A Costa Rican court on Friday acquitted former President Miguel Ángel Rodríguez Echeverría of embezzlement in the long-running “Reaseguros” case, closing one of the country’s most protracted corruption prosecutions a quarter-century after it began.
The Criminal Court of Public Finance and Public Service ruled unanimously to absolve the former president, who governed Costa Rica between 1998 and 2002. The verdict, handed down at the Second Judicial Circuit of San José, followed a trial that opened in August 2025 and concluded yesterday.
Presiding judge Mercedes Muñoz Campos read the ruling and indicated that serious irregularities in the investigation had been identified from the outset of the case. Rodríguez said what moved him most was hearing the judge affirm there was not a single fact linking him to a criminal plan.
During the trial, the Prosecutor’s Office for Probity, Transparency and Anti-Corruption sought 132 years in prison against the former president over what it considered 11 counts of embezzlement. The case concerned allegedly improper payments made in 2001 by British reinsurance firms to public officials, intended to secure their selection as reinsurers for the National Insurance Institute (INS). In reaching its decision, the court concluded that the funds in question did not belong to the State, meaning the facts could not be classified as embezzlement under the penal code.
The tribunal also absolved the other defendants, including the former head of reinsurance at the INS, Álvaro Antonio Acuña Prado; the former head of reinsurance at the Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE), Ronald Bonilla Rodríguez; and former ICE officials Antonio Corrales Moya and Ramón Lara Molinari. The judges further rejected the civil damages claims filed by the Attorney General’s Office.
The proceedings were marked by repeated delays: the preparatory phase alone lasted more than 12 years, and in 2013 a court dismissed the case after deeming the use of banking evidence from Panama, the United States and the United Kingdom illegal, a ruling that was annulled in 2014.
The case carried significant political weight from its earliest days; in 2004, Rodríguez resigned as Secretary General of the Organization of American States amid the investigations he faced in Costa Rica. The verdict is separate from the better-known ICE-Alcatel bribery case, in which he was convicted in 2011 but ultimately acquitted on appeal.
