Four people have been arrested in Costa Rica for the killing in June of a Nicaraguan exile who had been a critic of the country’s strongman president, Daniel Ortega. Roberto Samcam, a retired Nicaraguan army officer who had fled to Costa Rica in 2018 during the Ortega regime’s crackdown against opposition protestors, was shot eight times at point-blank range outside San Jose in June.
As WPR’s James Bosworth wrote shortly after Samcam’s murder, an assassination on foreign soil is not without precedent in Latin America, but what makes this case different is that the current Nicaraguan regime has been engaged in “a multiyear pattern of attacks against political opponents in exile, many of whom live in Costa Rica.” Other countries in the region should find and shut down Ortega-linked criminal cells that threaten people outside of Nicaragua, Bosworth wrote, because without a stronger regional response, the campaign of transnational assassinations will continue and could be destabilizing for the region.
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