If you follow the news in Costa Rica with any degree of regularity, you’ll know that crime is in the zeitgeist. As with any nation there are many flavors of crime in Costa Rica. Corruption is usually associated with the government and other people that hold power. Much of the violent crime lately in Costa Rica has to do with the drug trade in and through the country and those who wish to control it. The type of crime I have been very aware of during my time in Costa Rica tends to affect the general public, and that’s theft.
One of the things I noticed during my first days in the country that was different than what I was used to were bars on windows, metal gates and doors, and tall fences or walls sometimes topped with razor wire on many of the homes and businesses throughout the country. I quickly learned that these theft deterrents were generally considered necessary if you wanted to keep your family and your things separate from those who wished to do you harm or take your stuff.
As time went on in our new tropical lives, my wife and I would hear enough consistent stories of break-ins, many times while the house was empty, but sometimes while the occupants were home, that we decided that metal bars on doors and windows were going to be requirements in any home we rented in Costa Rica. When we decided to build a little beach house it was a no-brainer to install them in our new home. The theory we always went by was to make our home a little too much trouble to break into. We had the bars on the windows, we had the big heavy metal doors on our exterior doors, and we topped that off with one of the world’s meanest bull terriers patrolling the yard and interior. We thought that may be enough to keep us from being the target of a robbery.
Unfortunately, that didn’t go as planned. After a quick stop at the local beach one weekend for sunset, we came home and shuttled the kids into the backyard to hose off the sand and I found the bars on my bedroom window pried open. The thieves had somehow avoided Costa Rica’s angriest dog and made their way through the house grabbing whatever they thought might be worth something. In reality, we were not and still aren’t a great target for theft.
We do not have a lot of nice, expensive things. They made off with a lot of my camera equipment, items from my wife’s purse, my kids’ iPads, an old laptop, and a few other items. Neighbors quickly came to our aid, and I was able to track their footprints through the nearby forest some distance and was able to cover a few items dumped from my wife’s purse before losing the trail. In the end, nobody was charged and nothing was recovered.
A few months later, having gotten one of Costa Rica’s most common types of crime under my belt, the universe decided it was time for me to experience the other most common type of crime, stealing items from a parked car. Everybody knows that you don’t leave anything of value in your car, especially while visiting any area that can be described as touristy. My wife and I have always been diligent about that. My car robbery caught me by surprise because it happened not in the parking lot of a popular beach or parked in front of an expensive rental house, but in the parking lot of my local, frankly grungy supermarket that often smells of chicken that’s past its prime and has birds flying around the ceiling.
I had just completed a long day far from home tramping through the jungles of two different properties reviewing camera traps. During the trip to the first property, the guy that owned the place got us temporarily lost and we were unable to find a camera trap. It poured the entire time I was with the old-timer who owned the second property and though we were able to find all of the cameras, we had to work hard to not slide down the slick, wet mountain while hiking.
Having successfully almost made it home and feeling chuffed that some of the SD cards in my backpack had videos of jaguars on them, I decided to stop at the local supermarket and grab a celebratory six-pack. I was in the store for all of four minutes and when I returned to the truck, I noticed that my lunchbox had been flipped over, leaving an apple on my front seat. I then looked in the back and realized my backpack, with all of the data from my camera traps, was gone. I distinctly remember pushing the lock button on my keys, twice, but I guess it didn’t work or something may have been stopping one of the doors from latching completely.
Those are my two experiences with crime in Costa Rica, and I think they are both the type of thing that have a pretty high possibility of happening if you live here long enough. In the end it wasn’t the things that were taken that really had any impact, though I won’t lie, thinking of those jaguar videos now does hurt my heart a little.
The worst part was how it made me and my family feel. Somebody was in our house, touching our stuff, stealing among other things, my kid’s toys. I had worked so hard that day reviewing camera traps for a wildlife monitoring business that I started in a different country, where I had to learn a new language to make any of it work and I had successfully gotten the exact results that I had hoped for and then somebody broke into my car and stole them. Both incidents felt sad, a little violating, and deflating.
Costa Rica has provided my family with many good memories and peak experiences, but like anywhere, it’s an imperfect place and sometime there are valleys to go with those peaks.
About the Author
Vincent Losasso, founder of Guanacaste Wildlife Monitoring, is a biologist who works with camera traps throughout Costa Rica.
