A confidential police intelligence report has flagged 116 Fuerza Pública officers stationed along Costa Rica’s southern border, describing alleged collaboration with drug trafficking, liquor smuggling and migrant smuggling networks in a region that has drawn increasing law enforcement attention.
The report dated April 12, was produced by the Directorate of Intelligence and Criminal Analysis of the Ministry of Public Security and addressed to Marlon Cubillo, then director general of the Fuerza Pública. The review was ordered by its own senior command amid suspicions that organized crime had penetrated policing in the area.
Investigators examined the backgrounds of 122 officers assigned to the Brunca Sur regional directorate, covering the Golfito, Coto Brus, Corredores and Puerto Jiménez delegations, and recorded observations on 116 of them. The report states explicitly that its findings do not constitute judicial evidence. No officer named in it has been charged in connection with the review.
According to the analysis, several of the officers appear in the registry maintained by the Costa Rican Drug Institute as suspected collaborators of trafficking organizations. The roles attributed to them include escort work, logistical support, coordinating the landing of aircraft on clandestine airstrips, and moving drug shipments through the southern zone. The report also alleges that officers received payments in connection with those aircraft arrivals and, in some instances, provided cover from police vehicles for cars carrying narcotics.
The single largest concentration of alleged infiltration involves not drugs but alcohol. Intelligence analysts concluded that at least 44 officers maintained suspected links to a liquor smuggling organization known as Los Whiskeros, allegedly warning the group about checkpoints, passing along restricted information about planned operations, coordinating vehicle movements and, in some cases, escorting illegal shipments in exchange for payment.
Drawing on human sources, the document identifies an officer surnamed Moya as the alleged organizer of the structure inside the Fuerza Pública, describing him as recruiting other officers and directing institutional personnel and equipment according to the needs of the criminal groups.
Beyond the trafficking allegations, the review flagged individual officers in connection with other suspected offenses, including one case of femicide, three of rape, one of domestic violence and five of aiding an offender. The findings arrive alongside a series of separate cases involving police personnel. Prosecutors have charged a group of officers in the Caribbean lowlands over alleged assistance to the organization led by Alejandro Arias Monge, known as Diablo, in a file built largely on intercepted phone calls.
A former Fuerza Pública officer from Corredores, within the same southern region covered by this review, is being held for extradition to the United States on drug trafficking allegations. And evidence presented to a federal court in Texas in an unrelated prosecution described payments to National Coast Guard personnel in exchange for allowing cocaine shipments to pass.
The intelligence unit attributed the vulnerability primarily to two factors. The first is financial pressure on officers, which the report’s confidential sources described as making collaboration attractive as supplementary income.
The second is weak oversight by mid-level commanders over the use of patrol vehicles and communications equipment. The analysis further warned that officers with personnel under their command are especially likely to be involved, and that their supervisory position makes them particularly valuable to criminal organizations.
The report recommended relocating officers with no established ties to the southern zone and referring its findings for administrative and criminal investigation. The areas covered by the review sit along the Panama border and the Osa Peninsula, taking in the Paso Canoas crossing, the Golfo Dulce and the airstrips and coastline that have featured repeatedly in trafficking prosecutions.
The document was written nearly four months before it became public, and it remains unclear what action the Fuerza Pública took on its recommendations in the interval, or whether the disciplinary and criminal referrals it proposed were opened.
