” said Zuñiga, the former State Department official. Since 2020, the year after the port opened, Costa Rica has been “the number one transshipment point for cocaine headed from South America to the United States and Europe,” according to the U.S. Though it was always grittier than the beaches and rainforests that draw millions of tourists, residents said that until the past few years it felt like a relatively safe place to live. It’s the result of those in-kind payments being made by major organizations based in Mexico, Colombia and Europe,” said Mauricio Boraschi, a deputy attorney general. In one case, the man’s mother screamed and cried over his body in the road until authorities arrived, Hills said. “They’re killing our children, our siblings, our relatives, our neighbors,” she said. Chaves has said the cuts are part of a plan to address the national debt.
In addition to building the new prison, Chaves signed a constitutional amendment allowing for the extradition of Costa Rica citizens accused of drug trafficking. “But in Costa Rica, building prisons won’t solve the problem. “Why has this turned into a vicious cycle, where the police arrest people and the judiciary releases them? In the months since, her battle with the judicial branch has exploded into a political civil war. Fernández accused the judiciary of being infiltrated by organized crime, filed a criminal complaint against judges of the constitutional court in a fight over judicial appointments, and slashed the judiciary’s budget. Judicial-branch officials and opposition politicians say Fernández and her party are making a raw power grab. The fight over how to respond to the security crisis underscores a growing trend across Latin America: Political leaders from El Salvador to Ecuador are increasingly urging voters to give up democratic protections in exchange for promises to end the violence. “There’s very little patience in the population for rule-of-law arguments. Until the past few years, drug cartels had little effect on life in Costa Rica, which boasts one of the strongest economies in Latin America, with a broad middle class. Tourists fill the arrivals lounge at the airport each day, then head to the pristine beaches, or to catch glimpses of sloths in the rainforest. Still, Costa Rica remained an inviting target for drug traffickers looking to move their product north from South America. Located a short boat ride from the coca-growing fields in Colombia, the country has access to both the Pacific Coast, where most drugs are smuggled into the country, and the Atlantic, the hub for exports. This year, Costa Rica extradited a former supreme court justice and minister of security to the U.S. to face drug-trafficking charges—a case the ruling party has held up as an example of corruption in the judiciary. Chaves’s rhetoric stung the political establishment. He warred with La Nación, a major Costa Rican newspaper, which published articles outlining allegations of sexual harassment against Chaves when he was at the World Bank. Chaves denied the charges but received a demotion in their wake. Several former U.S. officials questioned whether Chaves made Costa Rica safer. “We’re seeing the Bukele effect taking hold across the Americas. As Limón province grew more violent in recent years, Lariza Brenes and her husband, Gerson Rosales, an officer with the national police, stopped leaving the house much. When they’d go to the beach a few miles away, Rosales would often recognize local drug traffickers. The traffickers recognized Rosales, too: Once, when he and Brenes went to the grocery store, they returned to find their car tires had been slashed. Rosales’s death has since become a flashpoint in the national debate over how to confront the expanding reach of the criminal organizations. Soon after, she proposed a series of bills—including a law named for Rosales—designed to increase criminal penalties. “She’s someone who’s sincerely trying to fight against what’s going on in Costa Rica. She’s trying to get things done. Write to Ian Lovett at [email protected]
In Costa Rica, frustration with the status quo set off a political earthquake in 2022, when the country narrowly elected Rodrigo Chaves, a former World Bank official who vowed to tackle corruption in the political system. The country gained international acclaim by abolishing its military nearly 80 years ago, and its stable political system—with robust checks and balances, and elections controlled by an independent tribunal—helped turn Costa Rica into a regional hub for high-tech manufacturing. With the opening in 2019 of APM’s Moín Container Terminal, just outside Limón, on the Caribbean coast, criminal groups saw a chance to move drugs through Costa Rica at an altogether different scale, law-enforcement officials said. Flor Ocampo Díaz, 33, a municipal employee in Limón, said a constitutional reform was needed to let the government tackle criminal groups. As violence was starting to subsume Costa Rica, in 2022, Rodrigo Chaves stepped into the presidency and made cracking down on crime the centerpiece of his administration. Stephen Madden, director of Costa Rica’s Drug Enforcement Police, said the government’s strategy is working: His agency has added 100 new officers in the last two years, and drug seizures in Costa Rica rebounded to 2021 levels last year. In May, rumors circulated among police officers in Batán, where Rosales worked, that the gang was paying around $2,000 for every officer they killed, Brenes said. That month, Rosales, 28, and his partner were out on patrol when two alleged members of a local gang shot and killed him from behind.
