Few places are as emblematic of Costa Rica as Monteverde, a district nestled in the country’s mountainous cloud forests northwest of San Jose.

For decades tourists have been drawn to the abundant tropical flora and fauna, preserved through the efforts of scientists, conservationists and an unusual group of outsiders. In the early 1950s, American Quakers — conscientious objectors avoiding the Korean War draft — settled here and established a community built on pacifism and environmentalism.

Their arrival coincided with another defining moment in Costa Rican history. After emerging victorious from the country’s brief civil war in 1948, José Figueres, the revolution’s leader, did something unheard of: he abolished the army and called for elections. So much for becoming yet another Latin American strongman. Instead, he became a visionary, laying the foundations of a democratic system that has endured for nearly eight decades. Costa Rica acquired the moniker the “Switzerland of Central America,” its stability, independent institutions and respect for civil liberties setting it apart from its violent and autocratic neighbors.

But today Monteverde also evokes a very different Costa Rica. In February, several dozen migrants expelled from the U.S. by the Trump administration were dumped in Costa Rica after the government of then-president Rodrigo Chaves, a Trump devotee, agreed to accept them. He placed them in a detention center where, according to lawyers and human rights advocates, they were effectively prisoners held in poor conditions. But much to Chaves’s displeasure, a Costa Rican judge eventually ordered their release. Some ended up in Monteverde, where Quakers opened their doors and helped them get settled. 

The episode illustrates one of the principal conflicts in roiling Costa Rican politics: an increasingly confrontational executive branch facing a judiciary determined to assert its constitutional authority. Sound familiar?

Chaves came to power promising to shake up a political system that many voters viewed as stagnant and corrupt. He blamed the opposition, judges, the press — any critic for that matter — for protecting criminals and obstructing reforms. His weekly press conferences became political theater. Almost every Thursday he singled out opponents by name, accusing them of sabotaging his administration. 

The insults were often crude, a sharp departure from the restrained language that had traditionally characterized Costa Rican politics. Supporters saw authenticity. Critics saw an assault on democratic norms.

Target: the Courts

Fernando Cruz Castro, the former president of Costa Rica’s Supreme Court, believes the attacks are not simply rhetorical. “The strategy,” he told me, “Is to discredit the judiciary in the eyes of the public.”

Cruz says he had never experienced anything like it in decades on the bench. Presidents had disagreed with court rulings before, but they had not made judges themselves into targets. Chaves regularly mocked members of the judiciary and, on one occasion, directed a personal insult at Cruz himself. 

By the time Chaves left office earlier this year, he was more popular than any recent Costa Rican president at the end of a term. His chosen successor, Laura Fernández, won the presidency by a comfortable margin after campaigning as the candidate who would continue what supporters increasingly call “Chavismo.” She had been minister of the presidency and minister of planning, under the Chaves administration. And presto, after she won, they simply switched roles: she appointed him minister of the presidency and minister of finance. 

He sits at her right in cabinet meetings and accompanies her to many public appearances where she often lets him speak, which begs the question of whether he isn’t still pulling the strings. While she might not be as abrasive as Chaves — she sounds more like a schoolmarm scolding pupils who seem not to understand what’s good for them — she has continued, even escalated, attacks on the opposition in general and the judiciary in particular. 

“You know what communism and the left does to countries,” she said in a recent press conference, referring to members of the opposition in parliament. “It destroys everything in its wake. You can see the example of Cuba and Venezuela. They are the enemies of the Costa Rican people.”

For years, Costa Ricans watched the country’s public institutions begin to show signs of strain. The public health system, long regarded as one of Latin America’s best, developed waiting lists for medical care that stretched months, sometimes years. Traditional political parties, which had alternated in power for decades, became increasingly associated with patronage and corruption. And while Costa Rica remained considerably safer than its neighbors, organized crime expanded along with cocaine traffic. 

Rising Crime

Homicide rates rose to levels once unimaginable in a country that prided itself on its peacefulexceptionalism. In 2023, Costa Rica recorded 17.3 homicides per 100,000 people — far lower than Colombia or Honduras, but almost triple that of the United States. The figure has since leveled off, but remains more than 60 percent higher than it was a decade ago.

