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PUNTARENAS, Costa Rica – That night all was quiet on the Tourist Boardwalk, the famous boulevard overlooking this coastal town’s white sand beach and gently lapping waves.
But just a few miles from the bars and seafood cafes, Maribel Sandí was woken up by rapid bursts of metallic fire.
The 59-year-old grandmother came out of her corrugated iron hut. It was dark, after 11 p.m., a muggy January night. Here, in the Bella Vista neighborhood, where young people sell junk to buy crack, neighbors had gathered on the dirt road.
“There was a dead man,” Sandí said. The 21-year-old’s body had been “torn apart” by a barrage of AK-47 assault rifles.
“We’ve never seen that before,” she says.
Costa Rica has long been a model for progressive democracy in Latin America, a nation that abolished its army in 1948 and set aside a quarter of its territory for conservation. Hundreds of thousands of American and European tourists fly in every year to surf, hike the pristine rainforests and soak up the laid-back “pura vida” atmosphere.
Now this long-standing haven of calm is grappling with a surge in violence fueled by a little-noticed phenomenon plaguing several Latin American countries. Once only Stopovers for illegal drugs en route to the United States or Europe, they suffer from their own abuse problems.
Costa Rica is just one example. Further north, in Mexico, cartels pumping out methamphetamines for Americans also feed a growing domestic market. The number of Mexicans being treated for amphetamine addiction — mostly with meth — increased 218 percent from 2013 to 2020, according to the latest UN World Drugs Report.
In South America the number of people with Cocaine has more than doubled in a decade, reaching an estimated 4.7 million people in 2020, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime reported. Consumption was particularly high in Brazil, Uruguay, Ecuador and Argentina, important hubs for cocaine transported to Europe.
Increased drug use does not always lead to more violence. But in some countries, street vending battles have fueled a spike in bloodshed. Ecuador’s homicide rate tripled between 2020 and 2022 as drug groups fought over domestic sales and export routes. Costa Rica suffered a record 656 homicides last year, up 12 percent through 2021. In Mexico, disputes between dealers selling crystal meth have skyrocketed the death toll in cities like Tijuana, Juárez and Manzanillo.
“The problem has come home to settle,” Laura Chinchilla, a former Costa Rican president, told The Washington Post. “Our own people do drugs and allow these criminal groups to exist.”
The large Mexican and Colombian human trafficking organizations have little presence in Costa Rica. But for years, local criminals have been providing logistical support, such as gas and motor boats, to the big cartels that move Cocaine from Colombia to the United States and Europe.
At some point, the cartels began paying these low-level contractors in drugs. Many began selling this cocaine or converting it into cheap crack, creating local demand.
Smaller drug feuds are behind most of the killings in Puntarenas, one of Costa Rica’s seven provinces. “Most of those killed are children,” said Randall Picado, the region’s chief police officer.
One last afternoon, Picado stopped his truck on the tourist boardwalk. Down the road, visitors boarded ferries that went to some of the country’s most beautiful beaches. Ahead of him, beyond the glittering Pacific, was the hazy outline of the Nicoya Peninsula, where Celebrities like Mel Gibson, Matt Damon and Tom Brady have vacationed. Picado rarely has to fear crime there.
“The problem is concentrated in the barrios,” the poor inland neighborhoods, he said. “Not in the tourist zones.”
Still, Costa Ricans are concerned. The country’s security minister made headlines in December when he appeared to praise El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele’s ruthless anti-gang policies. The Costa Rican government struggled to make it clear that it was not planning anything similar to Bukele’s mass arrests and indefinite detentions of suspects – although some politicians welcomed the idea.
The growing drug addiction Crises in Latin America are exacerbated by a lack of professional police, effective justice systems and treatment facilities. So far, there has been little hemispheric coordination to address the issue, said Chinchilla, who has remained a prominent voice on security issues since leaving the presidency in 2014.
In a sign of disorganization, she said, countries like Costa Rica are spending limited resources destroying marijuana shipments. At the same time, the United States – home to the largest drug market in the western hemisphere – is beginning to legalize the drug.
“We’re basically still living with the same anti-drug policies that we designed 30 years ago,” she said.
Colombia, the US’s largest supplier of cocaine, is considering decriminalization
Maribel Sandí remembers the moment her community reached breaking point. It was March 22, 2021, a Monday afternoon. Some children had been playing soccer nearby. At the edge of the crumbling tarmac they found a large black garbage bag.
Taylor Castro, a 20-year-old man from Bella Vista, was apparently beheaded by a rival gang. “That’s how it all started” said Sandy.
Bella Vista is only six miles from the tourist boardwalk, but the two locations are worlds apart. Families bake here in muggy huts with corrugated iron roofs. Children ride by on battered bicycles, kicking up clouds of dust.
