Costa Rica opens the Centro de Alta Contención para el Crimen Organizado (CACCO, High Containment Centre for Organised Crime) on Wednesday, 14 October: the largest prison the country has built and its first new penitentiary since CAI Terrazas, in 2021. The design is modelled on the Cecot, the maximum-security prison Nayib Bukele built in El Salvador.
What is opening
The complex was built next to the La Reforma maximum-security prison, in San Rafael de Alajuela. It has capacity for some 5,100 inmates, with cells designed for 60 people and bunks stacked up to three levels high.
The cost is around 35 million dollars, according to Prensa Libre's account; the Ministerio de Justicia y Paz (Ministry of Justice and Peace) has cited a figure of 33 million. Construction began in January, at an event attended by then-president Rodrigo Chaves and Bukele.
Justice Minister Gabriel Aguilar told Monumental that the first transfers will take place at the end of this month, and that the prison will take in the highest-risk criminal profiles.
The context
President Laura Fernández Delgado, who took office on 8 May 2026, has presented the prison as a direct answer to deteriorating security. Costa Rica records around 900 homicides a year, and the authorities attribute roughly 70% of those cases to drug trafficking: figures that have broken the exceptional standing the country used to claim within Central America.
The CACCO arrives alongside a tightening of the prison regime already under way: fewer conjugal visits, limits on deliveries of food and clothing, and the removal of power outlets and cabling from cells.
The objections
Construction was not uncontested. Residents and municipal councillors in the area asked the government to reconsider the prison's location, according to Costa Rican press reports dating back to 2025.
The Salvadoran model behind the project is also the most contested in the region: the Cecot has become a symbol of El Salvador's fall in homicides and, at the same time, a target of criticism from human rights organisations over detentions without due process. Costa Rica is adopting the architecture; how much of the accompanying legal regime it adopts remains to be seen.
With information from Monumental, Prensa Libre, Bloomberg Línea and EFE.
