The Government of Rodrigo Chaves fulfilled one of its security promises by placing scanners that monitor 100% of the merchandise that leaves the Caribbean port of Moín towards Europe, to prevent drug gangs from continuing to camouflage cocaine inside the containers with fruit in the main Costa Rican terminal. In an attempt to combat the drug business that travels to the markets of the northern hemisphere, the authorities are trying to curb the violent fights between criminal groups and the increase in murders to record numbers in the history of the Central American country that for decades boasted of its safe environment.
A first shipment of almost 900 kilos of cocaine, which was destined for the Belgian port of Antwerp, fell on Saturday due to the new records of ‘Operation Sovereignty’, as the authorities called the new security device with more than 100 police officers who replace private security from the company APM Terminals, concessionaire of the Moín port complex, and two new equipment to scan all containers. The drug was in one of these, loaded with fresh fruit, but it was detected before beginning its journey across the Atlantic, on a route through which almost 10 tons traveled in the first half of 2023, which were seized by the European police upon arrival, according to official reports.
“This is how we are confronting the transnational organized crime that has invaded this area of Costa Rica’s sovereignty, contaminated the good name of our products and that every day generates deaths in our streets. Today a door is closing for him,” Security Minister Mario Zamora said at the inauguration on Thursday, who took office in May on the first year of the Chaves government, in the midst of the crisis caused by the wave of murders that are committed in neighborhoods and cities day or night. After reaching an unprecedented homicide rate of 12.6 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2022, the official record of homicides in the first half of 2023 reached 444 homicides, 42% more than the first half of the previous year. Almost two thirds of these deaths occur for reasons linked to clashes between gangs for control of territories, especially through hitmen, the authorities explain.
The promise of the Chaves government is to ensure that before 2025 all the country’s ports and customs posts on the borders with Panama and Nicaragua are also monitored. His intention that the geographical position in the middle of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, halfway from South America to the United States, be only a strategic factor for legal trade, not for drug trafficking groups, as has happened in recent decades and about the overproduction after the signing of the peace agreements in Colombia (in 2016), according to Zamora.
Added to the trend of drug production and consumption is the deterioration of social conditions in Costa Rica, which have pushed thousands of young people to become part of criminal groups, especially in the coastal areas of the country. This is what the United States ambassador, Cynthia Telles, said about the change in the environment that she saw as a child and young woman living in Costa Rica and the one she encountered in 2022 when she was appointed diplomat in San José. “I am very concerned about the fight that (Costa Rica) must face against organized crime,” said the representative, after her counterpart from Spain, Eva Martínez, pointed out the increase in consumption in the last decade in Europe and the value of maritime routes for traffickers. “They are large corporations without the fanfare of the past or the romanticism that is mistakenly associated with these criminal gangs,” she said.
The placement of the scanners to shield the port of Moín, however, is only one of the strategies that the Ministry has promoted since Zamora arrived and made combating hit men a priority, after his predecessor claimed to be focused on the sale of drugs. retail in the neighborhoods, while President Chaves denied that there was a crisis and polls in April pointed to insecurity as the greatest concern of Costa Ricans.
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