Costa Rica opens a Bukele-style mega-prison. Here's how it got here

SAN JOSÉ, Costa Rica (AP) — Costa Rica, considered for decades a peaceful enclave in turbulent Central America, has now made fighting drug trafficking one of its main goals. And it is turning to one of its Central American neighbors for inspiration in its hardline crackdown.

On Wednesday, President Laura Fernández inaugurated a mega-prison that emulates the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) that has become a symbol of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele's security strategy.

Bukele has managed to reduce murders to a historic low in El Salvador but faces accusations of abuses during the state of emergency that began in 2022 and has imprisoned more than 91,000 people.

Costa Rica is not the first to turn its attention to the man who has proclaimed himself the “coolest dictator in the world.” Ecuador has done it. So have the new presidents of Peru and Colombia. From Honduras to the Southern Cone, these countries are joining the hardline security strategy also endorsed by U.S. President Donald Trump.

Now, Costa Rica says it will incarcerate its most dangerous criminals in the High-Containment Center against Organized Crime, with a capacity for 5,100 inmates and a cost of $35 million. Here's how the country that was once the region's most stable got here.

For decades, Costa Rica was a “passive” transit zone for drugs from South America, according to the organization Insight Crime. But without an army, and with extensive jungle and ports on both coasts, it began to attract Mexican and Colombian cartels.

At the end of the last decade, a new cargo terminal transformed the Caribbean port of Limón into a storage and transshipment point for cocaine destined for Europe, according to the U.S. State Department, which, in a 2025 report, also detected fentanyl distribution in the Central American country.

Now, the two major Mexican cartels, Sinaloa and Jalisco, are present in the country, as are the Colombian Clan del Golfo, the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua — all considered terrorist organizations by the United States — and Italian mafias, while local cartels proliferate, explained Vanda Felbab-Brown, an organized crime researcher at the Brookings Institution.

The cartels’ interest in new routes and the rivalry between the two major Mexican cartels “pushed local proxies to fight with each other and then drove homicides up” in Costa Rica, Felbab-Brown noted. Payments to these gangs in drugs developed local markets that further increased the violence, and the authorities felt overwhelmed.

The alarm was raised in 2023 when the country registered a record 907 homicides — a figure that has decreased, but only slightly — and the government acknowledged that they were mostly due to organized crime.

Insecurity, although far from that of Ecuador or Mexico, became the biggest concern for Costa Ricans and was a key factor in Fernández’s election.

It was then that Fernández’s predecessor, Rodrigo Chaves, sought out Bukele, whose success in cutting down killings have led his counterparts in the region to turn to him for inspiration on security policy. Chaves bestowed him with a diplomatic honor, and sent his security minister to visit the CECOT. The Salvadoran president, in turn, donated the design for the prison to the Costa Rican government.

The CECOT has become a symbol of Bukele’s security policy and is increasingly being imitated. Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa opened a similar prison last year. Honduras planned something similar on an island, though it has not yet been built. And Peru’s Keiko Fujimori has just announced a trip to El Salvador in response to the rise in homicides and extortion.

The measures tend to be popular, and a large portion of the Costa Rican population supports the new mega-prison.

“Many people are afraid,” said Carlos Ávila, a business administrator. “I think it’s good that they’re building a prison and isolating the criminals.”

But it remains to be seen how criminal gangs and society will react to Costa Rica’s new prison, said Felbab-Brown.

“Orchestrating mass arrests at the scale that we see in El Salvador might be both politically unpopular (in Costa Rica) and opposed and challenged also in terms of intelligence,” she said.

Chaves opted for another tool against crime: in 2025, he carried out a constitutional reform to allow Costa Ricans to be extradited for drug trafficking and terrorism offenses.

In March of this year, the first extraditions to the United States took place, including that of Celso Gamboa, former security minister and Supreme Court justice, accused of drug trafficking.

In recent months there have been high-profile arrests, such as that of Alejandro Arias Monge, alias “Diablo,” the country’s most wanted drug trafficker, and the president announced investigations into two hundred police officers.

Meanwhile, Costa Rica remains a staunch ally of Trump, with agreements to receive deported migrants and participation in the Shield of the Americas, which involves maritime patrols.

Verza reported from Mexico City.

An interior view of a new high-security prison during a media tour in Alajuela, Costa Rica, Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Diaz)

A view of a cell inside the new high-security prison during a media tour in Alajuela, Costa Rica, Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Diaz)

A view of a cell inside the new high-security prison during a media tour in Alajuela, Costa Rica, Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Diaz)

A view of a cell inside the new high-security prison during a media tour in Alajuela, Costa Rica, Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Diaz)

A police officer walks through a hallway during a press tour of a new high-security prison in Alajuela, Costa Rica, Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Diaz)

ROME (AP) — Pope Leo XIV resumed his regular diet, began walking and celebrated Mass in the hospital Wednesday as he recovered from surgery to remove a cancerous mass from his lung, the Vatican said. Questions remained about whether the cancer had spread, while Peru’s president suggested Leo might have to alter his planned visit to Latin America next month.

Blood tests and a chest X-ray showed the 71-year-old pope was recovering normally, his two doctors said.

“The Holy Father underwent respiratory physiotherapy and has begun walking in his room. He resumed his regular diet and had breakfast and lunch,” said Dr. Luigi Carbone, the pope’s personal doctor, and Dr. Stefano Margaritora, the head thoracic surgeon at Gemelli hospital. “Recovery is proceeding as planned.”

Tuesday’s surgery confirmed that Leo has lung adenocarcinoma, the most common type of lung cancer. Surgeons removed the lower lobe of his right lung.

