Security Reform in a Country Without an Army
Costa Rica's Second Bill Package Due July 27

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President Laura Fernández says her government will send a second package of security bills to Costa Rica's Legislative Assembly on July 27, less than three months after taking office on May 8. It rests on four pillars: broader grounds for extradition, mandatory service of full sentences, tougher penalties for illegal mining, and a restructuring of the judiciary itself. Together they sketch how a country with no army intends to answer a security problem.

What has happened — and what has not

First, the timing. As of this writing the second package has not been filed. At a July 15 press conference Fernández urged legislators to move the bills already before them and announced that the next package would arrive on July 27, declining for now to detail its contents.

The four components were outlined in a government announcement on July 1. One widens the legal grounds for extraditing people wanted in connection with international drug trafficking and organized crime. A second would require sentences to be served in full, closing the gaps through which time behind bars is shortened in practice. A third raises penalties for illegal mining. The fourth targets the judiciary, which the government says will guarantee justice that is both prompt and actually carried out — though no draft text has been released.

The first package was six bills

The opening package reached Congress on June 15: six bills. One, named after a fallen officer, stiffens penalties for attacking or obstructing police on duty and creates a presumption of legitimate self-defense for armed police response. Others redefine gang membership as an offense in its own right, restrict benefits for repeat offenders while creating a national recidivism registry, require inmates to work and split the proceeds between upkeep, victim restitution and family support, criminalize clandestine airstrips used for smuggling, and tighten who may access criminal records. Fernández said at the time that this was only the first package and more would follow.

The bar association has objected to parts of that first package, and the president pushed back against its position on July 15. The second package will land on top of friction that already exists.

Without an army, security reform becomes judicial reform

This is the structural point. Costa Rica abolished its military in 1948 and wrote that abolition into Article 12 of the 1949 constitution. There is simply no army to deploy when crime worsens. With the Ecuadorian or Salvadoran route — a state of exception and soldiers on the streets — constitutionally closed, the levers available to any government narrow to the police and the justice system. The standard move we traced in our earlier piece on the spread of mano dura policing is not on the table here.

So the pressure lands on the courts. On July 15 Fernández argued that drawn-out proceedings leave suspects free to offend again, and criticized senior criminal justice figures by name; the judiciary responded that the system works. She convened a National Security Council session for July 20 with judicial officials invited. The confrontation is now in the open.

Reshaping the judiciary in a country without an army is delicate precisely because it is simultaneously a security question and a separation-of-powers question. If part of what has made Costa Rica an outlier for stability in Central America is an independent judiciary, the government is proposing to operate on one of its own strengths.

The numbers are already falling

What is easy to miss is that this legislative push does not follow deteriorating indicators. The Judicial Investigation Agency (OIJ) counted 378 homicide victims in the first half of 2026, down about 14% from 440 in the same period of 2025. In its first security review on July 1 the government reported homicides down 15% (64 fewer cases), femicides down 52%, and property crime down 10.4%. Bystander victims fell to 20, a 57% drop.

Over a longer horizon, killings peaked at 905 in 2023, then held high at 876 in 2024 and 873 in 2025 before turning down this year. The 2025 rate was 16.7 per 100,000. The OIJ sees a plausible path to finishing 2026 below 800. So the argument for reform cannot rest on a rising murder count; it rests instead on Costa Rica's role as a transit corridor for cocaine and on the slowness of judicial procedure.

My take

When forceful legislation arrives while the numbers are improving, the direction of causation deserves scrutiny. The government is two and a half months old and none of these bills has passed. The first-half decline cannot be their effect. Yet when the drop and the legislative offensive are presented at the same press conference, readers connect them. As in Jamaica, where homicides fell while another indicator worsened, an improving headline total does not settle the question of whether a policy works. Clearance rates and case duration belong next to the totals.

Personal impressions are no substitute for statistics either. I walked through San José in January 2025 for the first time in a decade and, as I wrote at the time, the feel of the center at night was much as I remembered — the sidewalks had been rebuilt and the city looked tidier, if anything. What a visitor absorbs over a few days and what a trafficking corridor does to a country are observations at completely different resolutions. That nothing felt worse is not evidence against the case for reform.

If you watch one thing after July 27, make it the bill number (expediente) assigned to the judicial restructuring proposal and the committee it is routed to. Whether that single bill confines itself to procedural efficiency or reaches into judicial appointments and budgets will tell you, the moment the text is public, whether Costa Rica's version of getting tough stays inside the rule of law. That answer will arrive well before the year-end OIJ figures.

Glossary

Asamblea Legislativa — Costa Rica's unicameral Legislative Assembly, 57 seats. extradición — extradition. cumplimiento efectivo de la pena — effective service of a sentence, the "full sentence" principle. OIJ (Organismo de Investigación Judicial) — the Judicial Investigation Agency, the investigative body inside the judiciary and the primary source for homicide statistics. expediente — the file number assigned to a bill once it is filed with Congress.

When a country without an army tries to get tough on crime, the pressure falls on its courts — and the institution that was its strength becomes the target of reform.

※ This article is the author’s commentary based on public information. Please confirm the latest figures, dates and procedures with governments and primary sources. Quotations are kept minimal and sources are cited.