DistantNews
Support us
🇨🇷 Costa Rica /Crime & Justice

Laura Fernández’s reasoning gives her away

From La Nación · () Spanish

Translated from Spanish and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

Opinion Named sources Context piece
  • Laura Fernández has set a goal of reducing Costa Rica’s homicide rate by 1.5, after the country recorded its highest-ever level of lethal violence.
  • Columnist Marco Feoli argues that the focus should be on preventing deaths rather than securing more convictions and imprisoning more people.
  • He says responsibility for crime prevention lies primarily with executive authorities, rather than judges or prosecutors.

If the judiciary hands down many convictions, it is because many people have died. And if many people have died, it is because the executive branch failed to stop them. That is the reasoning Marco Feoli says Laura Fernández’s security argument exposes.

Fernández has announced that her now modest security objective is to reduce Costa Rica’s homicide rate by just 1.5. The country is enduring the most lethal homicide rate in its history, a legacy of the administration led by her minister of the presidency and finance.

For Feoli, the promised land invoked by populist movements across the region amounts to little more than returning, perhaps, to the situation in 2023. “That is where we are,” he writes.

The columnist says the country does not need large numbers of convicted prisoners. It needs fewer people killed in its streets. That is the central point, he argues: crime prevention is fundamentally the responsibility of administrative authorities, not judges or prosecutors.

About this summary

Originally published by La Nación in Spanish. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

More Stories

From Our Blog