The right lung has three lobes and the left has two. After one lobe is removed, the remaining lung tissue can gradually compensate, especially in otherwise healthy, physically active people. Leo is known for his interest in sports, including weekly tennis games and swimming.

The Vatican said late Wednesday that the pope had celebrated Mass with his secretaries in the afternoon in a special chapel set up for him on the 10th floor of the hospital.

Experts said some of Leo’s lymph nodes would also have been removed and tested to determine whether the cancer had spread. Those results have not so far been made public.

If the cancer has spread, test results will guide treatment, said Dr. Stephen Liu, a lung cancer expert at Georgetown’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. Options include chemotherapy, a combination of chemotherapy and immunotherapy, or targeted therapy, which uses pills to treat cancers with specific characteristics.

Liu, who is not involved in the pope’s care, said that, of the different types of lung cancers, adenocarcinoma has the most favorable prognosis.

“While we know the diagnosis, we now need to know the stage,” Liu said. “We now need to know how big it is, how many spots in the lung are involved. Is it just one nodule, or more than one, and the lymph nodes, are they cancerous?”

Dr. PierCarlo Gentile, head of radiation oncology at Rome’s San Pietro Fatebenefratelli Hospital, said the minimally invasive, video-assisted chest surgery the pope underwent typically requires 15 to 20 days of recovery. Postoperative complications, including infections, are rare, he said.

The Vatican hasn't announced any changes to Leo’s planned trip to Uruguay, Argentina and Peru on Nov. 6-17.

But Peruvian President Keiko Fujimori said Wednesday that the pope's diagnosis and recovery could affect the visit, even as she expressed hope it would go ahead. Leo spent two decades as a missionary in Peru, holds Peruvian citizenship and is beloved by his flock there.

“We understand that this recovery will take several weeks, longer than expected,” Fujimori told reporters. “We also understand that there could be some changes to the schedule of his visit.”

The ambitious itinerary for the longest trip of his papacy covers just over 31,000 kilometers (19,000 miles), with a dozen flights and two helicopter rides across the three countries, as well as a significant change in altitude in Peru.

Fujimori said millions of Peruvians were praying for the pontiff’s recovery and awaiting further announcements from the Vatican.

“We hope his recovery will be swift and that his visit can go ahead, but we will also understand if that is not possible,” she said. “What matters most is that His Holiness regains his health.”

Oncology surgeons often advise patients not to fly for three weeks after surgery.

“If it is Stage 1, he can complete these trips. If more treatment is needed, I would likely advise against the trips,” said Liu.

The pontiff has offered a rare degree of transparency about the first publicly disclosed major health problem of his 17-month papacy.

He revealed the discovery of a nodule, or growth, on his lung during his Sunday noon prayer, announcing it on live television. But Leo did not disclose everything he knew Sunday.

Tuesday’s medical bulletin said preoperative tests had led doctors to suspect cancer, which surgery confirmed. Leo did not use the word cancer in his announcement, though he described the nodule as being at an “early stage” and “circumscribed.”

The Vatican has now said that those tests included a robotic bronchoscopic biopsy, known as an ION broncoscopy, meaning doctors had already taken tissue samples to assess whether the mass was cancerous.

The procedure requires general anesthesia and must be performed in a hospital equipped with one of the advanced machines, said Dr. Lorenzo Spaggiari, chief thoracic surgeon at the European Institute of Oncology in Milan. He said Gemelli hospital had had one for about a year.

The Vatican did not say when Leo underwent the diagnostic tests, which also included a chest CT scan with contrast and a PET scan.

A PET scan can be used to make sure that the disease has not traveled to other places in the body, said Dr. Brendon Stiles, chief of surgical oncology at Montefiore Einstein in New York. Between the scan and the biopsy, Stiles said, “we can be hopefully reassured that this should be a stage-one cancer.”

The Vatican has long been secretive about the health of popes and tightly controlled any such information — a practice encapsulated in the popular Italian saying, “ The pope is fine until he’s dead.”

St. John XXIII died in 1963, nearly a year after doctors diagnosed stomach cancer that was kept hidden at the time. St. John Paul II died in 2005 after suffering for years from the obvious effects of Parkinson's disease that the Vatican only confirmed after he died.

Pope Francis seemed more up front about his health problems, giving an Argentine doctor a tell-all interview for a book about his physical and mental health. But in the end Francis, too, tightly controlled the information that was released in his dying months.

As a result, Leo's decision to announce himself that he had a nodule and was undergoing surgery was significant.

“That was truly a revolution. It was like he was reading a medical bulletin himself,” said Giovanni Maria Vian, a church historian and the former editor-in-chief of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.

Vian, who was part of the Vatican communications team from 2007 to 2018, said the Vatican's obsession with secrecy was due to both practical and cultural considerations. He noted the Vatican is a 2,000-year-old institution that is culturally European — and Europeans tend to be more guarded about health problems than people in the United States.

Barry reported from Milan. Associated Press video producer Paolo Santalucia in Rome and Associated Press writer Lauran Neergaard in Washington contributed to this report.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

A television light is pointed towards the Agostino Gemelli Polyclinic, where Pope Leo XIV is hospitalized after undergoing a surgery, in Rome, Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

Medical Director Andrea Cambieri, right, receives Pope Leo XIV as he arrives at the Agostino Gemelli Polyclinic in Rome, Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2026, where he's expected to be operated to remove a lung nodule. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

An image of Pope Leo XIV rests at the base of a statue of the late Pope John Paul II outside the Agostino Gemelli Polyclinic, where Leo is hospitalized for surgery to remove a lung nodule, in Rome, Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)