Costa Rica's president-elect Laura Fernández, left, with the incumbent Rodrigo Chaves in San Jose on Feb. 4.Mayela Lopez/Reuters
Robert Rotberg is the founding director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s program on intrastate conflict, a former senior fellow at CIGI and president emeritus of the World Peace Foundation.
Every day, hundreds of tourists from the U.S. and Canada pour off airplanes and into the winter warmth of Costa Rica’s two main airport terminals. But recent trends and political shifts in this tropical paradise may mean the end of its tranquil, trouble-free reputation.
Earlier this month, after a free and fair election, millions of Costa Ricans made 39-year-old Laura Fernández their next president, choosing a right-wing quasi-democrat handpicked by the previous president Rodrigo Chaves, whom she had previously served as chief of staff.
She has promised, when she takes office in May, to institute harsher sentencing and punishments, finish building a giant prison in the El Salvadoran mould, and wage war against encroaching crime. She has threatened to crack down on independent magistrates and judges, overhaul the Supreme Court, throttle independent regulatory agencies, and further criminalize abortion.
Costa Rica, with its population of about 5.5 million, still deserves its reputation as the safest and most peaceful country in Central America, especially in comparison to nearby Honduras and Panama, and to dictatorially run Nicaragua just to its north. The Economist Intelligence Unit ranked Costa Rica as the 18th-strongest democracy in the world last year, slightly lower than Uruguay and much higher than any of its neighbours. (Canada is 14th, the U.S. 28th – “a flawed democracy.”)
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And its economy is relatively stable: It is a major exporter of medical devices and other electronic equipment, sends bananas and pineapples to the U.S. and Canada, grows sugar cane, and accepts remittances from Costa Ricans living in the Northern Hemisphere. Its annual per-capita GDP is very high, at more than $19,000 – a figure that’s greater than in Brazil and Mexico.
But narcotics trafficking has become more intense there than ever before, and new laboratories producing fentanyl have emerged. Crime has also increased to unheard-of levels, especially in the big cities of San José and Limón. There were 900 homicides in 2025, up by 50 per cent from four years ago, making for a homicide rate of 17 per 100,000, higher than Panama’s. The U.S. State Department has even advised travellers to take increased caution due to the risk of robberies and assaults.
Costa Rica remains by far the least corrupt country in Central America. But there is also new evidence of slippage on this front. Mayors are reportedly taking kickbacks after awarding construction contracts, drug money is proving influential, and competition between China and the U.S. has enabled high-ranking government officials to benefit by selling influence.
But Ms. Fernández’s tough-on-crime campaign message resonated with voters – she bested her more progressive opponent, 48.3 per cent to 33 per cent – even though she represents a continuation of the government under which much of this crime flourished. She has promised that her predecessor Mr. Chaves would be part of her government moving ahead, and he has said he will help his protégé continue shifting Central America’s longest-running democratic enterprise to the right. He and Ms. Fernández have also voiced admiration for El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and his “iron fist” approach to crime, which has regularly violated human rights.
This rightward shift could mark the end of Costa Rica’s long adherence to fundamental freedoms and integrity. In 1949, after a bitter civil war, the contending political factions decided to establish a framework for peace, launching the country’s Second Republic and a series of reforms that abolished the army and focused on improving society.
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The country realized that educating girls would transform their country by providing more skilled workers and lowering fertility rates; Costa Rica now has an adult literacy rate of more than 98 per cent. And in order to improve health everywhere and to prevent girls from having to fetch water from distant wells, Costa Rica also embarked on a potable water revolution. All piped water in the nation is now drinkable, unlike elsewhere in South America.
These reforms transformed Costa Rica from a middling Central American despotism into one of the most advanced countries in Latin America and the Global South. But Ms. Fernández has declared that the Second Republic was now a “thing of the past,” and that “change will be deep and irreversible.”
Three million tourists arrive each year, contributing as much as 10 per cent to the country’s annual GDP. Beaches, surfing and birdwatching are draws that will not easily be diminished, unless crime continues to grow exponentially. But if Ms. Fernández continues Mr. Chaves’s efforts to erode democracy and reverse its major shifts, there’s no telling the damage it would do to Costa Rica’s global reputation.