For a long time, Costa Rica was bought because the “Switzerland of Central America”: no military, steady democracy, rainforest tourism and the promise that severe violence occurred some other place. That picture drew buyers and retirees.
Today it’s colliding with rising murders, entrenched cartels and corruption instances that attain into the state. The shift exhibits up within the knowledge. Costa Rica logged 603 homicides in 2017 and 907 in 2023, a contemporary document.
Security officers say legal teams have multiplied from about 35 to 340 in a decade, turning components of the nation from discreet transit hall into contested territory the place gangs extort companies, struggle over ports and recruit youngsters.
The disaster now reaches past poor neighborhoods. Former safety minister and Supreme Court choose Celso Gamboa was arrested after a U.S. grand jury accused him of serving to transfer cocaine, shortly after a constitutional reform allowed Costa Rica to extradite its personal residents for severe crimes.
At the identical time, a big Nicaraguan exile neighborhood watched one in all its best-known figures, retired military main and Ortega critic Roberto Samcam, shot lifeless close to San José, elevating doubts about how protected even high-profile refugees actually are.
Costa Rica at a Crossroads: Force or Social Renewal
Politics has moved with the shock. President Rodrigo Chaves faces a public that lists crime and medicines as its high fear, but he retains approval rankings above 60 p.c, and his chosen successor, former minister Laura Fernández, leads early polls, an indication that voters need firmer authority and sooner outcomes.
The authorities’s major reply thus far has been drive: a rising jail inhabitants, overcrowded cells and plans for a brand new high-security complicated impressed by El Salvador’s “mega-prison.”
Behind these headlines lies a quieter erosion. Social spending has fallen by roughly 4 proportion factors of GDP since 2020, thinning the colleges, clinics and neighborhood packages that when supplied younger Costa Ricans a path apart from gangs.
The nation now faces a selection with regional implications: rely primarily on crackdowns and prisons, or mix agency policing with renewed funding within the social ground that when made Costa Rica a protected haven.
