Costa Rica adopts Bukele’s penitentiary model with the inauguration of a new mega-prison

President Laura Fernández of Costa Rica on Wednesday inaugurated the so-called High-Containment Center Against Organized Crime (CACCO), a mega-prison designed to hold 5,100 inmates under maximum-security conditions with the aim of isolating narcotics-trafficking gangs. The Costa Rican government seeks with this move to consolidate its tough-on-crime policy, the centerpiece of propaganda amid the security crisis, which is symbolized by the enormous penal complex modeled on Nayib Bukele’s approach.

As of this Wednesday, Costa Rica was one of the 20 countries in the world with the highest incarceration rate, with overcrowding exceeding 50% following a decade in which the prison population doubled — despite the government’s rhetoric blaming the judiciary for allegedly failing to hand down enough convictions and accusing it of fueling the wave of crime plaguing the Central American country.

The government has presented the new facility as “a before and after” in the country’s penal history. It is a flagship project for President Fernández, who took office on May 8 and announced a “war” against criminal gangs in a country that for years has prided itself on pacifism, the abolition of its armed forces in 1948, its rule of law, and its welfare system.

Now the reality is different and authorities say the penal system must be further tightened. Every poll highlights security as the population’s primary concern. Daytime homicides have ceased to be shocking news, and every week there is at least one operation by the judicial police against a drug-trafficking gang, now with the possibility of capturing suspects wanted by courts in the United States.

Fernández has acknowledged that drug-trafficking and money-laundering operators are “dispersed” throughout society and have infiltrated state institutions, but her most visible response has been to exalt the new prison that her predecessor, Rodrigo Chaves, pushed through late in his term. They are aware of the high popular acceptance of hard-line measures, like those applied by Bukele to contain gang violence in El Salvador.

“It is a before and after in penitentiary security and national security as a whole. Our country will be a world reference,” Fernández said before announcing she will travel this Friday to El Salvador to visit the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot) and learn how it operates with thousands of alleged gang members.

The new Costa Rican prison is being called a “mega-prison” even though its capacity is one-eighth that of the Cecot. It could be filled as soon as this month with just the inmates currently overcrowded in traditional prisons, but authorities say their intention is to reserve the CACCO for the most dangerous and powerful criminals. The criteria to classify each individual will have a technical basis, they said at the inauguration on Wednesday, although Fernández immediately ordered that the first inmate be one of the suspects accused of killing a police officer in May in a Caribbean municipality.

The Salvadoran government donated the building designs taking the Cecot as a reference, although in Costa Rica the crisis is driven not by gangs but by drug-trafficking organizations that move millions of dollars in partnership with international cartels. The underlying problems are different, and that is part of the criticism against the new prison. “They are applying a solution used there [El Salvador] to a problem that does not exist here,” said Marco Feoli, a former justice minister who is now a member of the United Nations Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture.

But that is not the only criticism. Feoli points to the lack of information on how the CACCO will operate and stresses that its capacity is insufficient to solve even current overcrowding. “It is a staged show to display an instrument as exemplary, but it will not solve the problem we have in Costa Rica,” the lawyer said.

The person in charge of the new prison is Justice Minister Gabriel Aguilar, a lawyer who appears in public with a stern demeanor and who has himself filmed in police uniform confronting inmates, threatening to transfer them to the CACCO if they do not obey his orders. In recent days, allegations have emerged of alleged mistreatment and beatings during searches in which he participated — reports that prompted the Prosecutor’s Office to open an investigation into the official for abuse of authority.

The Ombudsman’s Office, which houses the National Mechanism for the Prevention of Torture, asked that inmates not be transferred to the new prison until the criteria are clarified. “The opening of the CACCO constitutes a risk,” the institution said in a statement, referring to the lack of technical and legal norms and calling for the eradication of arbitrary criteria and political interference. Aguilar, however, has said he will not heed the Ombudsman’s positions and that the treatment of inmates reflects his personal style. “It is my way of being,” the minister later told the press.

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