Costa Rica’s prosecutor’s office has suspended its investigation into who ordered the 2025 killing of retired Nicaraguan military officer Roberto Samcam, an outspoken critic of Nicaragua’s government who was living in exile in San José, according to a resolution made public Tuesday.
Costa Rican authorities pointed to “ideological” motives for the killing six months ago, but an assistant prosecutor concluded there was “insufficient” evidence to identify who ordered it, according to a recent document. “It is unacceptable,” Samcam’s widow, Claudia Vargas, told AFP in San José.
The United States has accused the government of married co-presidents Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo of carrying out “transnational repression” and has called for those responsible for the killing to be brought to justice. The resolution issued by assistant prosecutor Karla Chaves states that the investigation into who ordered the killing may be reopened if new information emerges.
The decision does not affect the case against five Costa Ricans arrested and accused of carrying out the murder. Prosecutors requested in June that their case proceed to trial. Samcam, a 66-year-old retired Nicaraguan army major, was shot dead on June 19, 2025, in his apartment in northern San José. He had fled to Costa Rica following the 2018 protests against Ortega.
Samcam denounced the army’s role in the crackdown on those demonstrations, which left more than 300 people dead, according to the United Nations, and triggered a political crisis that has driven hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans into exile. In 2023, he was stripped of his Nicaraguan citizenship along with dozens of opponents and critics of Ortega and Murillo, who have ruled Nicaragua for nearly two decades and now wield absolute power.
The Samcam family’s lawyer, Almudena Bernabéu of Spain, expressed her “dissatisfaction” with the prosecutor’s decision. “It is surprising that they decided to close it when little or very little has actually been done on that front,” Bernabéu said. She stressed the need to “get to the bottom of who is behind” the killing.
A United Nations expert group that has documented surveillance, threats and attacks against Nicaraguan exiles in several countries maintains that Samcam’s killing was carefully planned as “a contract killing.”
