Before Christian Puchi set off for work in the rainforest, he made sure his machete was fastened to his hip and his fellow forest rangers were doused in mosquito repellent. They jumped in their boat and navigated through throngs of tourists already on the water.
The tourists clutched binoculars, hoping to catch a glimpse of Costa Rica’s famous turtles. Mr. Puchi and his men just hoped to come back unscathed.
They can handle the poisonous frogs, venomous snakes and crocodiles. But with too few staff and inadequate gear, they’re no match for the most dangerous threat now lurking in the national parks, violent drug cartels.
“We used to focus on conservation, finding jaguar tracks, turtle nests, normal stuff. Now, protected areas like this one have become drug warehouses,” said Mr. Puchi, 49, a forest ranger for over 20 years.
Costa Rica, often considered one the region’s most idyllic destinations, long escaped the scourge of cartels that has pervaded the region. Its national motto, “pura vida” or pure life, has for decades attracted honeymooners, yoga retreat goers and bird-watching enthusiasts.
But now, the lush forests blanketing a quarter of Costa Rica are being infiltrated by drug cartels seeking new trafficking routes to evade the authorities.
Costa Rica surpassed Mexico to become the world’s leading transshipment point for cocaine destined for the United States, Europe and beyond in 2020, according to the U.S. State Department. Mexico returned to the top spot last year, but Costa Rica remains close behind.
And with the rising drug trafficking, a surge of violence has hit the nation.
Homicides in Costa Rica soared 53 percent from 2020 to 2023, according to government figures. The same is happening in nearby Caribbean countries, with rising homicide rates a result of gangs competing over drug markets, the United Nations said in 2023.
In Costa Rica, schools are becoming crime scenes, with parents gunned down while dropping their children off. Plastic bags filled with severed limbs have been discovered in parks. A patient was recently shot dead inside a hospital by members of a rival gang.
Local gangs battle for control of routes within the country, a competition in greed and ruthlessness to become the local muscle for the rival Mexican criminal groups operating here, largely the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels.
“There used to be a limit here, people weren’t killed indiscriminately,” Mario Zamora Cordero, Costa Rica’s minister of public security, said in an interview. “What we are witnessing, we have never seen before. It’s the Mexicanization of violence, to provoke terror and panic.”
‘No Power to Do Anything About It’
The gangs’ trafficking operation is fairly straightforward.
Colombia’s Gulf Clan, the country’s main drug trafficking cartel, pushes cocaine across the Pacific in crudely made submarines to Costa Rica’s forest-covered shores, according to American and Costa Rican officials.
The traffickers then rely on thick tangles of mangroves intertwined with river canals and rainforests as a gateway into the country. About 70 percent of all the drugs coming into Costa Rica enter through its Pacific coast, according to the country’s coast guard.
Much of the cocaine is then transported overland by local groups working with Mexican cartels to a port on the country’s eastern coast, where it is crammed into fruit exports destined abroad.
Costa Rica seized 21 tons of cocaine last year, although Mr. Zamora said hundreds of tons passed through the country undetected annually.
It is not just cocaine that has Costa Rican officials worried. Fentanyl is starting to creep in, too.
In November, Costa Rica’s first fentanyl laboratory was found and dismantled by the local police working with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Many of the confiscated fentanyl pills were bound for the United States and Europe, according to a U.S. cable from the embassy in San José, the capital, obtained by The New York Times.
“Costa Rica is a prime target for cartels in search of new markets for fentanyl,” read the cable, which was marked “sensitive” and sent to Washington last year. The organizations are bent on “transforming Costa Rica into a new hub.”
Rob Alter, the director for the U.S. Embassy’s Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, said in a statement that Costa Rica remained “a strong and enduring U.S. partner despite facing significant security challenges from international narcotics trafficking, like many countries in the region.”
Costa Rica is the only country in Latin America without a military, so Mr. Zamora, the minister of public security, is pushing to expand the national police force, which numbers about 15,000 for a population of 5.2 million. (Nearby Panama has a force of 29,000 for 4.4 million people.) His ministry finally received a 12 percent budget increase in 2024 after seeing cuts over the previous five years.
But ground zero in this drug war is the national parks, where sloths fall out of trees, jaguars roam and macaws circle above. The cartels face little resistance.
Just under 300 park rangers are responsible for patrolling 3.2 million acres of protected forest. They are armed with weapons better suited for hunting small animals than countering the automatic machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades wielded by the traffickers. And park rangers lack the authority to make arrests.
