PUERTO CALDERA, Puntarenas – Before departing on her epic, day-long boat ride to Costa Rica's far-flung ocean territory, Isla del Coco, President Laura Chinchilla stopped off at the Caldera Coast Guard base for the inauguration of the island's new radar system.
With the wholesale price of marijuana falling – driven in part by decriminalization in sections of the U.S. – Mexican drug farmers are turning away from cannabis and filling their fields with opium poppies.
In the past week: 16 deaths, eight people injured, 118 arrests, and seizure of 24 grenades, two machine guns, 100 pistols and rifles, assorted bullets, and more than 1,000 tons of marijuana, cocaine and crack.
Park guards and coast guard officials say Costa Rica’s Isla del Coco National Park sits within a known drug-trafficking corridor that stretches from Colombia to Mexico.
An estimated 86 percent of the cocaine trafficked into the United States passes through Central America, according to the United States State Department’s 2014 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report. The firehose of cocaine passing through the isthmus has led the State Department to name Costa Rica and its Central American neighbors as major drug producing and drug-transit countries.
Fredis Concepción Ríos, 41, and Guido Fuentes Ríos, 36, were killed Thursday night, and two others were injured in what police suspect is a dispute over drug trafficking.
Drug Control Police seized 1,631 lbs. of cocaine hidden under 58 boxes of scrap metal in a truck attempting to leave Costa Rica at the Peñas Blacnas border crossing Thursday evening.
Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández took office Monday promising to work with a fragmented Congress and stem the highest homicide rate in the world.
Charlie Shrem, who became a tycoon at 24 in the virtual currency Bitcoin, was arrested Monday and charged with money laundering in connection with a scheme to sell more than $1 million in bitcoins to people trafficking drugs on the Silk Road website.
