Costa Rica’s drug trafficking and organized crime are undergoing a profound transformation driven by the incursion and adaptation of Mexican cartels, which have been forced to change their traditional operations and fragment their structures under police pressure, Michael Soto, interim director of the Judicial Investigation Agency (OIJ), warned.

Soto said emblematic Mexican criminal organizations, particularly the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), have completely reshaped their presence in the Central American country. Instead of maintaining rigid or centralized structures, they constantly seek alternatives to avoid blows directed at their leadership.

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The central strategy in this new criminal landscape is a subcontracting scheme on Costa Rican soil run by the cartels’ operators. “Large criminal organizations transform and turn to structures or individuals that provide services to them without belonging to the cartel. What we see are fragmented structures,” Soto said.

Under this outsourcing model, local criminal groups supply essential services for drug movement, including ground transportation, tactical security, fuel supply and logistics. These Costa Rican networks operate with full commercial flexibility: they do not maintain exclusive ties to a single Mexican cartel and instead provide logistics services according to their economic and operational interests.

#Mexico | President Claudia Sheinbaum responded to U.S. President Donald Trump’s remarks about the cartels made during the Shield of the Americas summit. She said Mexico rejects any foreign military intervention and defends its national sovereignty.https://t.co/3WnG12kesd

— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) March 12, 2026

The Sinaloa Cartel has had a presence in Costa Rica for more than two decades, but now operates through factions derived from its leadership, such as Los Chapitos and La Mayiza, reflecting a need to decentralize to avoid greater structural losses. The CJNG, meanwhile, exemplifies survival after severe blows to its main leaders abroad, and its ability to blend in through local partners complicates traditional intelligence and police pursuit.

The OIJ also recalled that similar transformations affected other Mexican criminal groups in the past, including Los Zetas, the Juárez Cartel and Los Caballeros Templarios. After their top leaders were captured, those organizations lost operational relevance—a pattern that now pushes modern cartels toward decentralization and subcontracting in Central America.

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