In the picturesque Caribbean port of Limón, from where cruise ship passengers are taken on adventures into the jungle of Costa Rica’s interior, locals try to stay home after dark and police patrol with heavy weapons amid escalating violence. linked to drug trafficking.
Costa Rica registered a record 657 homicides last year, and Limón was the epicenter, with a homicide rate that is five times the national average.
The bloodshed in a country known for its laid-back, “pura vida” image, and for not having an army, has outraged public opinion, and the government of President Rodrigo Chaves is trying to come up with answers.
Costa Rica used to be solely a transit territory for cocaine shipped north by Colombian and Mexican cartels, but authorities say it is now a storage and transshipment point for drugs sent to Europe by Costa Rican criminal groups.
In Limón, that change in criminal dynamics has combined with the growing ranks of unemployed youth who make up most of the deaths in violent territorial disputes.
The director of the Coast Guard and vice minister of Public Security, Martín Arias, said that the violence in Limón is due to disputes over control of the shipment of cocaine to Europe and the sale of marijuana locally.
In January, the authorities dismantled a network that smuggled drugs through the port. Cocaine was hidden in the walls of steel containers and even between cans of pineapple and cassava shipped to Spain and the Netherlands.
Foreign drug traffickers used to pay Costa Rican fishermen to bring fuel to their boats.
“Then the Mexican drug traffickers said: ‘We are not going to use money, we are not going to leave the trail that money leaves in the banks, the systems, we are going to pay in coca,’” Arias said.
At first, the fishermen and their collaborators did not have the contacts to place the cocaine abroad, so they sold it as crack locally. But when they learned how expensive cocaine was in Europe, they began smuggling it through the port, he added.
Meanwhile, marijuana arrives from Jamaica and Colombia, and gangs compete for the local market. The victims of this violence live mainly in marginalized neighborhoods, Arias said.
Costa Rican authorities classified 421 of the 657 homicides last year as “reckoning.”
Former Public Security Minister Gustavo Mata estimated that 80% of homicides in Costa Rica were related to the growth of drug trafficking.
“Before we talked about the Colombian cartels, the Mexican cartels,” Mata said, but now investigators have found that “we already have mini-cartels in Costa Rica.”
Mata, who held the position from 2015 to 2018, said that Costa Rica had become a “huge warehouse” for drugs and an operations center to send them to Europe.
Due to the commercial activities of the port of Limón, both legal and illegal, the place has become an epicenter of violence.
“In Limón there are four strong criminal groups that compete for the drug market,” said the director of the Judicial Investigation Agency, Randall Zúñiga. These groups confront each other and “usually the people who die are terminal salesmen or members of criminal groups.”
But the violence has not been confined to Limón or those involved in the drug trade.
The death of the 8-year-old boy Samuel Arroyo, struck by a stray bullet on February 28 while he was sleeping in the capital, San José, caused an uproar among the population. Costa Ricans not related to the boy’s family attended the funeral with balloons.
President Chaves described Samuel’s death as “outrageous, inexplicable and unacceptable.” The president said the shot was apparently generated in a war between criminal groups. A 15-year-old boy was arrested in connection with the boy’s death.
A month earlier, Ingrid Muñoz organized a demonstration in front of the Justice Courts in San José to demand justice for her 19-year-old son Keylor Gambia, who was murdered for defending his girlfriend during an assault.
“What we want is to raise awareness so that the case does not go unpunished,” declared Muñoz. “What we want is justice, that both the magistrates and the prosecution are aware of the serious situation that not only young people are experiencing, but everyone in the country.”
The Minister of Public Security, Jorge Torres, in statements before the Legislative Assembly in January, lashed out at the judicial system because, he said, those sentenced for drug trafficking crimes only serve a fraction of their prison sentence.
“There are crimes that should serve the full sentence,” he said.
Torres affirmed that a new security strategy would be ready by June, but he specified that more resources are needed for the police. “If we want to fix this in the short term, we need police on the streets.”
Limón is 160 kilometers east of San José. It is the most important port in Costa Rica and a large part of the country’s exports to the United States and Europe leave from there.
In 2018, the government privatized the container port and awarded the concession to a Dutch company.
Antonio Wells, general secretary of Costa Rica’s Atlantic port workers’ union, said that some 7,000 jobs were lost with privatization, and he attributed the social problems in Limón to this.
Last year, Limón was the canton with the second highest homicide rate, with more than 62 per 100,000 inhabitants.
“If there is no job, it sounds ugly to say, but for many the closest thing to a job is a hit man,” Wells said.
Costa Rica’s homicide rate has increased in each of the last four years. Last year, the rate reached 12.6 per 100,000 inhabitants, a third of that of Honduras, but remains the highest for Costa Rica since at least 1990.
The College of Professionals in Economic Sciences found in January a strong correlation between low levels of development and high homicide rates in the most violent cantons such as Limón.
“This is not the Limón I grew up in,” said a pensioner, who gave his name only as David, recently as he chatted with others in the city’s central plaza. “After 9 at night you can’t walk, and it’s very sad.”
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