Costa Rica is being infiltrated by drug traffickers

[DavidBrown]

In most unwelcome news, drug cartels are taking over the protected rain forests of Costa Rica and killing civilians as they try and establish new trafficking routes. The Costa Rican government is trying to figure out an effective response.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/15/...e_code=1.K04.b2z_.0XIbGwAWxu_M&smid=url-share

 

[birdsandbats]

This is largely being caused by a fundamental problem with the Costa Rican national park system. Many national parks in the country are unstaffed (all are understaffed) and many are rarely visited by the public due to a significant amount of red tape required to enter them. Combine that with the sheer scale of the country's national parks and it's easy to see why this happened. They're huge areas devoid of people where it's easy to operate undetected, while still being fairly close to population centers.

I actually encountered something clearly of this caliber while I was in Costa Rica earlier this year on a beach at night near Dominical. I didn't quite understand it at the time, but in hindsight I was lucky to get away undetected.