(AFP) The Costa Rican authorities dismantled on Tuesday a powerful drug trafficking group that sent narcotics to the United States and Europe, considered the biggest local cartel in the country’s history, officials said.
Some 1,200 police officers carried out 64 raids in different provinces against Cártel del Caribe Sur (South Caribbean Cartel), in an unprecedented operation in Costa Rica for its scope and deployment of security forces, the deputy director of the Judicial Investigation Organism (OIJ), Michael Soto, told journalists.
“This group was capturing drug shipments to sell them to other known drug traffickers in the country and there was also a line and a drug route to Europe and the United States,” added the official.
Since the country began investigating the group in 2021, following the massacre of eight people in a Caribbean village, 13.7 tons of cocaine and marijuana have been seized, according to OIJ reports.
Some 28 people were arrested on Tuesday, according to the prosecutor’s office, and luxury homes, vehicles and boats were seized as part of a vast investigation in which Colombia, Panama, Spain, United Kingdom, France and the U.S. drug agency DEA.
Soto explained that one of the cartel’s leaders has been detained since 2024 in England to be extradited to the United States, and another remains in a Costa Rican prison, also awaiting to be sent to the U.S. to face trial.
According to the police chief, the group is a “cartel” because of its level of organization and logistics for transporting drugs by sea and land, as well as its sophisticated money laundering scheme.
Costa Rica, once the safest country in Central America, closed 2024 with a rate of 16.6 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, more than double the global average.
In October, a court approved the extradition to the United States of former Security Minister and former Judge Celso Gamboa, who faces drug trafficking charges in the country. The extradition has yet to be carried out.