The challenges they face are expansive. The nearest population center is about an hour away by boat. Phone service is weak or nonexistent. On a recent visit, the team’s single cellphone — which people call to report suspicious activity— was propped up by a stack of logs, in hopes of catching a signal.
At night, the rangers are awakened by low-flying planes and helicopters landing illegally in the forest several times a month. “We have no power to do anything about it,”said Miguel Aguilar Badilla, who leads a team that patrols 77,000 acres in Tortuguero National Park.
On a boat patrol in July, Mr. Aguílar and his team puttered through the canals as they pushed deeper into the rainforest. They came across a boat of fishermen and asked for their permits.
“I’ve been trying to call you since yesterday,” one fisherman said, explaining that he had seen some men with guns in the rainforest. “No one picked up.”
“We haven’t had reception for a few days,” Mr. Aguilar said. “If we ever have it.”
‘Mexico Is No Longer the Most Important Player’
About 40 miles south of the park sits the Moín seaport in the city of Limón. As Costa Rica’s largest port, it has helped the country meet a booming demand for pineapples and bananas from the United States and Europe — key cocaine export destinations.
As a result of the port’s lucrative possibilities, violence has exploded in Limón as local gangs allied with Mexican cartels compete for territory. Limón now has the highest rates of violence in the country.
The Moín seaport first opened in 2019. Just a year later, Costa Rica became the world’s largest transshipment point for cocaine.
Mexican and Colombian cartels now use fruit warehouses in Limón to store their drugs, as fronts to send containers of cocaine abroad and to launder their money through agricultural farms, Costa Rican officials said. The produce can bruise easily and is laborious to sort through for security checks; therefore, the fruit must be transported quickly before it rots, putting pressure on ports to get shipments moving fast.
“The world is a logistics puzzle and the narcos are experts at logistics,” said Mr. Zamora. And the traffickers always seemed a step ahead.
The Costa Rican authorities recently found that the criminal groups were employing scuba divers to weld underwater hulls to the bottoms of ships that could carry up to 1.5 tons of cocaine. The authorities also discovered that local traffickers were smuggling soda bottles filled with cocaine converted into liquid form to Europe and the Middle East.
Randall Zuñiga, the director of the Judicial Investigation Department, Costa Rica’s equivalent of the F.B.I., said the liquid cocaine discovery had spooked the authorities, signaling the growing sophistication of the country’s traffickers.
“The narcos used to be focused on getting drugs up to Mexico to enter the U.S.,” Mr. Zuñiga said. “But Mexico is no longer the most important player, because Costa Rica is a bridge to Europe, which is now flooded with cocaine.”
‘We Have to Adapt’
During a recent joint operation combining Costa Rica’s park rangers and the border police, the officers strapped on bulletproof vests, life jackets layered on top. Their boats — donated by the United States — sliced through the calm waters of a river canal as they scanned mangroves for any signs of suspicious activity.
As the captains killed their engines to drift ashore, the officers jumped from the deck, their boots quickly sinking into a foot of thick mud. The men wilted in the humidity, which enveloped them in a thick blanket of tropical heat as they patrolled the forest.
The joint operation unit is the first time the nation’s park rangers, overseen by the ministry of environment and energy, are working with the police, sharing their knowledge of the tricky terrain.
“It is a relationship born out of necessity,” Franz Tattenbach, the minister of environment and energy, said in an interview. “The threat has changed, and we have to adapt.”
The joint force’s efforts are supported by Costa Rica’s coast guard at an outpost about 50 miles to the south. The coast guard patrols the Pacific and intercepts suspicious boats by ramming into them at full speed on rough waters.
It is not only the drug’s transit to the Moín port that Costa Rican officials worry about, but also domestic consumption. The nation is facing an addiction crisis unlike anything it has ever dealt with before.
Nowhere is the crisis as acute as in Limón, the port. Crack cocaine has flooded the streets, police officials said.
New York Times journalists accompanied the police on a night patrol as they set up random checkpoints in the streets, searching for drugs and illegal weapons.
At one point, the police raided a sprawling slum, running through alleyways barely wide enough to fit a baby stroller, as the tropical rain beat down on them.
They entered a drug den, waking up residents from deep, drug-induced slumbers and lining them up against the walls of a shoddily constructed maze of rooms.
One woman leaned into the wall. She sighed and closed her eyes as an officer patted her down and asked for her identification. Another officer said she was a repeat offender, but they were looking to find her help, not lock her up.
She slowly opened her eyes, staring listlessly at graffiti scrawled on the wall before her.
“If God is with me, who can be against me,” it read.
The officers gave her back her identification. She stared at it in confusion, then crouched back into her plywood lair, to return to a hazy sleep.
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