2023-08-10 02:50:39
An oasis of security within one of the most dangerous regions in the world. So it has been considered Costa Rica for decades due to its low crime rates compared to its neighbors. Only 500 kilometers from San José is Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, the country with the highest homicide rate in the world. However, the judicial authorities warn that there are reasons to end optimism: the influence of the Mexican cartels in the country threatens to reach the worst number of murders in its history this year.
The rise of organized crime in Costa Rica, which is now reaching record numbers, has been several years in the making. In 2022, an all-time high in the murder rate was already reached, with 656 cases. According to official data, currently, the country registers a homicide every 10 hours. Although it is far from the almost 35 registered by Mexico, the rebound is evident: only in the first six months of the year so far, it has exceeded the first half of last year by 42%. Mario Zamora, Costa Rica’s Minister of Public Security, declared just a few days ago that the country has “a Mexicanization of crime, the most evident feature being the present.”
Behind the presence of the Mexican drug trafficking groups in Costa Rica we find the interest in the search of new routes for cocaine trafficking Colombian to the United States and other markets. The Sinaloa Cartel, of which “El Chapo” Guzmán was the leader until his arrest last year and whose control of the largest faction now rests with his children, would be pressuring small Costa Rican groups to receive large amounts of cocaine . Despite the fact that Costa Rica is not a producer of narcotic substances, its location makes the country one of the largest platforms in the world from which to export drugs to third parties.
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There is a specific area that stands out from the others for drug trafficking. It’s about Moin, a Caribbean port city from where, according to police sources, this year ten tons of cocaine have been transported to Europe. The method for it to go unnoticed: camouflage it among the fruit shipments that are usually seen in port containers. The data makes us affirm that the presence of drugs in the area represents a significant increase in crime. In Limón, the province where Moín is located, official figures point to 33 homicides per hundred thousand inhabitants. These are numbers that triple the national average, making the region the most violent in the country.
war on drugs
Other local sources indicate the presence of the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel in Costa Rica, who chain constant clashes with the Sinaloa Cartel for control of organized crime in Mexico. That, the encounter between gangs on the ground, would also explain the rise in murders. According to a UN report on global cocaine production, these Mexican cartels are also using your management skills to penetrate Costa Rican territory, assassinating local traffickers to replace them with others from their own groups. Also, when they take control of a place, they begin to tax valid businesses and even prevent police from entering certain areas.
The President of the Republic of Costa Rica, Rodrigo Chavez, declared for his part the taking of measures to curb drug trafficking: “Deploy 9,500 police officers on the streets every day, changes in the criminal law so that drug traffickers and murderers cannot access prison benefits and restrictions on access to weapons and ammunition” . The plan, called “Safe Costa Rica Operation“It intends to stop the violence that has already amounted to more than 500 murders in the country so far this year, and which according to experts could reach a thousand by the end of the cycle.
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