Costa Rica’s largest-ever anti-narcotics operation moved from raids into the courtroom as prosecutors said they would seek preventive detention and other precautionary measures against 50 of the people arrested in the takedown of the drug and money-laundering network built by Edwin López Vega, the trafficker known as “Pecho de Rata.”
The request, filed by the Prosecutor’s Office Against Money Laundering and Asset Forfeiture, covers suspects facing charges that range from domestic and international drug trafficking to arms trafficking, possession of explosives, smuggling drugs into prisons, money laundering and criminal association. Although the petition was lodged with the Limón Criminal Court, authorities said the sheer number of defendants will force the detention hearing to be held at the Justice Courts complex in San José.
The filing follows the June 23 operation that authorities have repeatedly described as the biggest police action in our history. Roughly 1,500 officers, prosecutors and judges carried out 97 raids across 141 structures in five provinces — Limón, Heredia, Cartago, Alajuela and Turrialba — and even entered the La Reforma and La Leticia prisons. The first raids began at 3 a.m. at the family housing complex in Cahuita de Talamanca, Limón, where tourists at an adjacent hotel tied to one of the suspects were evacuated.
What gives the case its weight, prosecutors say, is that the organization kept running after López Vega was extradited to the United States in March, allegedly coordinated by his children. Investigators identified one son, a former first-division footballer, as a co-leader who managed front businesses spanning machinery, transport, cattle, rentals and other industries.
Among those detained are three of his children from a first marriage, an unrecognized son, two former professional footballers and two penitentiary police officers accused of lending López Vega a cellphone so he could issue orders from La Reforma while awaiting extradition.
Two women remain at large. The Judicial Investigation Agency (OIJ) said it has put out Interpol alerts at airports and border crossings for López Vega’s wife and a second woman — described in the file as a professional model — whose last registered location was Switzerland. Costa Rican authorities said they are coordinating directly with Interpol and Swiss prosecutors on their possible location and extradition.
A recovered case file, which is roughly 6,000 pages long, sketches a hierarchy that reached well beyond the Caribbean coast. According to the document, the network was allied with a Colombian group known as Los Costeños, which supplied cocaine and marijuana by sea to the Atlantic coast, and was capable of sending marijuana to the entire domestic market. A notebook seized in La Guácima de Alajuela allegedly logged drug movements and noted that “Pecho” had taken 125 Rolex watches — a detail that captures the lifestyle prosecutors are now trying to trace.
For the Southern Caribbean area, the most consequential thread is how that money allegedly moved. Investigators say hotels, a restaurant, rental properties, a gym, a bullring and a football pitch around Cahuita were used as fronts to launder drug proceeds. Seized items in the latest OIJ inventory include cash in colones, dollars and euros worth about â‚¡22 million, 3,200 kilograms of marijuana, nearly a ton of cocaine, a hydroponic marijuana lab, seven high-end vehicles, five boats and 49 pieces of jewelry.
The detention hearing in San José is only the next step. Prosecutors have stressed that the network kept operating even after its leader was extradited — a sign, they say, of how deeply it had embedded itself in the South Caribbean’s economy. With two suspects still sought abroad and the asset-forfeiture case moving in parallel, the courtroom phase of Costa Rica’s largest drug investigation is just beginning.
