Costa Rica Opens Bukele-Designed Megaprison
The Facts
- President Laura Fernández inaugurated the High-Containment Center Against Organized Crime (CACCO) on Wednesday, a 5,100-inmate facility equal to about 20% of Costa Rica's prison population. She said the country would become "a global benchmark for prison security."
- The prison, at the La Reforma complex in Alajuela, has five modules of 1,020 beds and cost about 16.8 billion colones, roughly $37 million. Officials say the first transfers of high-risk inmates will take place at the end of October.
- Fernández travels to El Salvador on Friday to meet President Nayib Bukele and tour the Terrorism Confinement Center, whose design his government donated to Costa Rica. Bukele said he congratulated her by telephone after her election win.
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The Spin
Pro-government narrative
Locking up drug traffickers, hitmen and killers in a high-security facility is exactly what a country drowning in record homicides needs. Built without new debt, CACCO shows tough-on-crime governance can be fiscally sound, while Bukele's backing offers Costa Rica and El Salvador a united front against organized crime across Central America. After years of judicial failure, it's time to restore law and order and let the region flourish.
Government-critical narrative
A megaprison modeled on Bukele's CECOT imports a system where fear rules the courts and judges convict people without meaningful due process. As mass arrests, opaque evidence and alleged abuses fuel outrage in El Salvador, Costa Ricans are already protesting Fernández's attacks on judicial independence. Trading democratic safeguards for tough-on-crime theatrics risks entrenching authoritarianism, not delivering lasting security.
