Costa Rica’s Ministry of Justice and Peace has ordered the immediate removal of every television set from cells across the national prison system, the centerpiece of an eight-point package of measures announced Wednesday that the government says is intended to strip organized crime of its influence behind bars.
Justice Minister Gabriel Aguilar presented the measures during the weekly press conference at Casa Presidencial, alongside President Laura Fernández, who endorsed each of the changes. Aguilar instructed the Penitentiary Police to carry out the removal order at all centers, describing the package as a set of directives of immediate compliance rather than proposals for discussion. The measures that require a change in regulation will be formalized through an executive decree that Aguilar said he expects the president to sign no later than Monday.
Alongside the television order, the ministry announced a substantial tightening of the conjugal visit regime. Aguilar said the government will prohibit intimate visits between people who are themselves incarcerated, a practice that until now allowed inmates held at one facility to be transported to another to meet a partner also serving a sentence.
He said the prohibition applies to any transfer arranged for that purpose, including those involving same-sex couples, and made specific reference to transfers from the Vilma Curling Rivera Institutional Care Center, the women’s prison widely known here as Buen Pastor.
A second visitation measure targets civilian visitors. Aguilar said penitentiary authorities had identified a case in which a single person was registered for intimate visits with as many as four different inmates, and that under the new rules no civilian will be permitted intimate visits with more than one incarcerated person.
He also ordered the opening of disciplinary proceedings against the officials and social workers who approved those arrangements, noting that certifying the existence of a genuine relationship before authorizing an intimate visit falls to social work staff. President Fernández, responding to the disclosure at the same press conference, questioned publicly whether the pattern amounted to a prostitution network operating inside the prison system. No charges have been filed in connection with the case, and the ministry has not identified any of the individuals involved.
The package also addresses the internal power structures that authorities say criminal groups rely on inside the prisons. Aguilar ordered the immediate relocation of inmates identified as leaders of prison wings, known in Costa Rican penitentiary slang as jachudos, with the stated aim of moving them to facilities where they hold no authority over other prisoners. He said the transfers are meant to break command chains that allow imprisoned figures to direct activity both inside and outside the walls.
Three further measures are directed at prison staff rather than inmates. All directors of the penitentiary centers will be rotated, a step Aguilar framed as preventing officials from becoming entrenched at a single facility over many years. Officers assigned to the maximum security wing at the La Reforma will be rotated and replaced immediately. And the Penitentiary Intelligence Unit, working with the National Intelligence and Security Directorate, will examine the lifestyles, unexplained wealth and conduct of penitentiary employees, with findings referred to judicial authorities where irregularities are detected.
Aguilar added that staff members — technical personnel, officers and supervisors alike — who are detained on suspicion of introducing drugs or prohibited items into the prisons, or of cooperating with criminal groups, will themselves be held at the maximum security facility for people deprived of liberty, on the reasoning that such conduct places them within criminal organizations. He offered no estimate of how many employees are currently under review.
“In the prisons, the sentence enforcement judges do not give the orders, the Ombudsman’s Office does not give the orders, the criminal gangs and corrupt officials do not give the orders,” Aguilar said. “In the prisons, the government gives the orders.” Fernández, for her part, said the government’s fight against organized crime would continue and that those who ought to feel fear are drug traffickers and criminals.
The television order revisits ground the ministry has covered before, and the earlier attempt did not survive judicial review. In mid-2025 the ministry removed televisions, microwave ovens, frying pans and other items from the maximum security and high containment wings at La Reforma, arguing that the appliances were being used to conceal drugs, mobile phones and electronic components, and that they were being dismantled to manufacture bladed weapons.
A court resolution subsequently ordered the equipment reinstalled. The ministry maintained its position at the time, citing among other things an electrical verification report from the Fire Department’s engineering unit. Whether the expanded nationwide order will face a similar challenge from sentence enforcement judges, the Ombudsman’s Office or the National Mechanism for the Prevention of Torture remains to be seen, and Aguilar’s remarks appeared to anticipate exactly that.
The announcement follows a series of restrictions imposed on the prison system in recent months, including limits on food parcels brought in by visitors, a large-scale removal of accumulated and prohibited items from cell blocks, the confiscation of video game consoles from the Specialized Center for Young Adults, and the “Zero Idleness” program under which inmates perform maintenance work on public infrastructure as part of their sentences.
What the package ultimately tests is where authority over the prisons resides. Aguilar’s insistence that neither sentence enforcement judges nor the Ombudsman’s Office give the orders inside the penitentiary centers sets the executive against the institutions that have historically reviewed and, in the case of the televisions, reversed its decisions.
Much of what was announced Wednesday takes effect only once the president signs the decree, and the measures that touch on visitation rights and conditions of confinement are the ones most likely to be contested. Whether the ministry’s authority holds this time will be settled not at Casa Presidencial but in the courts.
