Costa Rica’s conflict history begins not with war but with the deliberate absence of one. Independence arrived almost by default in 1821, and a poor, thinly settled colony took over a century to consolidate into a functioning democracy. The central process shaping modern Costa Rica was the abolition of its standing army: after a brief 1948 civil war, José Figueres Ferrer’s government wrote a 1949 constitution permanently disbanding the military and redirecting its budget toward schools and health care. That choice made Costa Rica a regional exception, a civilian democracy free of the coups that recurred among its militarized neighbors for decades. But an army abolished to guard against internal coups left the state poorly equipped for a different threat: by 2025, drug-trafficking networks exploiting the country’s position between the two Americas had driven Costa Rica’s most violent year on record, exposing a security model built for the wrong danger.
In 2025, drug violence in Costa Rica reached record levels, driven by turf wars between local gangs such as Los Cucas and Los Picudos and the Coqueros and Los Negros, alongside trafficking networks linked to Mexican cartels moving cocaine through the country. UCDP recorded 447 battle-related deaths in the Costa Rica conflict, including 14 civilians, though most incidents involved unidentified armed actors rather than named organized groups.
The World Map of Conflict uses two complementary datasets from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) to visualise conflict per country.
The colour coding of the overview base map is derived from the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (GED), which contains fully verified conflict data aggregated at the country level. UCDP publishes the GED annually (typically May–June of the following year) to allow careful validation of every recorded event.
The map on this country page draws from the UCDP Candidate Events Dataset (CED), which includes the most recent reported events and provides a near-real-time overview of conflict developments. Because these events are still under verification, the data should be considered preliminary.
Historical Lenses
To understand Costa Rica’s conflict history, it is first important to understand what kind of country it is. Historians often explain the same country in different ways depending on what they believe are the main forces driving history. Each historical lens below offers a different, evidence-based interpretation of the country’s development.
The interpretation most widely accepted by historians, based on mainstream historical research and university scholarship. It reflects broad areas of agreement while acknowledging where historians disagree.
Costa Rica occupies a narrow stretch of the Central American isthmus, the land bridge linking North and South America, wedged between Nicaragua to the north and Panama to the south, with coastlines on both the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. Its interior is dominated by a chain of volcanoes running down its spine, and it was in the cool, fertile highland basin around these volcanoes — the Central Valley, where the capital San José now sits — that Spanish colonization eventually took hold. Colonization came late and thinly: the Spanish crown found no gold here and no large, settled Indigenous population to conscript into forced labor, the arrangement (encomienda) that built plantation wealth elsewhere in the empire. Colonial Costa Rica grew instead into a poor, sparsely populated backwater of small farming families working their own land. That thin, modest beginning is the mainstream starting point for everything that follows: a colony without a landed aristocracy is, on this account, a colony with room to grow into something more evenly shared than its neighbors.
Iván Molina & Steven Palmer, The History of Costa Rica (2007).
Four thresholds carry the mainstream account forward. Independence arrived almost as an afterthought in 1821, when Spain’s Central American provinces jointly broke away with barely a shot fired; Costa Rica briefly joined, then in 1838 permanently left, a short-lived federation of its neighbors. Coffee exports from the 1830s onward gave the country its first real income and financed its earliest schools, roads, and courts. The gravest rupture came in 1948, when a disputed presidential election tipped into six weeks of civil war; the victorious rebel leader, José Figueres Ferrer, used his brief hold on power to rewrite the constitution the following year, permanently abolishing the country’s standing army. From that point, the mainstream narrative holds, Costa Rica consolidated into one of Latin America’s most durable civilian democracies, each subsequent election settled at the ballot box rather than by force.
John Patrick Bell, Crisis in Costa Rica: The 1948 Revolution (1971).
On the standard account, the state arrived before a strong sense of nationhood, and it was coffee money that closed the gap between the two. Export earnings from the 1830s onward gave Costa Rica’s small landholding elite the revenue to build a functioning central government — courts, a national school system, a road and rail network — decades before most of its neighbors could manage the same. That state, in turn, manufactured the nation: public schooling in particular spread a shared civic identity, built around literacy, landownership, and participation in politics, to a population that had not previously thought of itself as one people. State-building, in other words, preceded and produced nation-building, rather than the reverse.
Deborah J. Yashar, Demanding Democracy: Reform and Reaction in Costa Rica and Guatemala, 1870s–1950s (1997).
