There is no doubt that Costa Rica is a natural paradise. But none of Earth’s paradise is perfect. One out of every six Costa Ricans misses a meal every day, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. In 2020, fewer than two out of every three people aged 18-22 had graduated from high school. The Central American country’s homicide rate has dramatically increased since the 1990s.
Costa Rica has long prided itself on its commitment to democracy, security, social justice and a fair distribution of wealth. Yet there are flaws in paradise.
On September 22, 2023, the Organismo de Investigación Judicial announced that there had been 655 homicides during the year which already surpassed the record number of homicides during 2022. The homicide rate (ranked 5 or 12 per 100,000) was still far behind that of Guatemala and El Salvador (18), and Honduras (38), but the increase has many citizens worried about security. The narcotics trade is responsible for the large majority of the killings.
On November 1, President Rodrigo Chaves lauded his Salvadoran colleague Najib Bukele for transforming El Salvador into one of the “safest nations” in the world. Chaves complained that Costa Rica could not follow Bukele’s methods because that would necessitate congressional action to strengthen the executive branch in order to limit individual rights and social guarantees. Yet, Chaves commented that the 2026 the presidential election could lead to a Bukele-style solution to the problem of violence in this once tranquil country.
The Salvadoran example contrasts notably with the historical models Costa Rica has followed: Great Britain as a model of liberal democracy in the 1900s, Belgium as a model of social inclusion in the 1940s, and Nordic countries as models for social democratic development in the 1970s. Could political authoritarianism be the magic formula to make Costa Rica return to its peaceful roots? Was Costa Rica becoming its “other” and if so, why?
Costa Rica has long proudly, if not arrogantly, differentiated itself from its isthmian neighbors—and, indeed, most of Latin America. Setting aside racist or mythical explanations, the Costa Rica uniqueness stemmed from a combination of geographical and sociological conditions. Its remoteness insulated it from the exactions of Spanish colonial authority and from the Central American federal wars during the 1820s-1830s.
Moreover, Costa Rica’s elite could not employ violent repressive methods to exploit the population primarily due to the absence of a large Indigenous population and to the prevalence of a small and medium peasantry that could expand with the open agrarian frontier. Three political decisions marked the country’s particularity: the openness of election competition to all adult males after 1884 (women obtained the franchise in1949), a significant increase of investment in public education instead of the standing army (abolished in 1948) and social reforms that were consolidated during the early 1940s. The social reforms included the creation of a national health insurance system—the Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social (CCSS)—the University of Costa Rica (UCR) and a progressive Labor Code.
Following the civil war of 1948, the new government severely repressed the Left and its allied unions. The victors in the war under José Figueres and his Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN, founded in 1951) then won most presidential and legislative elections over the next decades. They built upon the social reforms of the 1940s and created an anti-communist model of social democracy that promoted massive increase in public employment, public unions and public institutions. This model of governance, merging new and old social policies, worked efficiently to democratize the country and to elevate the standard of living of ordinary citizens.
Yet, the cost of the welfare state policies came back to haunt Costa Rica. When the oil crisis occurred in the 1970s, its international debt became a critical problem. During 1980-1981, the country went through an intense economic crisis. Negotiations with the International Monetary Fund compelled the political class to introduce structural adjustment programs.
By the end of the 1980s, Costa Rica had embraced the Washington Consensus: privatization, financial liberalization and deregulation, creating reforms designed to drastically reduce state intervention in the economy and society. Financial capital with its emphasis on imports and subsidy elimination undermined the campesino economy and, with it, small-town rural society. In the cities, private hospitals and schools became increasingly attractive to the middle classes; public education and health deteriorated significantly.
Instead of increasing the quality of life for Costa Ricans—as promised by politicians and neoliberal economists—inequality has reached dramatic proportions: in 2023, 1% of the population receives an income larger than the total income of 50% of the population. A 2020-2023 Food and Agriculture Organization report noted an increase in food insecurity.
The quality of public education—long the path to social mobility—has declined markedly. Due to the 1980-1981 economic crisis, it was not until 2000 that Costa Rica recuperated the rate it had before 1980: 60.9% of the school-age population were attending schools. However, as noted above, graduation rates have plummeted among young people.
The quality and reach of public education only got worse with Covid-19. And sharp budget cutbacks have continued the downward spiral now affecting large swaths of society. Rather than stable employment with benefits, working-class youths looked for their livelihood in the informal sector which grew from 40% to 47% between 2010 and 2019 (the average in the continent as a whole is approximately 52%).
It is not then surprising that children and teenagers drop out of school and became easy prey for drug dealers. Youths are engaged in a neoliberal culture where expensive brands entice them. A report in Costa Rica’s La Nación recently detailed how drug gangs recruit children and teenagers in a town in the province of Cartago put them to work as lookouts and mulas. Drug gangs pay for them with cell phones, designer sneakers and expensive clothes.
