Sawt Falasteen - Counting begins in Costa Rica vote dominated by narco violence

Laura Fernandez, the ruling party candidate, is the runaway favorite to become the next leader of a country long seen as a beacon of stability in a volatile region, but now battling a crime wave.

Polls ahead of the election showed that Fernandez, who takes inspiration from Nayib Bukele, the iron-fisted president of nearby El Salvador, could secure the 40 percent of votes required for a first-round victory.

A total of 20 candidates are running for the top job.

Fernandez is the protege of popular outgoing President Rodrigo Chaves, under whom she served as planning minister and chief of staff.

A victory for the 39-year-old political scientist would confirm a rightward lurch in Latin America, where conservatives in Chile, Bolivia and Honduras have come to power in recent months.

Chaves has deflected criticism for a dramatic rise in the murder rate on his watch by placing the blame on what he sees as an overly-permissive judiciary.

Costa Rica has gone from being a transit point for cocaine shipments to a logistics hub for Mexican and Colombian cartels, with a spillover of the drug trade into local communities.

The number of homicides jumped 50 percent in the past six years to 17 per 100,000 inhabitants.

Jessica Salgado, 27, said she voted for Fernandez as the continuity candidate, because she felt the government was on the right track, even if violence is on the up.

"The violence exploded because they (the government) are going after the ringleaders, it's like dragging rats out of the sewer," Salgado told AFP.

Her sister Kenia, 24, voted for an opposition candidate, however, saying more investment in education and healthcare was needed so that young people "don't go down the wrong path" into crime.

- Seeking outright majority -

Fernandez is hoping to win a big enough parliamentary majority to change the constitution and overhaul the judiciary.

Her detractors fear she could try to change the charter to allow her mentor Chaves to return as president after her four-year mandate ends.

Under the current constitution, he is barred from seeking re-election until he has been out of power for eight years.

As he voted, former president Oscar Arias, winner of the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize, warned that the "survival of democracy" was at stake.

"The first thing dictators want to do is to reform the Constitution to stay in power," he said, alluding to Chaves.

Fernandez insisted she would "safeguard democratic stability."

- Cocaine-smuggling hub -

The drug trade has sucked in the high-density "precarios" (informal settlements) of cities such as the capital San Jose, where shootouts between rival drug gangs are increasingly frequent.

Fernandez has vowed to complete construction of a maximum-security prison modelled on Bukele's brutal CECOT penitentiary.

She has also promised to stiffen prison sentences and to impose a state of emergency in areas worst hit by crime.

The opposition compares the confrontational, anti-elite discourse of Fernandez and Chaves to that of Bukele and US President Donald Trump.

Bukele is a hero for many in Latin America, credited with restoring security to a nation traumatized by crime.

He has rounded up more than 90,000 people since March 2022 as part of his war on gangs, with rights groups saying that many of those detained are innocent or minors.

About 8,000 of those arrested were later released.

"At what point did we go from dreaming of being the Switzerland of Central America to dreaming of being El Salvador?" left-wing presidential candidate Ariel Robles, who is running a distant second behind Fernandez, said during the campaign.

Another contender, centrist economist Alvaro Ramos, warned that "modern dictatorships don't always arrive with tanks."

T.Samara--SF-PST