The government of Costa Rica has failed to protect victims of sex trafficking who are sometimes forced to become prostitutes for North American and European sexual tourists. Such was the statement presented to the Human Rights Commission of the Legislative Assembly by the Socialist Christian Union (Spanish initials: PUSC), a major political party in Costa Rica that has seen better times.

The Commission has agreed to investigate the claims made by the PUSC
legislators, who claim that the government has barely used the $3 million available to fight human trafficking within the sexual tourism and prostitution sectors of the underground economy.

According to the PUSC legislators, international agencies that investigate human trafficking do not have a clear picture of the situation in Costa Rica because the government is not doing its job insofar as compiling statistics and issuing reports.

Information provided by prosecutors indicate that 23 victims of human trafficking were identified in 2014; 13 of those victims were forced into sex work while the rest were coerced into manual labor.

Over the last two years, The Costa Rica Star has reported on brothel raids conducted by law enforcement agencies. The human trafficking section of the Office of Judicial Investigations (Spanish initials: OIJ) has been involved in these raids; however, the majority have not produced evidence of coercion into sex work.

One of the problems investigators face when looking into human trafficking in the sexual tourism and prostitution sectors of Costa Rica is that they often run into sex workers who are not victims. For example, when OIJ agents evaluate information about a brothel where women from Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic work as prostitutes, probable cause can be filed before magistrates to obtain a search warrant.

During brothel raids, social workers and psychologists conduct interviews with the purported victims, whom most of the time explain that they came to Costa Rica of their own will to work as prostitutes. At best, OIJ agents are more likely to find evidence of individuals deriving proceeds from prostitution as third parties (better known as “pimping“), which -unlike remunerated consensual sex between adults- is a crime.