“Until a few years ago, Costa Rica was an oasis of press freedom in Central America, a refuge for reporters and media outlets forced to flee Nicaragua, Guatemala or El Salvador. However, conditions are changing rapidly, and the country’s journalism ecosystem is showing symptoms that the region has already experienced, although with various safeguards that depend on a legal framework and institutions that are also under pressure.
This is the picture presented in the Fourth Report on the State of Freedom of Expression and Journalism in Central America, released days ago by the Program for Freedom of Expression and the Right to Information (Proledi) at the University of Costa Rica (UCR), with support from the German Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Central America office, despite the government’s insistence that there is ‘absolute press freedom’ in the country and that the tensions are nothing new.
Warnings about the deterioration of the journalism climate in Costa Rica are not entirely new. The latest international index from Reporters Without Borders documented a decline from an honorable No. 8 in the world to No. 38 over the past four years, while other international analyses have warned of changes during the populist-leaning administration of Rodrigo Chaves (2022-2026).
However, the Proledi-UCR report places Costa Rica’s deterioration in the context of more complex pressures that align with the deepening decline across Central America, where governments have played a leading role and Nicaragua represents the extreme case — the only country in the world where there are no print newspapers.”
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This story was translated with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Alejandro Martínez-Cabrera
