QCOSTARICA — The region of the country where poverty has been reduced the most in the last year, namely the Central Pacific, comprises the areas of the country where the most cocaine and weapons have been seized in the last year.
Last week, the National Institute of Statistics and Census (INEC) reported that, according to data collected through the National Household Survey, poverty in the country has been reduced to the lowest levels since it was first measured with that instrument in 2010.
Thus, Costa Rica went from having 21.8% of poor households to having 18% in the last year, a reduction of 3.1%.
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In addition, the survey revealed that the country experienced a drop in extreme poverty levels from 6.3% to 4.8%, a situation that was especially accentuated in the northern regions of the country, specifically the Central Pacific with a reduction of 3.9%, Guanacaste with 3.7% and Huetar Norte with 3.1% less population in that situation.
“Poor” households, it should be noted, are those whose monthly income is less than the poverty line, which is set according to the cost of a basic basket of goods and services necessary to maintain a minimum level of subsistence (¢127,324 in urban areas and ¢98,673 in rural areas).
Meanwhile, “extreme poverty” is where families find themselves whose monthly income per person is less than the cost of the Basic Food Basket (¢60,697 in urban areas and ¢50,905 in rural areas).
These data took economists and scholars by surprise, who consider that the country has not had sufficient growth, nor job creation in these areas, nor social policies that explain the phenomenon, so some pointed to the possibility of an economic reactivation effect caused by the penetration of drug trafficking, which has become evident in recent years and has even reached international media.
The Minister of Human Development and Social Inclusion and executive president of the Mixed Institute of Social Aid (IMAS), Yorleny León, reacted angrily to this statement and indicated that it is “an outrage that in this country they see the poor who are half getting ahead and then we want to label them as drug traffickers.”
The complexity of the situation is that coincidentally, Puntarenas – covered mostly in the Central Pacific region – is the province in which the most cocaine and weapons have been seized so far this year according to statistics from the Costa Rican Institute on Drugs (ICD).
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Coincidences cause doubts
According to ICD figures, between January and June 3, 177 kilos of cocaine were seized there, almost three times more than the next province in which the most drugs were seized (San José: 1,266.9 kilos).
On the other hand, in the first eight months of this year alone, 290 weapons had been seized in the coastal province, a figure that is only surpassed by the capital and, as if this were not enough, both the Guanacaste and Central Pacific regions are among the most violent in the country, only surpassed by the Huetar Caribe and the Central, which has more than ten times the population.
Thus, between June 2023 and the middle of this year — the same period that Enaho covers—, according to data from the Judiciary, in the Central Pacific there were 135 homicides and 3,951 crimes in total, while in Guanacaste there were 94 murders and 4,553 crimes.
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It is also worth noting that two of the regions where simple poverty was reduced the most are, precisely, the two most violent. The largest reduction in the percentage of poor population was in the Huetar Caribe region (5.1%), where last year there were 204 homicides and 4,753 crimes.
Meanwhile, the poverty rate fell by 4.2% in the Central region, which has the highest crime rates, with 383 murders and 26,559 crimes in the aforementioned period.
The president of IMAS insisted that these data are not connected and said that the increase in income is due to amounts from salaries and that “I do not know any drug trafficker who insures his people.”
A detailed analysis of the INEC data, however, shows that, in general, there was a 1.2% decrease in salary income and a 0.2% reduction in rental income, while the “other transfers” category grew by 1.1% and the autonomous income category by 0.3%.
However, in the case of the first quintile, salary income did increase, but only by 4.2%, while scholarships and subsidies represented 2% less of the total income of that group, despite Minister León maintaining that social policy is responsible for the improvement in the poverty data.
Economist Gerardo Corrales told SemanarioUniversidad.com that this “is very strange because neither agriculture, nor local industry, nor construction, nor commerce” show growth that explains this and, although there has been a reduction in inflation, that alone does not explain the phenomenon.
“I would not like to think like that, I hope this is a reality,” he said, but added that “the numbers from the Central Bank and from INEC itself are not consistent with these more than proportional increases in income, in those particular areas that, curiously, are areas where more illicit drug trafficking and crime activities are taking place, I would not like to think that these incomes have illegal sources.”
José Carlos Chinchilla said that pointing to the economic movement that can be generated by drug trafficking, money laundering and other illicit activities does not imply pointing out all the people who benefit from participating in crimes, since it is known that the injection of money can move other perfectly legal activities. “In addition, there are more than 60,000 households, we are never saying they are all involved in this,” he explained.
The worrying thing, he said, is that parallel to the already known growth of drug trafficking there is a growth of the informal sector of the economy, since “there can certainly be a link.”
“I believe that drug trafficking and drug distribution in the country somehow cause certain sectors to become consumers of services and goods, which means that they reach the poorest people in the informal sector” and, therefore, a growth is generated that can explain the slight and temporary improvements that are evident in the survey.
However, he said, it is necessary to take into account that these data are fragile, because literally, just by earning one colon more than the established line, “one stops being poor,” but if the change is not stable and sustained, as it could be if, for example, formal employment grew, it is easy for these families to fall back below the poverty line.
Translated and adapted from SemanarioUniversidad.com
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