Populism

Costa Rica has a long-standing reputation as a safe country with peaceful politics and strong, democratic institutions. However, this started to change as various drug cartels began increasingly using the country as a drugs transhipment point and rival gangs fought for control of territory and transport routes. The graph below shows that the annual homicide rate – used as a proxy for a broad range of criminal activities – reached a low of 11.1 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2019, rising sharply to 17.2 in 2023, before falling back to 16.7 in 2025. In recent years local crime groups have become more active. Organised crime has infiltrated several institutions and political parties. A sign of this was the arrest in 2025 of Celso Gamboa Sánchez, a former supreme court magistrate and security minister; he was accused of collaborating with the drug cartels.