More than 200 heavily armed police officers and tactical units began swarming several high-crime neighborhoods in Costa Rica's capital on Thursday in an effort to take back city streets that have become overrun by dangerous criminals, authorities said.
A steadily climbing homicide rate has left Costa Rican authorities struggling to find a strategy to combat increasingly violent and well-organized criminal elements, both international and local.
Last year was a rough one for Costa Rica when it came to crime. No where was this more clear than the dramatic increases in homicides and burglaries of homes, according to the Judicial Investigation Police’s (OIJ) 2014 annual report released Monday. Homicides spiked across the country by 14.6 percent – more than any other crime – with 471 people killed during 2014.
OIJ official: “Victims are being tortured or mutilated, and most of these crimes occur in the streets. Previously we had information of at least six organized groups operating in Desamparados, but our intelligence now says that these gangs have merged into two major groups that are disputing control of the area.”
The isthmus connecting North and South America continues to lead the world in murder rates, with four of the top five rates in the world in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Belize.
Despite having only 9 percent of the world’s population, Latin America and the Caribbean register more than 30 percent of the world’s homicides, according to a security expert at the World Bank.
INTERACTIVE GRAPHIC: Explore homicide statistics and their relationship to economic growth across Latin America.
