Costa Rica elects right-wing candidate amid fears over crime
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
By EMILIANO RODRÍGUEZ MEGA and DAVID BOLAÑOS
Laura Fernández, a candidate handpicked by the departing president as his successor, won Costa Rica’s presidential election on Sunday after running on a tough-on-crime platform, according to a preliminary count of the votes.
The 39-year-old political scientist is the second woman to become president in Costa Rica.
Fernández, capitalizing on President Rodrigo Chaves’ popularity, reached the threshold needed to win in the first round of voting, a feat no presidential candidate had achieved in more than a decade.
Early results showed she received nearly 50% of the votes, while her closest opponents, a technocrat and a former first lady, trailed significantly at 33% and about 5%, respectively. As of Sunday evening local time, about 85% of the country’s ballots had been processed.
The country’s electoral authority found last year that Chaves had used his power in office to campaign for Fernández, a tactic banned by the Constitution. He was ineligible to seek a consecutive term but is considered likely to receive a chief position in the new Cabinet.
“From day one, you trusted me, you believed in me, and you knew how to value my own merits and give me the confidence to be the president-elect of Costa Rica today,” Fernández, a former official of the Chaves administration, told her mentor in a televised video call after the preliminary results were announced. “Your work, your legacy for the benefit of this blessed people, is in good hands.”
With her victory, Chaves’ populist movement, which has moved to dismantle many of the country’s institutions — including by overhauling the Supreme Court and obstructing the work of watchdog agencies — will remain in power for at least four more years.
Chaves, who gained a reputation as a maverick outsider with an irreverent style who likes to humiliate his critics, made a public appearance at a polling place Sunday in San José, the capital. A crowd in white and turquoise, the colors of Fernández’s party, surrounded him, applauding and chanting.
“Thank you, Chaves!” they said. “You are not alone!”
The president blew his supporters kisses, then turned toward a group of voters shouting slogans against him and began mocking them sticking out his tongue and making other derisive faces.
Fernández’s rise is in keeping with a growing trend across Latin America as security becomes a top concern for voters and candidates promise iron-fisted measures to combat crime.
Once the most peaceful nation in Central America, Costa Rica is now reckoning with an escalation of violence fueled by transnational drug trafficking. Since 2023, the country has recorded nearly 900 homicides every year, figures that are about 50% higher than before Chaves took office in 2022.
The situation has instilled a kind of fear that many Costa Ricans say they have rarely experienced before.
“My house has bells everywhere,” said Stephanny Bejarano, 39, a preschool teacher in Cartago province, a once-peaceful area near San José. “We had to put up fences all around it. I’m lying down at night and you can hear the gunshots.”
“Four years ago,” she said, “that didn’t happen.”
Fernández’s tough-on-crime campaign notwithstanding, Bejarano voted for Álvaro Ramos, an economist and technocrat, citing a spike in violence under the Chaves administration.
She criticized the government for ordering the withdrawal of police units from the border with Nicaragua and closing strategic coast guard stations in the Pacific. Chaves defended those moves as strategic reorganizations designed to make security forces more efficient.
During the campaign, Fernández played down concerns about killings while retaining some of Chaves’ proposals to combat crime.
Some of those measures were inspired by President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, who has cracked down on gangs in his country. Homicides have plunged in El Salvador, but at a cost, with documented human rights abuses on the rise.
Fernández’s agenda includes imposing states of emergency in high-crime districts that would allow for constitutional guarantees to be suspended. Similar measures in El Salvador have led to a widespread pattern of arbitrary detentions and forced disappearances, according to human rights groups.
In Costa Rica, one Fernández supporter, Marianela Moreno, 76, defended the state-of-emergency approach. “It’s the only way to get into the houses or hide-outs where the criminals are,” she said.
Moreno said Chaves “has had a lot of difficulty taking a hard line” on security issues because his allies in Congress do not have a majority. Some of his proposals, like a plan to tighten pretrial detention for repeat offenders, were rejected as unconstitutional.
“The system is not working, and we feel that President Chaves’ intentions and continuity are very good,” said Moreno’s son, Joaquín Solera, 39. “But they have not been able to fulfill everything they promised because the judiciary and the legislature have not supported them.”
Fernández has also vowed to expand the use of cargo scanners at ports and airports, broaden cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and strengthen alliances with Interpol and European law enforcement. She says her government will enforce “strict control” over the chemical precursors used in the production of fentanyl.
Fernández has also pledged to complete a so-called megaprison, first commissioned by Chaves, that is designed to hold more than 5,000 inmates and keep crime leaders isolated.
Bukele, El Salvador’s president and a close ally of the Trump administration, was in Costa Rica in mid-January to inaugurate the prison, called the Center for High Containment of Organized Crime. El Salvador’s giant CECOT prison is a model for the one being built in Costa Rica.
Beyond security, Fernández has leaned into a deeply conservative platform.
She has pledged to double prison sentences for women who have abortions, to up to six years. And she has courted evangelical leaders, promising them a decisive role in selecting the heads of her education and health ministries.
“A shake-up was needed,” said Guillermo Rodríguez, 73, a retiree in San José who voted for Fernández, “some kind of radical change in the country in terms of the people who have been governing us.”
Fernández’s rhetoric, some borrowed from Chaves, has set off alarms among the opposition and international human rights groups. They warned that Fernández, like her mentor, would try to undermine the checks and balances that have cemented Costa Rica as the most stable democracy in the region for nearly 80 years.
Fernández asked voters to give her party, Pueblo Soberano, a supermajority in her nation’s Legislative Assembly that would allow her party to appoint a slate of loyalist magistrates and push through constitutional amendments that would let presidents seek a consecutive term.
The final makeup of the legislature will become clear in the coming days as electoral officials continue counting votes.
On Sunday, some voters expressed unease over the prospect of a political movement holding so much power.
“The ideology that is dominating the elections right now scares me,” said Sofía Núñez, 19, a physics students who was voting for the first time. “I feel that it is dangerous for the country, for the democracy we have.” She gave her vote to Claudia Dobles, a former first lady with a progressive agenda.
Some of Fernández’s voters dismissed those concerns.