How a tourist paradise became a magnet for drug trafficking – DNyuz

Before Christian Puchi left to work in the rainforest, he made sure his machete was strapped to his hip and his fellow rangers were doused in mosquito spray. They jumped into their boat and navigated through the hordes of tourists already on the water.

The tourists held their binoculars, hoping to catch a glimpse of Costa Rica’s famous turtles. Mr. Puchi and his men only hoped to return unharmed.

They can handle the poisonous frogs, venomous snakes and crocodiles. But with too few staff and inadequate equipment, they are 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 things. Now protected areas like this have become drug caches,” said Mr Puchi, 49, a ranger for more than 20 years.

Often considered one of the region’s most idyllic destinations, Costa Rica has long escaped the scourge of cartels that has permeated the region. Its national motto, “pura vida,” or pure life, has drawn honeymooners, yoga retreats and birdwatchers for decades.

But now the lush forests that cover a quarter of Costa Rica are being infiltrated by drug cartels looking for new smuggling routes to evade authorities.

Costa Rica surpassed Mexico to become the world’s top transshipment point for cocaine bound for the United States, Europe and beyond in 2020, the U.S. State Department said. Mexico returned to the top spot last year, but Costa Rica lags behind.

And due to the increasing drug trade, there has also been a wave of violence in the country.

Costa Rica’s homicide rate rose 53 percent from 2020 to 2023, according to government figures. The same is happening in nearby Caribbean countries, with rising homicide rates as gangs compete for the drug market, the United Nations said in 2023.

In Costa Rica, schools are increasingly becoming crime scenes, with parents being gunned down as they drop off their children. Plastic bags containing severed limbs have been found in parks. A patient was recently shot dead in a hospital by members of a rival gang.

Local gangs are fighting for control of the country’s routes. It’s a competition of greed and ruthlessness to become the local power brokers for the rival Mexican criminal gangs operating here, mainly the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels.

“Before, there was a limit, people weren’t being killed randomly,” said Mario Zamora Cordero, Costa Rica’s minister of public security, in an interview. “What we’re experiencing now, we’ve never seen before. It’s the Mexicanization of violence, to spread terror and panic.”

‘No power to do anything about it’

The gangs’ drug trade is quite simple.

The Gulf Clan, the country’s largest drug cartel, smuggles cocaine across the Pacific Ocean in crudely built submarines to Costa Rica’s forested coast, according to U.S. and Costa Rican officials.

Traffickers then rely on thick mangrove forests interwoven with river channels and rainforests as a gateway into the country. About 70 percent of all drugs entering Costa Rica come through the 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 east coast, where it is processed into fruit for export abroad.

Last year, 21 tons of cocaine were seized in Costa Rica, although Mr Zamora said hundreds of tons pass through the country undetected every year.

It’s not just cocaine that has Costa Rican officials worried. Fentanyl is also starting to make its way into the country.

In November, Costa Rica’s first fentanyl lab was found and dismantled by local police working with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Many of the seized fentanyl pills were destined for the United States and Europe, according to a U.S. embassy cable in San José, the capital, obtained by The New York Times.

“Costa Rica is a prime target for cartels seeking new markets for fentanyl,” said the cable, marked “sensitive” and sent to Washington last year. The organizations are determined to “transform Costa Rica into a new hub.”

Rob Alter, director of the U.S. Embassy’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, said in a statement that Costa Rica “remains a strong and enduring partner of the United States, despite the significant security challenges it faces due to international drug trafficking, like many other countries in the region.”

Costa Rica is the only country in Latin America without an army, 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 ultimately won a 12 percent budget increase in 2024, after five years of cuts.

But ground zero in this drug war is the national parks, where sloths fall from trees, jaguars roam and macaws circle overhead. The cartels face little resistance.

Just under 300 rangers are responsible for patrolling 3.2 million hectares of protected forest. They are equipped with weapons better suited to hunting small animals than to countering the automatic machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades used by the traffickers. And rangers have no power to make arrests.

The challenges they face are enormous. The nearest population center is about an hour’s boat ride away. Phone service is weak or nonexistent. On a recent visit, the team’s only cell phone — which people call to report suspicious activity — was propped up against a pile of logs, hoping to catch a signal.

At night, the rangers are woken by low-flying planes and helicopters that land illegally in the forest several times a month. “We have no power to do anything,” said Miguel Aguilar Badilla, who leads a team that patrols 77,000 acres of Tortuguero National Park.