Because there are few other economic opportunities in the area, jeison Arce, chief of Limon’s municipal police, said many teenagers join gangs.
Fernández said shortly after taking office in May. Throngs of Costa Ricans took to the street this month in a show of support for the judicial branch, waving signs with messages like, “We are afraid of dictatorship” and “Don’t touch our independent judiciary. “This definitely benefits organized crime,” said Carlo Díaz, Costa Rica’s attorney general, adding that proposed cuts to the judiciary’s budget “could create chaos that would facilitate government decisions aimed at limiting citizens’ rights. Ricardo Zuñiga, a former State Department official who worked extensively in Central America, said that in attacking the judiciary, Fernández and Chaves are seeking to kneecap the one branch of government they don’t control. “There’s a high risk they will be successful,” he said. Fernandez, whose office didn’t respond to requests for comment, has repeatedly said her goal is to reform the country’s institutions, not take over the judiciary. After Chaves publicly mused last month about dictatorship and shutting the judiciary down, she said news outlets were spreading a false narrative that she wanted to be a dictator. “Give me one example of a constitutional norm, a law, a judicial opinion,” she said, “that any minister or I haven’t followed. His department is doing what it can to combat the tide of drugs, he said, but its resources are limited—his officers have only three patrol cars. “It’s a bit of an uneven battle, because drug traffickers have vastly greater financial resources,” he said. “Give our president, Laura, the opportunity to move forward and do something for the country,” she said. After he criticized Costa Rica’s system of government as a “perfect dictatorship,” eight former presidents of the country released a joint statement defending Costa Rica’s tradition of respecting the rule of law and human rights. One former U.S. official said the State Department under Biden had been reluctant to give Chaves more hardware, viewing him as more interested in splashy technology than in improving the country’s police force. Robert Muggah, head of the Igarapé Institute, a policy group based in Rio de Janeiro that studies crime, said Costa Rica faces a different challenge than El Salvador, with transnational criminal organizations now deeply embedded in the country. And that means more talk of building bigger prisons, extending sentences,” Muggah said. “The president wants to provide security,” Lariza Brenes, a lifelong resident of the Limón region said in a recent interview. “The lack of resources for police to conduct investigations will only benefit organized crime,” said Vladimir Muñoz, deputy director of the Judicial Investigation Department.
The port is by far the country’s largest, handling more than six million tons in exports last year. President Fernández turned up at Rosales’s funeral, and bemoaned that one of the suspects in the case had been repeatedly stopped by police before the killing but remained free.
He encouraged Costa Ricans to tackle the growing violence in the country by following the example of El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele has suspended civil liberties and arrested roughly 90,000 alleged gang members, over the objections of human-rights advocates. Homicides continued to soar under Chaves, hitting historic highs in 2023 and hardly falling the next two years. Cocaine seizures dropped to 21.4 metric tons in 2023, the lowest quantity since 2015, even as drug seizures in Europe hit record highs, with Costa Rica as one of the top countries of origin for shipments.
But they proved popular with voters: This year, Chaves’s handpicked successor, Fernández, won a majority of seats in Costa Rica’s legislature, something Chaves never had. Over the next four years, Chaves excoriated the judiciary, the news media and political opponents as he pushed for major changes. Chaves toured the maximum-security prison Bukele built and spearheaded the construction of a similar facility in Costa Rica, which is expected to open later this year. Fernández appointed Chaves as finance minister and minister of the presidency, a job akin to chief of staff. During his presidency, prosecutors sought to bring corruption charges against him, but the case didn’t move forward after a vote to lift his immunity failed to win a supermajority in the legislature. Chaves denied the allegations. Chaves maintained close ties to the U.S., successfully lobbying the Biden administration for high-tech antidrug scanners. The relationship grew even closer when Trump took office, and Costa Rica joined Trump’s Shield of the Americas regional defense pact and began accepting deportees from third countries. This year, without public explanation, the Trump administration barred more than half the board of La Nación from entering the U.S. Oscar Arias, a former Costa Rican president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, blamed Chaves for the U.S. decision. “Until very recently, Costa Rican democracy had been free from such practices. The State Department declined to comment about the visas. Chaves’s finance ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment on the issue.
His methods infuriated political opponents, who said he was undermining Costa Rica’s democratic traditions. “It’s nothing more than a means of intimidation typical of authoritarian regimes in which power is used to frighten the adversary,” Arias wrote on social media.
