The Costa Rica Star has recently published information about receiving your permanent residency in Costa Rica to avoid border runs, wasting time, and money.

Author’s Note: This article is being written in response to a dear reader named Jane, who is from the United States and is planning on moving to the town of Puerto Viejo in the Talamanca Region, province of Limon. Parts of her e-mail to the Costa Rica Star are excerpted herein.

In 1996, British novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland saw the wildly successful publishing of his first novel, The Beach, partly based on his experiences as a young backpacker in Asia. The Beach was adapted into a film by the same name in the year 2000, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

A background theme of Garland’s freshman novel was the concept of “paradise lost.” The main character is a backpacker from England who has grown jaded at a very early age. He longs to find a pristine and idyllic tropical spot where he can truly get away from it all. He gets his wish when he is given a map to a secret insular beach off the coast of Thailand, where he finds a group of like-minded tourists who have taken over a paradise-like beach.

The young settlers of The Beach were once tourists and backpackers, but later became settlers. The Beach is almost desolate, save for the presence of a few armed local men who guard a vast marijuana plantation on the other side of the island. Things eventually turn ugly and reminiscent of Lord of the Flies, whereupon the settlers steal marijuana and chaos descends on The Beach.

In the end, the settlers and the guards come to realize that the place and the people had changed, and that it was no longer an idyll secret spot. The foreigners, now at odds with each other, leave The Beach. Paradise lost.

Crime in Puerto Viejo

In Jane’s letter to the Costa Rica Star, she writes:

“Expats are suffering violent attacks and home invasions, while the police does nothing. Four friends I personally know have been attacked or robbed at knife or gunpoint. I have heard of three other incidents, one attempted rape, and one murder.”

Jane has appealed to the Costa Rica Board of Tourism to pay attention to the matter. She continues:

“Can anything be done? I am 49 years old. We want to leave the United States, buy a small business down there, give back [to the community], and live out our days in peace. How can I move there knowing that all four of my friends got robbed or attacked?

Something needs to be done! Can anyone help them?”

Jane’s letter is certainly alarming, particularly since it puts the rate of crime at a hundred percent within her expatriate social network in Puerto Viejo. For the record, the province of Limon is second to San Jose in terms of crimes per capita, and even then it is a distant second. Limon is a port city, and many port cities around the world suffer from crime. Puerto Viejo is located some distance away from the port city, and yet crime seems to affect this small coastal community significantly.

The articles below seem to echo Jane’s concerns. They have appeared in the crime news section of Diario Extra over the last few years:

• In late March, a 65-year old American was found dead and nearly decapitated in the Pan Dulce beach shacks. A preliminary report from Fuerza Publica indicated no signs of forced entry, and the deceased man’s valuable belongings were with him when he was found. The man’s companion, a fellow American, was detained as a suspect.
• In January, prosecutors and narcotics officers seized a property that housed an indoor marijuana farm of 237 plants. The property owner and another man, both Americans, were arrested.
• A Vietnam War veteran by the last name of Sonnichsen was kidnapped by two drug dealers over a debt in late 2006. He apparently paid the money owed and was promptly released by his captors.
• In 2009, a Canadian man was smoking marijuana in public when he was approached by two Fuerza Publica officers. The three men negotiated a bribe to take place later that day, but the Canadian told employees at the hotel he was staying. The employees notified the local precinct and the officers were charged with bribery.
• In 2008, a Bribri man guarding a vast marijuana field with nothing more than a .22 caliber rifle was arrested by narcotics agents who were searching for the guard’s foreign employers.

Tourism and the expatriate community have changed Puerto Viejo

The articles cited above are examples of crimes in Puerto Viejo and the vicinity, and they involve controlled substances and foreigners. There are other types of crime in the area, like Jane mentioned, but the ones above denote a sad reality of Puerto Viejo.

Puerto Viejo has been transformed by tourists and expatriates who fall for the laid-back atmosphere and natural beauty of the place. In her 2009 Master Thesis for the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, Daniëlle van Oostrum gives great insight into the transformation of Puerto Viejo (PDF-in Dutch) from a cultural anthropologists’ point of view. Van Oostrum interviewed various Ticos who grew up in Puerto Viejo and collected their stories.

Here’s Laura, talking about Puerto Viejo in the 1960s:

“There were just a few houses and shops, there were no hotels, no ‘carretera’, there was no light. To get to Puerto Limón we had to walk to Hone Creek, from there we took a mule car and after that we went to Penshurt by boat where we had to wait for the train to go to Limón.”

“The plantations [of cacao] reached from here until the coast. The people knew everything about farming, about cultivating and taking care of the land, but they knew nothing about finance. The foreigners abused that and bought the land very cheap.”

Here’s John, a native of Limon who at some point worked as a bartender in Puerto Viejo. He is old enough to remember the first wave of expats:

“The first foreigner was Black Beach Albert, a Cuban American. The second was an American, Tim, he lived with us for a while in Playa Chiquita. Then a Swiss man came, a man from France, and little by little more different people came.”

A younger woman, Maria, recalls her initial encounters with expats:

“The first white faces were hippies, with long dresses. I never understood what they did here. Later came the surfers.”

John again talks about the changes in Puerto Viejo:

“For a while the tourism made things better, but then the drugs came in. We always smoked some ganja, in the private sphere, but no hard drugs. Smoking ganja is pretty much part of our culture. It is a relaxing thing, sitting on the beach, chilling out. You are not in an office here.

I used to work in a bar where tourists asked me where to buy this and this. I looked at them like if they were crazy because I had no idea what they were talking about, I didn’t know that stuff. The tourists went by taxi to Cahuita because in those times you could buy it there, then came back to Puerto Viejo. That’s how the hard drugs got introduced here.”

The recent history of Puerto Viejo is in some ways reminiscent of Alex Garland’s The Beach. A reader’s review of the novel sums it up nicely:

“The backpackers, the travellers, the island community think themselves superior to tourists yet by the end of the book it is they who have taken a previously uninhabited Eden and left it far, far worse than what they wanted to avoid on the mainland.”

Given enough time, Shangri-La fades away. Paradise lost.