During a boat patrol in July, Mr. Aguílar and his team were trudging through the canals as they ventured deeper into the rainforest. They came across a boatload of fishermen and asked for their permits.

“I’ve been trying to call you since yesterday,” said one fisherman, explaining that he had seen some men with guns in the rainforest. “No one answered.”

“We haven’t had reception for a couple of days,” Mr. Aguilar said. “If we ever get it again.”

‘Mexico is no longer the main player’

About 40 miles south of the park lies the seaport of Moín in the city of Limón. As Costa Rica’s largest port, it has helped the country meet growing demand for pineapples and bananas from the United States and Europe — major cocaine export destinations.

As a result of the port’s lucrative potential, violence in Limón has exploded as local gangs allied with Mexican cartels battle for territory. Limón now has the highest violence rate in the country.

The Moín seaport first opened in 2019. Just a year later, Costa Rica became the largest cocaine transshipment point in the world.

Mexican and Colombian cartels are now using fruit warehouses in Limón to store their drugs, as a front to send containers of cocaine abroad and to launder their money through agricultural companies, Costa Rican officials said. The produce bruises easily and is difficult to sort for security checks; therefore, the fruit must be transported quickly before it rots, putting pressure on ports to move shipments quickly.

“The world is a logistical puzzle and the narcos are experts in logistics,” Mr. Zamora said. And the smugglers always seemed to be one step ahead.

Costa Rican authorities recently discovered that the criminal groups were hiring divers to weld underwater hulls to the bottom of ships that could carry up to 1.5 tons of cocaine. Authorities also discovered that local smugglers were smuggling soda bottles filled with cocaine converted into liquid form to Europe and the Middle East.

Randall Zuñiga, director of the Criminal Investigations Division, Costa Rica’s equivalent of the FBI, said the discovery of liquid cocaine had deterred authorities and was a sign of the growing sophistication of drug traffickers in the country.

“The narcos used to be focused on smuggling drugs to Mexico to enter the United States,” Mr. Zuñiga said. “But Mexico is no longer the main player, because Costa Rica is a bridge to Europe, which is now flooded with cocaine.”

‘We have to adapt’

During a recent joint operation between Costa Rican park rangers and border police, officers donned body armor, with life jackets over them. Their boats — donned by the United States — cut through the calm waters of a river channel as they scanned the mangroves for signs of suspicious activity.

As the captains cut their engines to drift ashore, the officers leaped from the deck, their boots sinking quickly into a foot of mud. The men withered in the humidity, which enveloped them in a thick blanket of tropical heat as they patrolled the forest.

The joint operational unit marks the first time that the country’s park rangers, under the supervision of the Ministry of Environment and Energy, have teamed up with police and shared their knowledge of the challenging terrain.

“It is a relationship born of necessity,” said Franz Tattenbach, the minister of environment and energy, in an interview. “The threat has changed and we have to adapt.”

The combined efforts of the force are supported by the Costa Rican Coast Guard at an outpost about 50 miles to the south. The Coast Guard patrols the Pacific Ocean and intercepts suspicious boats by ramming them at full speed in rough water.

It’s not just the drug’s transit to the port of Moín that worries Costa Rican officials, but also its domestic consumption. The country is facing an addiction crisis like no other it’s ever seen.

Nowhere is the crisis more acute than in Limón, the port. Crack cocaine has flooded the streets, police officials said.

New York Times journalists accompanied police on a nightly patrol, setting up random checkpoints on the streets, looking for drugs and illegal weapons.

At one point, the police entered a sprawling slum. They walked through alleys barely wide enough for a pram as tropical rain poured down on them.

They entered a drug den, roused residents from a deep, drug-induced sleep and lined them up against the walls of a shoddily constructed maze of rooms.

A woman leaned against the wall. She sighed and closed her eyes as an officer frisked her and asked for identification. Another officer said she was a repeat offender, but they wanted to help her, not lock her up.

She slowly opened her eyes and stared listlessly at the graffiti scrawled on the wall before her.

“If God is with me, who can be against me,” it said.

The officers handed her back her identification. She stared at it in confusion, then crouched back into her plywood den and fell back into a hazy sleep.

The article How a tourist paradise became a magnet for drug trafficking first appeared on New York Times.