In his own recorded telling, it played out like a doting grandfather’s anecdote. Edwin López Vega — the alleged narcotrafficking kingpin known across the South Caribbean as “Pecho de Rata” — narrates a clip investigators describe in the style of a social-media “Story Time,” recounting how he told his four-year-old grandson to grab a banded stack of bills as a birthday present.
He meant the green bundles, each worth about US$2,000. The boy, López says with evident pride, reached instead for an orange-banded stack — roughly ₡10 million, or close to US$20,000. “What can I do?” he asks his unseen audience, as if the child’s instinct for the bigger pile were a family virtue.
That scene, drawn from the orden de allanamiento in the case Costa Rican authorities have code-named Riverside, has become the most-shared detail of an investigation already remarkable for its scale. It lands precisely because it is small: a single domestic moment that makes the abstraction of “narco wealth” suddenly legible.
One publication has rendered the episode more cinematically still — López opening a car trunk packed with cash from which the child simply pulls out his ₡10 million — but the version anchored in the court file is the grandfather’s own filmed narration, and the color-coded bundles it describes tell their own story about how the operation handled money.
According to the file, that handling was nearly industrial. Photographs show López’s wife and one of his daughters running stacks of bills through electronic counting machines, sorting the cash by denomination before binding it into bundles — green for dollars, orange for the larger colón sums.
Several images carried GPS metadata that investigators say placed the counting inside properties tied to the family. Authorities have cataloged, among the seized assets, 49 pieces of jewelry, seven high-end vehicles, five boats and roughly ₡22 million in cash recovered during the raids. The Organismo de Investigación Judicial estimates the organization’s total assets could exceed ₡10 billion colones (nearly $20 million)— spread across hotels, short-term rental homes, a restaurant, a gym, a soccer pitch and cattle ranches.
The lifestyle reached beyond Costa Rica’s borders. The file notes López’s cultivated proximity to international performers he hosted at a bar he owned; investigators point to imagery of Jamaican dancehall artist Elephant Man photographed alongside one of the López grandchildren, wearing a personalized Christ pendant they say matches custom jewelry worn by López himself — evidence, in their reading, of how deep the social access ran. López, by the OIJ’s account, had come to see himself as something of an influencer, and the recovered clips suggest a man entirely comfortable performing his wealth.
He is no longer in the country to perform it. López Vega was extradited to the United States in March, among the first Costa Ricans surrendered under the constitutional reform to Article 32 that permits the extradition of nationals for narcotrafficking and terrorism. Authorities allege that after his departure the network kept running under family control, and Riverside — described by interim OIJ director Michael Soto as the largest deployment of simultaneous raids in the country’s history — was built to dismantle what remained.
The operation reached five provinces and three penitentiaries, and investigators have linked the structure to the Colombian group known as Los Costeños, whose boats, they say, ran cocaine and marijuana to the Caribbean coast around Cahuita for storage and distribution.
The human-interest detail now sits inside a live courtroom timeline. The hearing on precautionary measures against the detainees opened Thursday at the Juzgado Penal de Limón, then recessed almost immediately: with a file exceeding 9,500, the court granted defense attorneys time to study it and set the continuation for July 1.
In the meantime, the judge ordered one-month instrumental preventive detention for 38 of the accused for whom prosecutors will seek pretrial custody, while 15 others — facing lesser charges and judged to have sufficient community ties — were released on the condition that they appear in court daily once proceedings resume.
For those along the southern Caribbean, the file is more than a curiosity. It is a portrait of how thoroughly a single organization had threaded itself through tourist-based economy: the hotels guests booked, the rentals they stayed in, the restaurants and gyms they passed. None of that changes the day-to-day calculus of a trip or a long-term lease. But it explains why the next phase of this case, beginning July 1, will be watched far beyond the courtroom in Limón.
