QCOSTARICA — The president of Costa Rica, Rodrigo Chaves, stated in an interview with EFE that the country’s economic year has been “miraculous”, with “world champion” results in some indicators, while in terms of security he expressed that more prison sentences are needed to combat the historic wave of homicides in 2023.
“The Costa Rican economy has had a miraculous year. All the macroeconomic indicators, the vital indicators of the functioning of our economy, are exceptionally good,” said Chaves in an interview in which he referred to the results for 2023 and the projections for 2024.
According to Chaves, Costa Rica is a “world champion” in attracting foreign direct investment (fdi) with an amount that amounts to 12% of its GDP, and is the leader of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in economic growth and low inflation.
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“Costa Rica is the country with the highest economic growth in the entire OECD, that is not a minor thing, we are the country with the lowest growth in the OECD price index and particularly important is that in energy and food we are champions of the OECD,” he said.
Costa Rica joined the OECD in 2021, becoming the Organisation’s 38th member country.
According to OECD projections in 2023, Costa Rica will grow 5.1% and by 2024 the figure will be 3.5%, while the consumer price index would stand at 0.6% in 2023.
Chaves also highlighted that international risk rating agencies have raised Costa Rica’s grades and that his Government is “the first in decades” to pay off the debt and register a primary balance in finances, and in addition to the fact that unemployment fell to almost half to stand at 7.9%.
“The miracle of 2023 is particularly surprising because the world economy was not the most conducive to achieving that. It was a challenging year. Next year is going to be a challenging year internationally because geopolitical risk has increased in the world,” Chaves pointed out.
The conflict in the Middle East and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could generate increases in international prices of basic grains and oil, but that Costa Rica “is prepared to navigate those turbulent waters.”
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Insecurity, the main problem of Costa Rica
According to the most recent surveys, insecurity has become the country’s main problem in 2023, the year in which a historic number of homicides, 857 as of Tuesday of this week, 42% more than in 2022.
For Chaves, “the analysis of the murders is very simple although very painful” and he attributed the increase in homicides to conflicts within organized crime and drug trafficking organizations.
“There is, as in Sweden and France, a war of organized crime gangs that kill each other because they are competing for the sale of (illegal) drugs. The only way to prevent these young people from killing each other is to isolate them from the society and that means jail,” he declared.
The president said that in Costa Rica there are between “290 and 390 hitmen (sicarios in Spanish) known to the police” and that imprisoning them “solves the problem because they commit the majority of the crimes.”
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Chaves blames Costa Rica’s legislation as being “weak” and that putting an underage juvenile hitman in jail “is practically impossible” due to the “conception of rehabilitative justice” used in the country.
“We have an absolutely soft law that has no firm hand, which makes imprisoning people difficult, gives enormous discretion to judges and the judge is a human being subject to fear and other types of things,” he noted.
“You can throw all the money in the world at a problem that is not going to fix it without addressing the fundamental issues, which are the detention and imprisonment of individuals participating in contract killings and gang warfare, and the problem of impunity,” said Chaves, who recognizes that the problem of crime is “multifactorial” and that his government is working to create opportunities for education, care, employment and reduce inequality.
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