Sandí knew that drug abuse had been rampant for years — crack, marijuana, illegally traded prescription pills like clonazepam. Violence was hardly uncommon. But a decapitation?
Through her work leading a collective for shrimp peelers, Sandí had met Denia Murillo, the local representative of Costa Rica’s social security agency. Sandí fired a text message.
“I said, ‘Doña Denia, let’s do something to help the children.'”
What followed was a plethora of civil society activity known as strategy. Murillo persuaded Costa Rica’s state institutions to focus on rehabilitation of Puntarenas’ poorest communities – organizing youth sports events, theater clubs, parenting classes, civic patrols. The US Embassy participated with its Sembremos Seguridad (“Let’s Sow Security”) program.
But the Costa Rican government provided few additional resources, Murillo said. Gang fighting continued, with one young man after another being shot dead. The strategy lost momentum.
Puntarenas was just one of many areas caught up in a much bigger problem: cocaine production in Colombia was exploding. Global cocaine production has rocketed to a record high in 2021, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime reported Thursday. Costa Rican officials caught a glimpse of this boom from their cocaine seizures, which have quintupled in a decade to reach 49 US tons in 2021.
Most of it was destined for other countries. Still, “it’s not at all uncommon for transport to lead to consumption at a local level,” said Antoine Vella, a senior data officer at the UN agency. “We call this the spillover effect.”
Cocaine and crack have overtaken marijuana as the second most common category of substances Costa Rican addicts are treated for after alcohol. “Cocaine has become a protagonist,” said Helvethya Alfaro, a senior official at the government’s Institute on Alcoholism and Drug Addiction.
Officials note that Costa Rica is still less violent than many countries in the region. The homicide rate reached 12.6 per 100,000 population last year. In Mexico, the rate is 25 per 100,000; in Honduras there are 36. (The latest US figure is about 7 per 100,000). And even though handguns are increasingly used in murders in Costa Rica, assault rifles are still rare.
“Paradise is not lost,” said Randall Zuñiga, chief of the Legal Investigations Division, the FBI’s approximate equivalent.
Gema Kloppe-Santamaría, a George Washington University professor who studies violence in Latin America, warned against dismissing the killings as gang disputes: “This has gone very wrong for Mexico.” Mexican authorities are anticipating the effects of an explosion of bloodshed Underestimated for the past 15 years and struggling to regain control.
Chinchilla, the former president, warned that the escalating violence could push a nervous public toward a Bukele’s populist policies and undermine the nation’s democratic heritage. A UN-sponsored study released in October found that two-thirds of Costa Ricans felt their country was somewhat or very unsafe.
President Rodrigo Chaves, who took office nearly a year ago, promises to submit “urgent legislative reforms” on gun control, extradition, telephone tapping and preventive detention to Congress next month. Security officials have attacked judges for placing gang suspects under house arrest, monitored by shackles, saying such practices belong to a more peaceful past.
“We didn’t have the reality we have now,” Deputy Security Minister Daniel Calderón said.
But the courts are not the only concern, Calderón said. Budget cuts in recent years have weakened the police force. Now a shift is underway “to focus not only on international drug trafficking, but also on attacking these local gangs.”
In Bella Vista, this approach is evident. After the 21-year-old man was gunned down in January, police swept through the neighborhood, a helicopter flew in and an armored vehicle dubbed “The Beast” rolled down the potholed streets. “We called it a war,” Sandí said.
Even the police concede that aggressive law enforcement alone will not solve the problem. Sandí says a lack of well-paying jobs and educational support is driving young people into the maelstrom of illegal drugs. The coronavirus pandemic has taken a toll on Costa Rica’s tourism economy, and unemployment still stands at about 12 percent. Public services in the country of 5 million people have been strained by the arrival of waves of migrants fleeing an increasingly dictatorial government in neighboring Nicaragua.
In vulnerable areas, drugs have become an escape route, Sandí said. “It’s like forgetting your problems a bit. Nothing else matters – only usage.”
She knows the feeling well. Years ago, she said, she left an abusive husband and struggled to support their three children. She eventually left her with her mother while she worked as a nanny. She tried her first drink – half a bottle of beer – in a bar with a friend. Soon she was drinking six or seven. Next it was marijuana.
“Then came the white powder. People called it cocaine,” she said. She became addicted to crack. “You felt like your head was going to explode, but it was so beautiful.” Most of all, it was what made the pain go away.
“I thought no one loved me. Not even my mother.”
She was saved through prayer and her Christian faith, she said. But for her neighborhood ravaged by a drug crisis, salvation seems a long way off.
“A lot of the young people here,” she said, “are lost.”