The single force mainstream historians reach for most often is a habit of incremental, negotiated reform rather than rupture. Confronted repeatedly with the same pressures that pushed neighboring states toward military rule or landowner oligarchy — a narrow export economy, a rural population that wanted land and a voice — Costa Rica’s governing class chose again and again to concede a little rather than repress a lot: widening the vote gradually across the early twentieth century, building a national health and social security system in the 1940s, and finally giving up the army itself in 1949. Reform absorbed the pressure that, elsewhere in the region, discharged as coups and civil wars.
Deborah J. Yashar, Demanding Democracy: Reform and Reaction in Costa Rica and Guatemala, 1870s–1950s (1997).
Alternative interpretations developed by respected historians that challenge or expand the mainstream view. These perspectives highlight debates within historical scholarship rather than presenting a single accepted explanation.
Revisionist historians, most influentially Samuel Stone, dispute the founding image of a colony with no elite at all. Stone traced the country’s landholding and political class back to a small number of conquistador-descended families who claimed the best land in the Central Valley from the earliest colonial years and never fully relinquished it. On this reading, Costa Rica was not an egalitarian blank slate; it was simply a poor, small colony where a real elite operated at a scale modest enough to be mistaken, later, for its absence. The facts of a thin, underfunded colony are not in dispute; what is disputed is whether “thin” also meant “flat.”
Samuel Z. Stone, La dinastía de los conquistadores (1975).
Revisionists keep the mainstream’s own turning points — independence, the coffee boom, 1948 — but reweight what each one meant. The coffee boom, in this account, did not spread income evenly among small growers; it let a compact class of processors and exporters, the beneficiadores who owned the mills that turned raw coffee cherries into an exportable product, capture the most profitable stage of the crop while thousands of small growers remained dependent on those same processors for credit and a buyer. Detailed work on the country’s agricultural frontier found settlement patterns considerably less uniform, and considerably more stratified, than the “nation of smallholders” image implies. The 1948 war, on this reading, was as much a contest between rival factions of that same landed and commercial elite over control of the state as it was a popular democratic uprising.
Mario Samper, Generations of Settlers: Rural Households and Markets on the Costa Rican Frontier, 1850–1935 (1990).
Where the mainstream account has an already-poor, already-equal colony producing a democratic nation almost automatically, revisionists argue the causal arrow ran the other way: a landed elite that had never been especially equal built, and then repeatedly retold, the story of a nation of independent smallholders because that story served its own legitimacy, at home and abroad, especially against the unflattering comparison with more visibly militarized and unequal neighbors. Land concentration outside the Central Valley — cattle estates in the northern province of Guanacaste, the foreign-owned banana plantations of the Caribbean coast — sat awkwardly alongside the smallholder myth for decades, largely left out of the version of the national story that circulated in schoolbooks.
Samuel Z. Stone, La dinastía de los conquistadores (1975).
Where the mainstream sees a habit of good-faith reform, revisionists see a repeatedly renegotiated settlement engineered from above: an elite that gave up just enough — a wider vote here, a health system there, eventually the army itself — to keep control of the state without ever risking it. This reweighs accepted events rather than inventing new ones, and stands on that basis as serious history, though mainstream scholars continue to dispute how much of the credit for Costa Rica’s reforms belongs to elite strategy as opposed to genuine, sustained pressure from rural and labor movements that revisionist accounts sometimes underplay in turn.
Mario Samper, Generations of Settlers: Rural Households and Markets on the Costa Rican Frontier, 1850–1935 (1990).
Explains history through religion, culture, identity, political traditions, ideology and the stories societies tell about themselves. This lens asks how beliefs and shared identities have shaped historical development.
Costa Ricans have long described their own country, with evident pride, as different in kind from its Central American neighbors — the phrase “the Switzerland of Central America” is a local commonplace, not a foreign label. That self-image rests on three intertwined threads: an overwhelmingly Catholic and, by regional standards, culturally homogeneous population in the Central Valley; a civic culture built around voting and civilian institutions rather than military rank; and a long-standing national pride in schooling, going back to nineteenth-century investments in public education well ahead of most of the region. The term for this civilian, anti-militarist political style is civilismo — rule by civilians, for civilians, without a standing military as arbiter.
Deborah J. Yashar, Demanding Democracy: Reform and Reaction in Costa Rica and Guatemala, 1870s–1950s (1997).
