The Nicaraguan government requested a complete police report from Costa Rica on Wednesday about a crime that it classified as “xenophobic” and that occurred on Monday in San José, for which it requested a “fair trial.”
This is the murder of Otoniel Orozco Mendoza, 53 years old; a Nicaraguan nationalized as a Costa Rican who was shot 14 times by his neighbor Eduardo Ramírez Zamora in an exclusive area in Escazú, Costa Rica, after an argument.
“This is an unforgivable crime, our Foreign Ministry has communicated with the Costa Rican Foreign Ministry. What we ask for is, on the one hand, a complete police report, and, on the other hand, the willingness of the Costa Rican authorities to prosecute and punish this horrendous crime,” Nicaraguan government spokesperson Rosario Murillo said in a statement issued Wednesday.
Murillo said she was “deeply shocked and outraged” by the incident and said that they were asking the authorities for justice for this crime, which she classified as “xenophobic.”
According to Nicaraguan authorities, the victim’s body was repatriated to his country of origin with the help of the government, along with 23 relatives who traveled to Managua with the coffin.
The government of Costa Rica has not made statements about an event that has shocked the country.
A report of the United Nations published in 2023 revealed an increase in hate speech in Costa Rica on social networks, many of them directed at Nicaraguan migrants, whose diaspora is one of the largest on Costa Rican soil.
In total, more than 1.4 million messages and conversations were detected on social networks linked to hate speech and discrimination, compared to 937,000 in 2022.
The ONU esteem that a “disturbing wave of xenophobia, racism and intolerance” is being witnessed around the world, and that hate is “becoming widespread” in both liberal democracies and authoritarian systems.
In Costa Rica, according to the report, hate speech and discrimination are mainly related to politics, xenophobia, gender, sexual orientation, generational clash, racism, religion and disability. Hate speeches about politics and national reality dominated the statistics, with more than 480,000 messages detected in the study.
Sources from the government of President Rodrigo Chaves told the Voice of America last year that they repudiated “hate messages and the violent tone on social networks.”
Costa Rica’s communications minister, Jorge Rodríguez Vives, said it was “very easy for some political figures” to say that the problem was due to “an attitude on the part of the president of the republic,” but that the Chaves government understood that The matter “is so serious” that he was developing “a national strategy against hate speech and discrimination,” which he hoped to “build at a societal level with the support of the United Nations.”
“We are not in favor nor are we going to encourage any type of physical, emotional, or online violence,” said the minister.
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