Drug traffickers, once content to use Costa Rica as a transit route, established a more permanent presence. Stories of shootings and gang violence became common in newspapers that only a decade earlier had devoted far more attention to tourism and protection of the country’s fragile environment.

Meanwhile, concerns have emerged over the infiltration of organized crime into the security forces and judicial authorities. The most egregious example to date is that of Celso Gamboa Sánchez, a former Supreme Court magistrate and ex-security minister in previous administrations, who was arrested in 2025 and charged with collaborating with drug traffickers. In March he was extradited to the U.S. to stand trial in Texas after a constitutional reform authorized the extradition of Costa Rican citizens for drug and terrorism offenses — an unprecedented turnabout in a country that had largely escaped the legal squalor of its neighbors.

Among Fernández’s responses to the problem has been to require that all police commissioners take polygraph tests. She fired seven members of the elite anti-narcotics unit who allegedly failed. She also pledged to stop “coddling” criminals, ordering the removal of TVs, microwaves and even electrical outlets from their cells. 

“The program is to copy the Bukele model,” explained former Supreme Court president Cruz, referring to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. “Which is why they are constructing a mega-prison, just like El Salvador’s, to house the country’s most violent criminals.”

Across Latin America, Bukele has come to embody the promise of making the streets safe by adopting a hard line against criminals of all stripes. While his mass arrests, giant prison complex and disregard for due process have drawn condemnation from human rights organizations, El Salvador went from having one of the highest homicide rates in Latin America to one of the lowest.

Beyond obtaining concrete results, the young and telegenic Bukele is a virtuoso on social media, where he presents as a tough, but hip caudillo. It’s made him, along with Trump, with whom he has a particularly close relationship, the model for many of the newly elected leaders of the Latin American populist right — including, of course, Laura Fernández. Bukele enjoys astronomically high approval ratings (over 90 percent) in his own country. But polling shows that many others in less battered countries in Latin America, even those who acknowledge that Bukele has curtailed civil liberties, believe the reduction of violence is a worthwhile tradeoff.

According to Cruz, the government has also consciously borrowed from Bukele’s political playbook when it comes to the judiciary, arguing that judges stand in the way of effective security policies. But the clash between Costa Rica’s executive and its judiciary did not begin with the migrants expelled by the United States. That episode exposed a conflict that had been building for years.

For much of Costa Rica’s democratic history, presidents occasionally complained about judges, but they generally accepted the courts as an independent branch of government whose rulings, however inconvenient, had to be respected. Chaves viewed the constitutional guardrails differently. In speech after speech, he accused judges of protecting criminals, frustrating the government’s security policies and preventing the reforms voters had elected him to push through.

Fernández has adopted his playbook, accusing judges of releasing dangerous suspects back to the streets. Cruz rejects that narrative. “Blaming judges for organized crime,” he said, “is politically convenient, but factually misleading. Portraying the judiciary as soft on crime creates a powerful political enemy and helps justify proposals to weaken institutional checks on executive power.” 

That does not mean Costa Rica is about to become El Salvador. The two countries have very different constitutional traditions, and Costa Rica lacks one important instrument available to Bukele: an army. But Cruz fears that Fernández’ strategy is similar. First, convince the public that the level of violence has become intolerable. Then argue that extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary measures — which include limiting the independence of the courts.

Cruz’ greatest concern is not any single court case or presidential speech, but the gradual normalization of a different understanding of democracy, one in which winning an election is treated as a mandate to remove institutional obstacles to executive power rather than govern within them. Whether Fernández can make that happen is an open question.

Costa Rica’s courts retain considerable constitutional authority, and unlike most countries in the region, the judiciary enjoys a tradition of independence. But for the first time in decades, many Costa Rican judges find themselves defending not only their rulings, but also the legitimacy of the courts to rule.

Currency Shock

Fernández has inherited an economy that improved under her predecessor. Inflation came under control, investment increased and the appreciation of the colón by almost 30 percent against the dollar made imported goods cheaper for consumers. The stronger currency is, of course, a mixed bag, hurting exporters and tourism operators. But for many families, the increased import purchasing power is especially welcome at a time when much of the world is struggling with the cost of living. Business leaders point to continued foreign investment, particularly in technology, free trade zones and luxury tourism, as evidence that confidence in Costa Rica remains strong.

