Costa Rica, the country that abolished its army in 1948 and long sold itself as Central America’s peaceful outlier, is about to open a prison built to El Salvador’s design.
The Centro de Alta Contención contra el Crimen Organizado (CACCO), a $35mn complex with room for 5,100 inmates across five modules, opens on October 14 in the grounds of the La Reforma penitentiary in San Rafael de Alajuela, outside San José. It was built from plans donated by the Salvadoran government and modelled on the Terrorism Confinement Centre (CECOT), the notorious mega-jail at the heart of President Nayib Bukele’s flagship war on gangs.
The region’s two loudest champions of hardline security, Bukele and Abelardo de la Espriella, Colombia’s new right-wing president, are expected at the ceremony.
“We promised it, and today we can say with pride that the CACCO is ready,” President Laura Fernández said in a video recorded as she walked its corridors.
The ceremony will turn a Costa Rican penal project into a regional showcase for the Bukele model just as it is being copied most widely and scrutinised most closely. Governments from Tegucigalpa to Santiago are borrowing from El Salvador’s playbook, even as a panel of international jurists has found reasonable grounds to believe that El Salvador committed crimes against humanity under the state of emergency that filled CECOT.
Built to a blueprint
Construction began in January, when Bukele and Rodrigo Chaves, then president, laid the foundation stone less than three weeks before the presidential election. “Everything we did at CECOT will be done at its Costa Rican version,” Bukele said at the ceremony.
Opposition parties denounced the visit as foreign interference. The Supreme Elections Tribunal allowed it to go ahead but warned that foreign delegations must not meddle in domestic politics. Fernández, Chaves’s handpicked successor, won the February 1 vote in the first round and took office on May 8, keeping Chaves at her side as minister of the presidency and of finance.
By July the complex was 64% complete. Justice minister Gabriel Aguilar said then that its inmates would wear orange uniforms, the first prison uniforms in Costa Rica in more than 50 years, and would not be allowed clothing from outside.
The justice ministry says the facility is intended for leaders of criminal organisations, inmates considered violent, people facing extradition and prisoners in need of special protection. Gerald Campos, Aguilar’s predecessor, said in January that its isolation modules would retain natural light and recreation periods to keep within Costa Rican law, unlike CECOT’s round-the-clock confinement.
Conditions have tightened across the rest of the system as well. The authorities have cut conjugal visits, restricted the food containers and clothing that relatives may bring, removed plugs and electrical cables from cells and shut in-prison shops. Lower-risk inmates have been put to work clearing roadside vegetation.
The government presents CACCO as the centrepiece of its response to organised crime. Costa Rica records about 900 homicides a year, about 70% of which the authorities attribute to drug trafficking. Killings peaked at 907 in 2023, a rate of about 17 per 100,000 inhabitants, and the Judicial Investigation Agency (OIJ) recorded 873 in 2025.
Overcrowding is the government’s other argument. In August 2025, Campos said the country’s prisons were almost 30% over capacity and that CACCO would add 40% to capacity.
Bukele’s interest predates the project. On a tour of La Reforma in November 2024, he warned that Costa Rica showed symptoms of criminality similar to those El Salvador had faced with its gangs. If he attends on October 14, it will be at least his third visit to the country tied to its prisons.
A challenge at home
The opening faces a legal challenge. Ricardo Zeledón, a professor at the University of Costa Rica, has filed an amparo appeal with the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court seeking to block the inauguration and any transfer of inmates, and asking for the building to be demolished. The appeal names Fernández, Chaves and Aguilar.
Zeledón branded the complex a copy of the jail of “the dictator Nayib Bukele” and argued that it posed an imminent threat to human rights. The court had not ruled as of October 7, and the pending appeal does not halt the ceremony.
The model he objects to carries a heavy record. More than 90,000 people have been detained in El Salvador since the state of emergency began in March 2022, many without warrants, and Bukele has acknowledged that about 8,000 were later released for lack of evidence. In 2025, the Trump administration paid El Salvador to hold more than 250 Venezuelans deported from the US at CECOT without trial. Salvadoran officials reject the abuse allegations and point to a fall of more than 90% in the homicide rate from its peak.
Even so, Bukele’s popularity helps explain why the model travels. His approval rating stood at 90% in an October poll by TResearch International, a standing built on a crackdown credited with crushing the gangs that once ravaged El Salvador.
Exporting the iron fist
Costa Rica is the furthest along of a growing band of imitators. Honduras’s Congress is pushing a reform that would require gang members to be held in high-security prisons even before conviction. In July, Panama’s President José Raúl Mulino announced a maximum-security prison for gang leaders, and in September Chile’s President José Antonio Kast hosted a Salvadoran security delegation to discuss prison policy.
De la Espriella, who took office on August 7 after a campaign that drew heavily on Bukele’s security message, has promised 10 high-security prisons modelled on facilities promoted by Bukele and Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa. Medellín is already building a 1,300-inmate jail on the Salvadoran pattern.
During a visit to Colombia in September, Fernández invited De la Espriella to the opening, saying that sharing intelligence with Bogotá would strengthen Costa Rica’s fight against drug-trafficking networks.
For all the regional fanfare, the case at home is less clear-cut. Costa Rica’s homicide count had begun to ease from its 2023 peak before CACCO took in a single inmate.
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