President Laura Fernández has put the owners of clandestine airstrips on notice. Following the second meeting of her newly formed Fuerza Élite security task force on Monday, the Costa Rican government announced it is preparing legislation that would impose serious penalties on landowners whose properties are found to contain unauthorized runways used by drug trafficking organizations to move narcotics in and out of the country.
The announcement came directly from President Fernández, who acknowledged a problem that security analysts have been raising for years. Costa Rica currently has around 200 airstrips across its territory, a significant number of which are clandestine and operating entirely outside any regulatory or legal framework. More troublingly, under current law, the penalties for landowners who knowingly allow their properties to be used for narco-trafficking flights are not strong enough to serve as a meaningful deterrent. The new legislation is designed to close that gap.
The Fuerza Élite is a weekly coordination body that brings together all the police and security forces under the executive branch, tasked with aligning operations and results in the fight against organized crime. Monday’s session was its second meeting since President Fernández took office in May, and it produced a series of announcements that together paint a picture of a government moving quickly to establish security credibility in its early weeks.
Beyond the clandestine airstrip legislation, the meeting also addressed improvements to protocols for detecting drugs and chemical precursors at the country’s airports, work that the government said would be carried out in coordination with CETAC and anti-drug authorities.
The administration also discussed measures around vehicle seizures, judicial coordination, and performance indicators designed to improve the rate at which criminal operations result in actual convictions. President Fernández noted that of every 100 people detained in Costa Rica, only four are ultimately convicted, a figure she cited as justification for demanding better results across the entire chain from arrest to sentencing.
The clandestine airstrip issue sits at a particularly sensitive intersection of geography and organized crime. Costa Rica’s terrain, with its remote valleys, jungle lowlands, and dispersed rural properties, creates natural cover for small aircraft operations that move cocaine and other narcotics between South America and destinations farther north.
Landowners who participate in these operations, whether actively or by looking the other way in exchange for payment, have historically faced limited legal exposure compared to the scale of the activity they enable.
The proposed legislation would change that calculus significantly. By making property owners directly liable for what happens on their land, the government hopes to shift the incentive structure in rural communities where cartel money has historically been enough to buy silence and cooperation. The measure mirrors approaches taken in other countries in the region where similar airstrip networks have been used to sustain drug trafficking corridors.
President Fernández also confirmed during the week that her cabinet ministers would be required to undergo polygraph testing, a measure framed as a signal of zero tolerance for corruption within the government itself as it takes on organized crime from the outside.
The security agenda is clearly the early priority of the new administration, and Monday’s announcements suggest it intends to move on multiple fronts simultaneously.
