Costa Rica opened CACCO — a 5,100-capacity mega-prison — on Wednesday, joining a hemisphere-wide rush to copy Nayib Bukele's El Salvador playbook: build enormous detention facilities, crack down hard, suspend inconvenient rights, and ride the resulting approval ratings. President Laura Fernandez called it a "tough-on-crime model" and a future "global benchmark for prison security." The country that once stood apart from Central American violence is now importing its neighbours' carceral architecture. The numbers driving the shift are real. Costa Rica recorded 905 homicides in 2023, a national record, with 876 in 2024 and 873 in 2025. Analysts attribute the surge to turf wars between criminal groups competing for drug trafficking routes. The new prison's 5,100-bed capacity amounts to roughly 20 percent of Costa Rica's entire current prison population — a massive expansion built in a single facility. First transfers are scheduled for late October. The Bukele template has become the dominant policy export in Latin American politics. Peru's President Keiko Fujimori, inaugurated in July, plans to tour El Salvador's CECOT — a 40,000-capacity facility — before building her own. Colombia's Abelardo de la Espriella campaigned on building 10 mega-prisons and took office in August. In Brazil's ongoing presidential election, right-wing candidate Flavio Bolsonaro has advanced to the final round on a platform that includes five mega-prisons. The model is no longer one country's experiment; it is a regional orthodoxy. What makes this contagion remarkable is the gap between the security results and the civil-liberties costs that come packaged with them. El Salvador's "state of exception," imposed in 2022, is credited with a sharp drop in homicides. But the mechanism requires continuous renewal of emergency powers, mass arrests, mass trials with hundreds of defendants processed simultaneously, detention without charge, and conditions rights groups describe as overcrowded and abusive. The emergency declaration, originally presented as temporary, has been continuously extended for over three years. The structural logic is extractive in a specific way: political capital is generated by concentrating state power against a visible enemy (gangs, organised crime), while the costs — due process erosion, overcrowding, torture allegations, indefinite emergency powers — are borne by the incarcerated population and, eventually, by the legal institutions that democratic governance depends on. The political incentive is to escalate, not to calibrate, because the model's popularity is proportional to its severity. Costa Rica's adoption is particularly telling. This was the region's democratic outlier — no standing army since 1948, historically low violence, strong institutions. That a country with Costa Rica's profile is building a Bukele-style mega-prison signals how thoroughly the model has displaced alternatives. Justice Minister Gabriel Aguilar framed CACCO as a tool to "reassert control" and "diminish infiltration by organised crime" — language that positions the prison system itself as compromised, justifying extraordinary measures. The 20-year question is whether any of these countries will find an off-ramp. El Salvador's own experience suggests not: once a state of exception becomes the source of a leader's popularity, lifting it becomes politically impossible. The hemisphere is building physical infrastructure — concrete, steel, guard towers — designed to house a policy of permanent emergency. Infrastructure outlasts the politicians who commission it.
