If you have ever wondered why a highway project in Costa Rica costs more than the government said it would, and finishes later than anyone promised, part of the answer is that there is hardly anyone left to bid on it. Four construction firms — two of them operating as a single consortium — now control roughly 74% of the value of the road contracts currently under way or awarded since 2022, according to a review published by La Nación.
Between them, they hold more than $970 million of a $1.311 billion portfolio built from international loans and the budget of the National Road Council, known by its Spanish acronym Conavi. That portfolio covers new construction, the Proeri emergency works program and the routine conservation of the national road network.
The largest share belongs to Constructora MECO, the Costa Rican firm whose awards exceed $582.5 million, or 44.4% of the total. Second is China Harbour Engineering Company, or CHEC. The remainder of the group is a consortium formed by the Dominican firm IngenierÃa Estrella and Bel IngenierÃa. The pattern behind the numbers is not one of aggressive competition. It is one of near-absent competition.
MECO was awarded the southern segment of the highway to San Carlos — 7.8 kilometers (4.8 miles) of road valued at $199 million — after emerging as the only bidder to clear the technical evaluation in a process run by the Ministry of Public Works and Transport through the Inter-American Development Bank, which is financing the project.
The company is also widening the stretch between San Gerardo de Chomes and Limonal on the northern Inter-American Highway, a $148 million job that forms part of the long-delayed Barranca–Limonal project, and is building the Hatillos interchanges and the Grecia overpass on the road to San Ramón. In the recently awarded contracts for maintaining the national road network, MECO took 12 of the 22 lines on offer, worth more than $197 million in work over the next four years.
CHEC’s position illustrates the same problem from the other side. The company was the only firm to submit an offer for the central segment of the San Carlos highway, a project the Finance Ministry had estimated at $183 million — a figure that MOPT officials have since indicated will be higher. That contract still has not been finalized.
MOPT confirmed a year ago that CHEC met the technical requirements, but the award has been waiting on a sign-off from the Inter-American Development Bank that never came. Faced with the delay, Public Works Minister EfraÃm Zeledón has asked the Comptroller General for authorization to change the mechanism entirely and move the project into a tender governed by national procurement law instead.
The money at stake is not marginal. MOPT and Conavi are currently managing a road works portfolio exceeding $1.311 billion, and that figure does not even include targeted repairs funded through the Fondo Vial or separate works at ports and airports. The resources come from the Inter-American Development Bank, the Central American Bank for Economic Integration and the conservation budget, which is the single largest line in the ministry’s annual spending plan. The IDB’s transport infrastructure program is financing Punta Sur and the interchanges at Grecia, San Ramón and Naranjo; CABEI money is behind the Conavi-managed widening between Barranca and Limonal.
La Nación reported that it put questions to MECO and CHEC, and that it also sought a press contact for Bel IngenierÃa through the company’s registered email address without receiving a response.
For foreign residents, property owners and investors, the concentration is not an abstraction about procurement law. It is the mechanism that sets the price and the timeline of nearly every major road project between San José and the coasts — Route 1 to Guanacaste, the San Carlos corridor into the northern zone, the Barranca–Limonal widening that a generation of drivers has watched start and stop. When a $199 million contract draws exactly one qualifying bidder, the state loses its main tool for holding the price down.
None of the companies named has been accused of wrongdoing in connection with these awards, and the concentration described is a function of who shows up to bid rather than of any finding by an investigating authority. But the market that produced it is one Costa Rica has been trying to open for years, and the numbers published Sunday suggest it has not managed to.
