Caribbean & Central America - November 2012 (ISSN 1741-4458)

While Costa Rica has never approached the high insecurity levels of its regional neighbours, particularly the countries of the Northern Triangle where Honduras registered 92 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants; El Salvador, 69 and Guatemala, 39 – the decline in security has long been the primary weak point of the Laura Chinchilla administration. Chinchilla has, however, finally made good on one of her initial pledges upon taking office in May 2010 – to bring down the homicide rate which closed at 11.5 per 100,000 inhabitants that year: official data compiled by the judicial investigation agency (OIJ) released in September last revealed a decline in homicides in 2011 – the first decline in six years.

According to the OIJ, Costa Rica registered a total of 474 homicides in 2011, down from 527 the previous year, which represents a 10% year-on-year drop and puts the homicide rate for the year at 10.3 per 100,000. At the same time, the rate of multiple homicides (defined in Costa Rica as the killing of two or more individuals in one event) almost doubled, increasing from 11 in 2010, to 21 a year later. Furthermore, the homicide rate was also significantly higher for men than women – equivalent to 17.5 per 100,000 inhabitants for men and 2.7 for women.

The predominance of male victims answers both to more traditional reasons, such a greater propensity of men to be involved in fights and robberies, as well as the emergence of a new threat, the increasing use of the Costa Rica as transit zone by Drug Trafficking Organisations (DTOs). In fact, according to the OIJ report on 2011 homicides, “crimes associated with narco trafficking [and] ‘problems of drugs’ characterised in their vast majority by rivalries between groups over territories for the sale of narcotics, debts in illicit transactions and personal problems between people involved in narco-related issues, have increased over the past years, so that for the year in question [2011] these are ranked, for the first time, along with fights as the third most prominent reason for homicides in Costa Rica, with a total of 51 murders, displacing other motives that previous to the 1990s and the first half of the first decade of the 2000s prevailed in incidence over this problem.”

This is also reflected in the type of victims: almost a third of all homicide victims in 2011 were either drug users or people otherwise involved with drug-related crimes in 2009 (167), 2010 (168) and 2011 (154). In the case of 2011, almost a third (42 of the 154) of these individuals were killed in a confrontation with the judicial police (2), the administrative police (12) or a civilian acting in legitimate self defence (27).

According to the OIJ, in the first six months of this year, murders have also been highly concentrated in specific areas. Of the total 169 homicides recorded to June, 62 took place in San José, 47 in Limón and 19 in Alajuela and Puntarenas, respectively. This translates into a much higher homicide rate in these specific areas: the provinces of Limón and San José top the list with 22 murders per 100,000 inhabitants each. They are followed by Alajuela (11), Matina and Goicoechea (9 each) and Pococí (8). Nonetheless, this still represents a further improvement on the first semester of 2011, when a total of 242 murders took place.

One of the main problems facing the authorities is that as the country’s role as a transit bridge increases, so do the potential harms to its population. Many DTOs pay local fishermen in kind for their refuelling services; seeing as they can’t sell cocaine at international market prices at home, according to the US Southern Command’s Forum of the Americas military magazine, this gets further refined into crack, which “has resulted in an increase in property damage, theft, robbery and homicide”. President Chinchilla may still have a long road to travel, but she is heading in the right direction.

• Massive marijuana seizure in Uvita Island

In early October in a joint operation, the Costa Rican coast guard and judicial investigation agency (OIJ) seized 905kg of marijuana hidden in Uvita Island, presumed to be en route from Jamaica to the port of Limón. Authorities arrested two Costa Ricans and one Nicaraguan national; one of the Costa Ricans detained was in fact an employee of the municipality of Limón, who had been in charge of administering and controlling activities on Uvita Island since 2008.