A brief history of a town on the other side of the central valley in Alajuela province sheds some light on this relatively new situation. In 1980, the large majority of the 2,000 residents of Santa Lucía (not its real name) either worked as small or medium producers or as agricultural laborers on the coffee and sugar cane plantations on the edge of the town. With few exceptions the older generation lacked secondary school education.
In the 1980s, however, the children of small and middle peasants often attended secondary school and even the university. They would go on to become teachers or other professionals. Even the children of plantation laborers often managed to climb out of poverty. In part, their success was due to the fluid social relations that characterized the town.
With the exception of the family who owned the largest cane and coffee plantation, there was a great deal of social interaction among the distinct classes due to community activities—especially soccer—but also through friendships developed in primary school. Such inter-class relations often benefited laboring-class children who obtained loans to establish small businesses or better employment, usually in agriculture. There were also inter-class marriages.
Forty years later, the 20,000-resident town barely resembles itself. Nicaraguan immigrants work the fields, cut the cane and pick the coffee. Even the second generation is weakly integrated into town life. Very few of the original families have anything to do with agriculture. The small fincas have been subdivided among the offspring to build their homes.
About one out of every four residents has moved from cities, converting Santa Lucía into something of a rural suburb. The older generation tends not to interact with any newcomers. The social cohesion that still exists in the town derives from extended family ties, from the Catholic Church and from soccer. Those ties are crucial in facing emergencies but can do relatively little to help the new generation to gain a toehold in the formal economy, even though many graduate from high school.
The local drug trade emerged during this social transformation, leaving many youths unmoored from traditional norms and opportunities. Allied with national drug clanes, the local actors avail themselves of networks of extended family ties to sell throughout the towns in the area. Choosing between selling tomatoes in the markets and selling drugs, many saw the latter as the better economic option.
Law enforcement never had any permanent presence in the town and in general people have little trust in authorities. Most family members disdain the drug trade, but they can be trusted to be quiet and to treat the dealers as family, however distant. Although no homicides have occurred in Santa Lucía, it seems that is just a matter of time.
The narcotics trade made its appearance in the 1980s but initially only used the country as a trans-shipment point. During the 2000s, the U.S. government took advantage of the War on Drugs to gain official access so that its ships could patrol the Central American coasts, thus compelling the Colombian and Mexican trafficking cartels to build new drug routes through the isthmus.
Commenting on the transformation over the past two decades, La Nación editorialized, “We are on longer a transshipment point for foreign cartels nor do Costa Ricans merely play support roles. The country and its delinquents are now protagonists in the international drug trade.” Summarizing a police report, the editorial remarked on the rise of Costa Rican minicarteles.
The cartels promoted local gangs by paying them with drugs, particularly in those peripheral geographical regions (Limón, Puntarenas and Guanacaste). In those areas, almost entirely dependent on the foreign-controlled tourism industry, the demise of the banana industry with its strong unions, along with the decline of public services, has contributed to the impoverishment of local youth and their availability for the drug trade.
Other than President Chaves’ dream of a Salvadoran solution, there are no serious plans to confront this cycle of violence and despair. The PLN has long ago shed its social democratic program, though some groups hope to revive some version of it to confront the social crisis. The Left, now grouped in the Frente Amplio, won six deputies (out of 57) in the 2022 election but they seem to be more caught up in cultural politics than in fostering those social movements that might begin to reverse the on-going depletion of public resources.
The previous administrations have denuded the public sector unions and systematically attacked and defunded the public universities. But there are dissenting voices.
As the rector of the Universidad Estatal a Distancia, Rodrigo Arias Camacho, stated, “… the universities have been the bulwark of the estado social de derecho [a constitution-based order that affords basic welfare and a defense of human rights to its people]. Now is the time of resistance. We must unfurl the banner of the Estado Social de Derecho.” The public universities remain a democratic bastion of critical thought and social commitment—of hope for this country that once represented democratic hope for the region.
Often supported by university students and faculty, social movements of resistance sporadically emerge. Indeed, in August, 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, a new protest movement called Movimiento de Rescate Nacional showed that highly diverse groups, including merchants, farmers, transport workers, students and others, could forge alliances to resist a series of governmental measures, including anti-labor laws and regressive taxes. Yet, the movement could not sustain itself.
Social inequality can only be defeated by specific social policies that guarantee access to quality public education—a plan to modernize public education is fundamental to remove children and teenagers from the hands of the narcotraficantes. The state must respect the constitutional order to finance public education and revamp the national health system.
Costa Rica may still seem like a paradise to tourists and it remains so for the upper- middle class and the elite. Like so many other Latin America citizens, faced with social anomie and crime, the authoritarian right has become attractive. Social movements need to dig deep into their social democratic past to find alternative models and to find the courage to renovate its social pact and to avoid a further descent into political, social and economic despair.
About the Authors
David Díaz-Arias is Professor of History at the Universidad de Costa Rica.
Jeffrey L. Gould is Distinguished Visiting Professor of Modern History and International Relations in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ)
This article was originally published in the Revista Harvard Review of Latin America.
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