Eric Poncon, regional director of ECOM, one of the world’s largest traders in coffee, cocoa and cotton believes that the government has been moving in the right direction. “No doubt, the revaluation of the colón was hard for us,” he said. “But it’s been worth it, nevertheless, by making life more affordable for most Costa Ricans. It did affect tourism, but that’s bouncing back. And now we’re had a large increase in foreign investment.”

Poncon believes that now that Fernández has a majority in the parliament — 31 out of 57 seats — “she’ll get more done. Before, the opposition was blocking everything.”

Costa Rica’s GDP is projected to grow by 3.5 percent in 2026 and 3.4 percent in 2027, above the Latin American average. Domestic demand is expected to remain robust, supported by moderate gains in disposable income. Inflation hovers right at 1 percent, while unemployment is just 6 percent.

Those successes help explain why Chaves left office with approval ratings that most former Costa Rican presidents would envy, as well as how Fernández was able to ride his coattails to victory. Her confrontations with other democratic institutions seemed to reinforce her central argument: that unelected judges, journalists and politicians from the old parties were preventing her from solving the country’s problems.

It is an argument that has become increasingly familiar across democracies around the world. In Costa Rica, however, it represents a profound departure from a political culture that for decades prized consensus over confrontation and institutions over personalities. So, while Fernández continues to rail against her opponents, real or imagined, she has touched a nerve that produced street demonstrations of a size not seen in years. Tens of thousands gathered in front of courts all over Costa Rica to protest her interference in the judiciary.

Fake News

During his term, Chaves accused Costa Rica’s major news organizations of being political adversaries, of misleading the public and protecting the political class. Fernández has dutifully carried the torch of “fake news” accusations. The deterioration in the status of journalism has been rapid, says Fabrice Le Lous, the editor of La Nación, Costa Rica’s leading newspaper. “In just five years,” he told me, “Costa Rica has gone from being among the world’s best countries for press freedom to roughly the middle of the rankings.”

That decline, he argues, cannot be explained by a single incident. From the beginning of Chaves’s political rise, Le Lous says, the country’s largest media organizations were presented not as institutions serving the public but as actors conspiring against his administration. La Nación became one of the administration’s principal targets.

Le Lous points to a pattern rather than specific disputes. Chaves repeatedly denounced the newspaper after it reported allegations of sexual harassment dating from his years at the World Bank. He threatened what he described as a political “tsunami” that would sweep away the country’s traditional media. Later, his government ordered the closure of a concert venue owned by La Nación, an important source of revenue for the newspaper. Costa Rica’s courts eventually ordered it reopened, concluding that the measure violated constitutional protections.

Earlier this year, the entire board of directors of La Nación had their U.S. visas revoked by Washington, which can hardly be attributed to coincidence. Included in the visa stripping were several critics of the government, including former president Óscar Arias, who won the Noble Peace Prize in 1987 for his efforts to end the conflicts devastating Central America at the time. Although the Trump administration has never explained the revocations, it’s pretty clear that Fernández and Trump administration share a distaste for independent voices.

None of this means Costa Rica lacks a free press. Newspapers continue to publish investigations critical of the government. Television stations openly question ministers. Journalists are not disappearing into prisons.

• • •

On my last day in Costa Rica, I had lunch with Luis Guillermo Solis who was president from 2014 to 2018 representing the center-left Progressive Action Party. We sat in an open-air cafe where people stopped by to say hello. There were no bodyguards; the atmosphere was relaxed. But Solis worried “that Costa Rica is heading down a populist and authoritarian road.”

To Solis, the government’s political strategy is clear: “Convince Costa Ricans that extraordinary insecurity requires extraordinary measures. That [Fernández] and Chaves need a free hand to right the ship. Of course, it’s undeniable there were problems, but their us versus them approach is dangerous.” 

Since she only has a simple, not absolute, majority in parliament, Fernández wants to change the constitution using referendums, which she refers to as “consulting the people,” to centralize more power in the executive. “We have, for the moment, more checks and balances than most other countries in Central America,” he acknowledged. “But we must remain vigilant. We’ve seen this play out many times in history. And by the time you realize it, it’s too late.”