The defining threshold in this lens is a single constitutional clause. After winning the 1948 civil war, José Figueres Ferrer’s provisional government wrote a new constitution in 1949 that permanently abolished Costa Rica’s standing army, redirecting its budget toward education and public health. Earlier moments reinforced the same civilian instinct in reverse: an army officer’s coup in 1917 collapsed within two years under domestic and American pressure, one of only two violent interruptions the country experienced in over a century of otherwise peaceful transfers of power, the other being 1948 itself. A parallel thread — the founding of a national social security system in 1941, under President Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia — built the welfare institutions that army abolition later made room for in the budget.
Article 12 of the Constitution of Costa Rica (1949), abolishing the army as a permanent institution.
On this account, Costa Rican nationhood was built around a specific civic self-image — literate, Catholic, land-owning, unarmed — as much as around any shared ethnicity. That image did real work binding citizens to the state, but it was also narrower than the country’s actual population: it centered a mestizo, Spanish-speaking Central Valley and, for much of the twentieth century, left comparatively little room in the national story for the Indigenous communities of the southern and Atlantic lowlands or for the English-speaking, Afro-Caribbean population of the Caribbean coast, descended largely from Jamaican railway and banana workers, who did not receive full citizenship rights until the 1949 constitution. National formation, in other words, involved a genuine binding civic identity and a genuine exclusion running side by side.
Iván Molina & Steven Palmer, The History of Costa Rica (2007).
The long-run process this lens foregrounds is the deliberate institutionalization of unarmed civilian rule as the country’s defining trait. Abolishing the army in 1949 was a single legal act, but its consequences compounded for decades: no military budget to divert from schools and clinics, no officer corps positioned to stage the coups that periodically toppled governments elsewhere in the region, and a national identity that came to define itself, increasingly, in explicit contrast to militarized neighbors. Costa Ricans do not simply happen to lack an army; the absence of one has become a structuring part of how the country understands itself.
Deborah J. Yashar, Demanding Democracy: Reform and Reaction in Costa Rica and Guatemala, 1870s–1950s (1997).
Explains history through geography, natural resources, trade, demographics, technology and economic structures. This lens explores how the physical environment and material conditions have influenced historical change.
Costa Rica’s shape sets its history in motion: a narrow, mountainous corridor between two oceans, sitting at the southern end of the Central American isthmus, away from the overland routes that colonial administrators favored further north. Its volcanic highlands produced unusually fertile soil, but the country had no gold or silver worth extracting and no easy route to the silver-mining core of the Spanish empire. Colonial administrators in Guatemala, who governed the region, largely left it alone. That combination — good soil, poor mineral wealth, geographic remoteness from imperial priorities — is, on this reading, the root cause of the small-scale, low-investment settlement pattern that later chroniclers would recast as a story about national character.
Lowell Gudmundson, Costa Rica Before Coffee: Society and Economy on the Eve of the Export Boom (1986).
Coffee, planted commercially from the 1830s in the volcanic soil of the Central Valley, gave Costa Rica its first sustained export income and tied its highland farmers directly to European buyers, chiefly in Britain. Later in the nineteenth century, the American entrepreneur Minor Keith built a railway from the Central Valley down to the Caribbean port of Limón to move that coffee to market, financing the line partly through vast land grants that he planted with bananas — creating, almost as a side effect, Costa Rica’s second export crop and its first foreign-owned agricultural enclave. Twentieth-century growth diversified further into manufacturing and, from the 1990s, into technology and tourism, drawing on the country’s biodiversity and, later, its trained workforce. Most recently, that same geography — a land bridge between South American cocaine producers and North American and European markets — has made Costa Rica a transit corridor for drug traffickers, reshaping its economic geography once again.
Anthony Winson, Coffee and Democracy in Modern Costa Rica (1989).
Here the state is a byproduct of export logistics. Coffee revenue funded the roads, the port works, and eventually the railway that physically stitched the country’s regions into a single market; that same fiscal base then paid for the schools and courts that gave the state its everyday presence in people’s lives. The nation, on this account, was assembled less around a shared myth or a founding battle than around the practical machinery of getting a cash crop from a highland farm to a European port and turning the proceeds into public institutions. Political unity followed economic infrastructure rather than the reverse.
