COMMENTARY Costa Rica is a longstanding democratic model in the hemisphere — but is its controversial president poised to adopt the dictatorial methods of the new autocratic model, El Salvador?
El Salvador’s fall into authoritarian rule hasn’t surprised me. Democracy’s roots in that small Central American nation run about as deep as musical taste in a South Beach techno club. That’s why autocratic President Nayib Bukele has had little trouble ripping them out.
But Costa Rica is a different — a critically different — story. It has long been an oasis in Central America’s democracy desert, more beacon republic than banana republic.
That's why last week’s visit to El Salvador by Costa Rica’s security chief was unsettling if not scary.
READ MORE: Oopsie! Is El Salvador the future of Trump's America? You bet your Bukele
Like most Central American countries today, Costa Rica has a violent crime problem. Thanks to the spread of narco-gangs, the once peaceful country registered its worst-ever homicide rate in 2023. It dipped only slightly last year.
And so, like most Central American countries today, Costa Rica can’t help notice El Salvador’s murder rate has dropped from one of the western hemisphere’s highest to one of its lowest.
Which, make no mistake, is a good thing.
Except for the cost.
That is, the human cost. The democracy cost.
Bukele has made El Salvador’s streets less delinquent by making its state more dictatorial.
The "good practices" Costa Rica sees in El Salvador are a troubling trade-off: making the streets less delinquent by making the state more dictatorial.
He’s neutered the legislative and judicial institutions — sending soldiers into the Legislative Assembly in 2020 got that done pretty pronto — and he’s trashed civil rights and due process. That’s led to summary imprisonment not just of gang members but of anyone who looks sideways at Bukele, the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator.”
Result: as much as 2% of El Salvador’s population is behind bars these days. The country has traded a terrifying homicide toll for an appalling incarceration roll.
And this was the model Costa Rican Justice and Peace Minister Gerald Campos Valverde praised during his tour of Bukele’s new maximum-security prison.
“We are going to take all of El Salvador’s good practices back to Costa Rica,” Campos declared.
This isn’t the first time the Costa Ricans, known as los Ticos, have gushed about Bukele’s “good practices.” Last fall, President Rodrigo Chaves awarded the Salvadoran Costa Rica’s highest diplomatic honor for “aiding peace in our region.”
'Nefarious claws'
Again, I can’t blame any Central American leader for wanting to clip what Chaves called the “nefarious claws” of mafioso violence in his own country as potently as they have been in El Salvador. And I can appreciate why that’s made Bukele so popular in the hemisphere.
But I also appreciate what’s made Costa Rica so admired in the hemisphere — and it’s not the suspension of habeas corpus, legal representation, right to trial and all the other rule-of-law essentials that Bukele has buried as irksome inconveniences.
Nor is it the sort of street-corner mugging of the constitution that Bukele commandeered so he could run, illegally, for re-election last year.
Yet I fear Chaves and Costa Rica could be poised to move in that direction — and for reasons that are about more than just reining in narco-thugs.
Simply put, Chaves is under the corruption spotlight, and has been since his presidency began in 2022. The most recent scandal involves kickback charges that could land him in jail. Chaves denies them; but what’s just as worrisome is his demonstrated contempt for democratic institutions, such as press freedom, which a new report says he threatens.
In other words, Chaves is a textbook candidate for Bukele-ism.
Let’s remember: Bukele started his draconian crusade a few years ago under corruption pressure — namely, well documented reports that he’d negotiated with El Salvador’s gangs to let them pursue non-lethal activities like drug-trafficking and extortion, if they’d reduce their murder numbers to boost his image.
To make folks unsee those ugly optics, Bukele went full martial law. Miranda rights who?
Chaves seems in desperate need of that kind of political deflection. As a result, Bukele's methods — which have historically been anathema to the Ticos and their ethos of pura vida, or harmonious living — may look muy atractivo.
Something else could make them look more appealing: the fact that Donald Trump, the President of the United States — the country with supposedly the deepest democratic roots in the Americas — admires them, too.
So much so that he’s deporting migrants, with no due process, to Bukele’s prison.
Beacon republics, it seems, are no longer the model. Bukele republics are.
