The United States has delivered the written assurances Costa Rican courts required before Gilbert Hernán Bell Fernández, the Limón businessman known as “Macho Coca,” can be surrendered to face alleged drug trafficking charges in New York. The document removes the last formal condition attached to his extradition, though judicial authorities have not announced a transfer date and he remains in custody in Costa Rica.
The letter was received on Friday sent by the U.S. Embassy in San José, passed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship and forwarded from there to the Secretariat of the Supreme Court of Justice. In it, the United States commits to prosecuting and sentencing Bell Fernández only for the offense described in the extradition request, and not for any prior or concurrent conduct falling outside it.
It further says it will not seek life imprisonment or any sentence exceeding 50 years, the maximum term permitted under Costa Rican law, and to credit the time he has already spent in detention here during the extradition process against any eventual sentence. The document also assures Costa Rican authorities that he will not be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
Accounts of the letter differ on one point: some describe an express commitment not to pursue capital punishment, while another reading holds that no such pledge appears because the death penalty is not an available sanction for the federal offense he is charged with.Bell Fernández, 62, is wanted by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, where prosecutors allege he led a criminal structure that stockpiled and shipped large quantities of cocaine from Costa Rican territory to the United States between March 2022 and August 2023.
The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated him in November 2023 as one of the most significant alleged traffickers. He has not been convicted of the charges in the U.S. case, and the allegations against him remain untested in court.
The path to Friday’s document has been contested at every stage. In March, a criminal court in Limón denied the extradition request outright, ruling that the constitutional reform permitting the surrender of Costa Rican nationals could not be applied retroactively. That reform, an amendment to Article 32 of the Constitution promulgated, took effect last year after the period covered by the U.S. allegations.
Prosecutors appealed, and in June an appeals court in San José reversed the decision and authorized a deferred extradition, meaning the request was granted but its execution held back until the criminal proceeding still open against him in Costa Rica was resolved. That obstacle fell days later, when prosecutors requested and a Limón court approved an opportunity criterion in a domestic case involving the alleged theft of fuel, ending the only proceeding that had kept him in preventive detention here.
What remains is procedural rather than legal. With the guarantees on file, Costa Rican judicial authorities are expected to coordinate with U.S. counterparts on the logistics and timing of the handover, which in previous cases has been carried out by charter flight under heavy security. No date has been made public, and until one is set and executed, the transfer is authorized rather than accomplished.
The case carries weight beyond the individual. Costa Rican courts have not settled whether the 2025 reform reaches conduct that predates it, and rulings have pointed in opposite directions. In a separate appeal involving another Costa Rican sought by U.S. prosecutors, judges accepted the non-retroactivity argument and held that the accused should be tried at home. The appeals ruling in this case departed from that reasoning.
Because the alleged conduct attributed to Bell Fernández ended in August 2023, nearly two years before the amendment took effect, his surrender would stand as the clearest application yet of the reform to earlier acts, and the reasoning behind it is likely to shape how Costa Rican courts handle the extradition requests still moving through the system.