Lowell Gudmundson, Costa Rica Before Coffee: Society and Economy on the Eve of the Export Boom (1986).
The recurring force in this lens is reinvention of the same small, well-placed territory as an export platform for whatever the world currently wants: coffee in the nineteenth century, bananas alongside it by the early twentieth, tourism and technology assembly by the century’s end, and now, unwillingly, transit space for cocaine moving north. Each cycle has reorganized Costa Rica’s economy, its internal migration, and even its politics around a different commodity or flow, without the underlying geographic fact — a narrow, two-ocean corridor at the hinge of the Americas — ever changing. Rural social movements that emerged in the late twentieth century, protesting the terms of the country’s latest economic opening, are themselves best read as a reaction to this recurring pattern.
Marc Edelman, Peasants Against Globalization: Rural Social Movements in Costa Rica (1999).
This is not a fifth lens, only a map of where the four genuinely disagree.
The sharpest dispute is between the consensus and revisionist readings over whether Costa Rica’s early equality was real or retrospective. Both agree the colonial economy was poor and the coffee boom came in the 1830s; they disagree on what those facts mean, one treating them as evidence of a genuinely broad-based smallholding society, the other as raw material later shaped into a flattering national myth by an elite that was never as absent as the myth implies.
The clearest case of rival explanations for a single event is the 1949 abolition of the army. The cultural and consensus lenses treat it as the culmination of a long civilian, reformist tradition — a moral and political achievement in its own right. The revisionist and economic lenses treat the same act more instrumentally: a fiscal reallocation and a way of demobilizing a defeated faction’s military option, whose peaceful, principled reputation was substantially built up after the fact.
All four agree on one thing without qualification: Costa Rica diverged sharply from the militarized, land-concentrated path many of its neighbors followed across the twentieth century. They part entirely on why — geography and a poor colonial inheritance (economic lens), a genuinely distinct civic culture (cultural lens), authentic bottom-up democratic achievement (consensus), or elite strategy dressed in democratic language (revisionist).
Reference status: all eight works cited above — Molina & Palmer (2007); Bell (1971); Yashar (1997); Stone (1975); Samper (1990); Gudmundson (1986); Winson (1989); Edelman (1999) — were independently verified to exist, with authorship, title, and publication year confirmed against publisher, library, or academic-review records, before being cited here. Stone’s thesis of an unbroken conquistador-descended oligarchy is itself a contested minority position within Costa Rican historiography, presented above as a challenge to the mainstream account, not as settled fact.
Costa Rica’s reputation for peace has come under real strain in the twenty-first century’s second half. 2025 was, on most measures, the most violent year in the country’s recorded history, driven not by war between states or ideological insurgency but by turf wars among domestic drug gangs and the country’s growing role as a transit corridor for South American cocaine moving toward North American and European markets; the conflict-monitoring body UCDP recorded 447 battle-related deaths for that year, the great majority in incidents involving unidentified armed actors rather than named organizations. By the first half of 2026, reporting suggested the worst of that spike had begun to ease — Costa Rica was on track for its first sub-800 annual homicide count since 2022, and UCDP’s provisional data through late August 2026 recorded no confirmed battle-related deaths for the year to that point. Whether this marks a genuine turn or a temporary lull, the structural conditions behind the 2025 peak — the country’s position astride a major trafficking route, and security and judicial institutions built for a smaller problem than the one they now face — remain largely unaddressed.
Verified as of 28 August 2026, against UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset figures and Tico Times reporting on 2025–2026 homicide trends.
Below is a curated selection of documentary films that complement the content on this page
Costa Rica became independent from Spain in 1821 and fully sovereign in 1838 after the Central American federation broke apart. It later developed a mainly democratic system, interrupted by a short dictatorship in 1917–1919 and a brief but intense civil war in 1948 after a disputed election. A new constitution in 1949 abolished the standing army, helping set a long-term pattern of political stability.
According to UCDP, Costa Rica has faced non-state organized violence since 1989, meaning fighting between armed groups that are not the government. In recent years, violence has increased as local gangs have consolidated and competed for territorial control. These groups have also developed ties to transnational drug trafficking networks, including Mexican cartels, which use Costa Rica as a hub in cocaine transit.
UCDP reports that non-state violence reached its highest recorded level in 2025. San José had the most criminal violence, especially clashes between Forces of Churro and Los Gemelos, while Limón was second, driven by fighting between Forces of Tony Peña and Los Hondureños. Other provinces also saw elevated violence. “Gota a gota” informal lending schemes have added threats to civilians through extortion and coercion.
