Q COSTARICA (Confidencial) An “order” for “political reasons” is the motive gaining the most “traction” each day in the investigation into the murder in Costa Rica of Nicaraguan ex-military officer Roberto Samcam.
Randall Zúñiga, director of Costa Rica’s Judicial Investigation Agency (OIJ), and Costa Rican Attorney General Carlo Díaz, monitoring the killing of the exiled Nicaraguan opposition figure, were interviewed on the program Esta Semana, which airs on CONFIDENCIAL’s YouTube channel due to Nicaragua’s television censorship.
Regarding the motivations behind the murder, both officials agree that it was a “contracted” killing, though they differ in how much emphasis they place on the political motive.
Attorney General Díaz, who is in charge of the case, was more categorical, stating that there are “several motives” and that “one of them, which I believe is the strongest, even as it appears in the investigation,” is that “there may have been, in this case, an order for this crime to be carried out for political reasons.”
“That is one of the motives and hypotheses we are studying. But, I reiterate, it may even be one of the strongest, yet we have other motives that also need to be investigated,” Díaz added.
Zúñiga, for his part, was more cautious: “The motive is a paid reward; there’s no denying that. What we want to understand are the motivations behind that payment.”
“It could be a political motive, which is entirely possible, or it could be related to debts or other reasons, but it seems more political,” explained the OIJ director, while clarifying that he currently has “no evidence to point to anyone in particular who may have paid for the killing” of the Nicaraguan.
The senior official acknowledged that 70% (about 630 to date) of homicides in Costa Rica are “contracted,” which police jargon calls “settling scores,” but is basically “a situation where one person hires another to kill a third party.”
Samcam, 67, was a strong critic of the Nicaraguan Army for its role in the repression and killing of unarmed civilians during the 2018 protests in Nicaragua.
The murder of the ex-military officer, carried out on the morning of June 19, 2025, is classified as an “aggravated homicide” because it involved “a death that occurred for a reward or some kind of payment,” explained Attorney General Díaz.
Samcam’s Murder Was “Planned”
Samcam had been outside Costa Rica for more than a month and a half and returned on Sunday, June 15. Just four days later, he was murdered.
According to Díaz, there is evidence showing “the planning carried out among the material perpetrators, the people who executed the homicide” the day before the crime.
Zúñiga added that, while there was “even greater planning” in the days prior, what is relevant for the investigation are “the surveillance and all the materialized aspects of the event,” which occurred in the days leading up to the murder.
The OIJ director ruled out that Samcam had reported threats directly to his agency, although he acknowledged that the ex-military officer “in some way communicated with what was the DIS, which is Costa Rica’s Directorate of Intelligence and National Security.”
On September 12, the OIJ arrested four of the five suspects in the murder. Of the four detained, only three were placed in six-month preventive detention by a criminal court: Danilo Chaves Medina, 35; Bryan Robles Salas, 23; and Luis Orozco González, 33.
Stephanie Chacón Guillen, 30, was released following the hearing held on September 13–14, 2025. According to Zúñiga, she was not imprisoned because her involvement was limited to “paying for a private transportation service.”
The OIJ is also still searching for Luis Carvajal Fernández, 20, who has been identified as the gunman who shot Samcam.
For Attorney General Díaz, the investigation has proceeded “successfully,” as authorities have managed in less than three months “to determine who, at least, were the material perpetrators of this homicide.”
According to the attorney general, there is “important evidence, there are testimonies, forensic proof, and especially videos from various cameras” that allowed investigators to establish the planning of the crime starting the day before it occurred.
An Anonymous Tip Dismissed
A controversial element in the judicial file has been an anonymous tip identifying the Costa Rican of Nicaraguan origin, Pablo Robles Murillo, as the alleged organizer of the murder and the link between the material perpetrators and the intellectual authors. However, Zúñiga was categorical in dismissing the document as an attempt to divert the investigation.
“We had never, until now, received a 25-page report laying out a full sequence of events, conducting an entire intelligence effort, and trying to steer the investigation toward a specific point,” said the director of the police agency.
“That had never happened in all 52 years of OIJ’s work,” he added.
He suggested that the document aims “to give the homicide a political tint” and could be the work of “some government or intelligence agency—I don’t know which, whether from Costa Rica, Nicaragua, or another interested country.” Currently, Pablo Robles Murillo “is not part of the investigation,” he confirmed.
Challenges Ahead
The search for the intellectual authors faces significant obstacles. Zúñiga acknowledged that the “OIJ’s investigative capacities are local, within the country. We do not have transnational capabilities to investigate beyond Costa Rica’s borders.”
The OIJ director admitted that this limitation became evident in the case of the attempted murder of Nicaraguan opposition activist living in Costa Rica, Joao Maldonado, and his wife Nadia Robleto, where, after eight additional months of investigation, the intellectual authors “could not be identified.”
Samcam’s murder has been reported as the fourth “violent attack against an exile in recent years” in a report presented in Geneva by the Human Rights Experts Group on Nicaragua (GHREN), which concludes that the Ortega-Murillo regime’s repression extends across borders.
The Nicaraguan dictatorship has used “a broad and complex network of surveillance and intelligence” to monitor Nicaraguans’ activities, even “beyond the country’s borders.” This network has allowed it to “harass, discredit, and threaten” Nicaraguans in exile, the report indicates.
The document, presented on September 23, 2025, to the United Nations Human Rights Council, reveals that this “transnational surveillance” is organized through “a multilayered intelligence architecture” involving the Army, the Police, the foreign service, and non-state agents.
Attorney General Díaz, aware of the sensitivity of the case, promised to be “just as rigorous with the possible intellectual authors as we have been with the material perpetrators.” “We do not want to rush and make decisions that could later affect even the reputation of a government, or in this case, even our own country,” he warned.
Authorities hope that opening the detainees’ cell phones and analyzing their communications will shed light on who ordered the murder.
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