Sources: UCDP; CIA World Factbook.
Costa Rica has become a key **destination and transit country** for people fleeing repression and instability in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba and other parts of Latin America. Recent data indicate refugees and asylum seekers are now around 4.5% of the population, with Nicaraguans comprising roughly three‑quarters of those in need of protection, and the country hosting over 90% of Central America’s asylum seekers. This has driven reforms to asylum regulations and new temporary stay categories for rejected or pending applicants from Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba and Colombia, seeking to balance humanitarian commitments with administrative capacity and social pressures. Bilateral protocols with neighbours, such as Guatemala, aim to better regulate labour migration and protect migrant workers, making migration management a central foreign and domestic policy issue. Sources: OECD International Migration Outlook 2025; UNHCR data via Tico Times (June 2026); Costa Rica–Guatemala labour migration protocol (2025)
Costa Rica has repeatedly issued strong diplomatic **condemnations of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine**, framing it as a violation of the UN Charter and international law and highlighting Ukraine’s prior renunciation of nuclear weapons as a peaceful choice betrayed by aggression. Official foreign ministry statements call on Russia to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and stress Costa Rica’s identity as a demilitarized, peace‑oriented state that supports dialogue and multilateral solutions. At the UN, however, Costa Rica has at times abstained on censure resolutions against Russia, revealing a more cautious voting pattern than its rhetoric suggests. Costa Rica does not provide military assistance, focusing instead on political support and multilateral diplomacy, consistent with its lack of armed forces. Sources: Costa Rican Ministry of Foreign Affairs statements on Ukraine (2024); The Costa Rica News report on support for Ukraine (2023); Q Costa Rica analysis of UN abstention (2025)
Costa Rica maintains a liberal, US‑aligned democracy while also deepening economic ties with China, creating a careful **balancing act in great‑power competition**. It established relations with Beijing in 2007, signed a free trade agreement in 2010, and joined the Belt and Road Initiative in 2018, with recent memoranda and high‑level visits reaffirming the one‑China policy and inviting Chinese infrastructure and investment. Chinese firms now dominate several consumer sectors and car imports, though large‑scale infrastructure projects have faced difficulties. At the same time, Costa Rica has moved to exclude Huawei and other suppliers from its 5G network via cybersecurity rules linked to the Budapest Convention, signalling sensitivity to Western security concerns. The government seeks diversified economic gains while keeping strong access to Western markets and finance. Sources: China–Costa Rica relations overview (2023); Chinese and Costa Rican foreign ministry releases on BRI cooperation (2018–2024); security‑focused analyses of China’s influence and 5G exclusion in Costa Rica (2023–2024)
Although explored by the Spanish early in the 16th century, initial attempts at colonizing Costa Rica proved unsuccessful due to a combination of factors, including disease from mosquito-infested swamps, brutal heat, resistance from Indigenous populations, and pirate raids. It was not until 1563 that a permanent settlement of Cartago was established in the cooler, fertile central highlands. The area remained a colony for some two-and-a-half centuries. In 1821, Costa Rica was one of several Central American provinces that jointly declared independence from Spain. Two years later it joined the United Provinces of Central America, but this federation disintegrated in 1838, at which time Costa Rica proclaimed its sovereignty and independence.
Since the late 19th century, only two brief periods of violence have marred the country’s democratic development. General Federico TINOCO Granados led a coup in 1917, but the threat of US intervention pushed him to resign in 1919. In 1948, landowner Jose FIGUERES Ferrer raised his own army and rebelled against the government. The brief civil war ended with an agreement to allow FIGUERES to remain in power for 18 months, then step down in favor of the previously elected Otilio ULATE. FIGUERES was later elected twice in his own right, in 1953 and 1970.
Costa Rica experienced destabilizing waves of refugees from Central American civil wars in the 1970s and 1980s, but peace in the region has since helped the economy rebound. Although it still maintains a large agricultural sector, Costa Rica has expanded its economy to include strong technology and tourism industries.
The violence in Costa Rica is driven by conflict between two non-state armed groups: the Forces of Churro – Los Gemelos and the Forces of Tony Peña – Los Hondureños. There is no recorded involvement of the Costa Rican government or foreign states in this particular fighting. Competing interests and local grievances likely fuel the conflict, although detailed motives are not explicit in the data.
According to UCDP data, civilian harm from this conflict is very limited, with one recorded civilian death linked to the non-state violence. No deliberate or collateral deaths caused by state actors have been recorded. This suggests the conflict’s impact on civilians, while present, remains relatively low within this dataset, though it does not guarantee overall safety in affected areas.
Sources: UCDP data.
This group is engaged in armed conflict against the Forces of Tony Peña - Los Hondureños, with minimal known civilian casualties attributed to their actions.
This armed group opposes the Forces of Churro - Los Gemelos, and is similarly associated with very limited civilian harm according to available data.
The conflict in Costa Rica involves clashes between two non-state armed groups, the Forces of Churro - Los Gemelos and Forces of Tony Peña - Los Hondureños. The fighting appears rooted in local rivalries and competition for influence, rather than involving the state or external governments. The minimal civilian casualties suggest a limited scope or scale of violence within this non-state conflict.
A brief civil war ends with José Figueres Ferrer’s victory and the 1949 constitution, which abolishes the standing army. Costa Rica redirects resources to education and institutions, shaping a stable but demilitarized state that later confronts security threats mainly through police forces.
The National Liberation Party (PLN), led by Figueres, institutionalizes social democracy, economic state intervention, and close ties with the United States. Its dominance anchors political stability that endures, even as later governments struggle with inequality and crime that influence today’s criminal violence.
Costa Rica aligns closely with the United States, receiving aid and political backing while remaining formally non-aligned and demilitarized. This arrangement reinforces internal stability but also embeds the country in regional Cold War dynamics influencing future cross-border trafficking routes.
Oil shocks, debt, and recession hit Costa Rica, prompting austerity and structural adjustment. Rising unemployment and inequality follow, contributing over decades to social vulnerabilities that criminal organizations later exploit, especially among marginalized urban and coastal communities involved in illicit economies.
During Central America’s wars, Contra forces and other actors use Costa Rican territory for logistics despite the country’s lack of an army. These experiences normalize clandestine corridors and border weaknesses that later become important for drug-trafficking and criminal group movement.
President Óscar Arias brokers the Esquipulas peace accords, helping end Central American civil wars and winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Costa Rica’s role as mediator strengthens its international profile, even as regional demobilization leaves weapons, ex-combatants, and routes that benefit criminal networks.
Governments push liberalization, free trade, and foreign investment. Growth benefits many but leaves persistent inequality, informal labor, and pockets of urban and coastal marginalization. These disparities, especially around Limón and San José peripheries, later provide fertile ground for gangs and drug-trafficking intermediaries.
Debate over CAFTA with the United States polarizes society but ultimately passes by referendum. The agreement deepens trade integration and modernizes some infrastructure, including ports and logistics, unintentionally also improving corridors that transnational drug cartels and local criminal groups can exploit.
Authorities step up cooperation with regional and U.S. agencies against drug-trafficking, including maritime patrols and intelligence sharing. While seizures increase, powerful cartels adapt, pushing more operations onto land and through local intermediaries, which encourages the rise of domestic criminal factions.
Costa Rica’s homicide rate begins trending upward, increasingly associated with disputes between drug-trafficking groups for control of street markets and transit routes. The police-centered security model proves stretched, underscoring institutional limits that shape the context for later non-state armed clashes.
Local networks deepen ties with international cartels, organizing retail drug markets and neighborhood protection rackets. Competition intensifies in coastal areas like Limón and urban districts around San José, setting the stage for later violent confrontations among emerging groups such as Forces of Churro and Los Gemelos.
Costa Rica records its highest homicide rate in modern history, largely tied to score-settling between criminal groups involved in cocaine transit and local sales. The spike forces authorities to recognize organized crime as a main security challenge, even without conventional armed conflict.
COVID-19 triggers recession, unemployment, and fiscal stress. Police and social programs face resource constraints while illicit markets adapt quickly. Socioeconomic strain and institutional pressure indirectly support recruitment into gangs and intensify competition for local drug markets and trafficking corridors.
Non-state armed clashes among criminal groups, including Forces of Churro and Los Gemelos, escalate in and around San José and Limón. Violence centers on control of territories and drug-trafficking routes, producing an armed conflict dynamic among non-state actors that remains active through 2024.
