SAN JOSÉ, Costa Rica — The United States has revoked the visas of a group of board members from La Nación, one of Costa Rica’s most prominent newspapers, the outlet announced on Sunday, triggering fresh accusations that Washington and its ally President Rodrigo Chaves are using visa restrictions to silence government critics.
The board said in a statement published on the newspaper’s front page that the affected members first learned their U.S. visas had been canceled through reports in media outlets that are sympathetic to the Costa Rican government, rather than from any official U.S. notification. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
La Nación has long been a thorn in the side of Chaves, a conservative leader and close ally of former U.S. President Donald Trump who has agreed to receive up to 100 deportees from third countries each month as part of Trump’s immigration enforcement push. The newspaper drew Chaves’s ire after it published allegations of sexual harassment during his 2022 presidential campaign, and it has continued to report critically on his administration.
“However, it is unprecedented in Costa Rica’s recent history for the board members of a general-interest, independent newspaper to have their visas revoked,” the board’s statement added. “To date, none of our members has received any official explanation for the basis of these decisions.”
Press freedom and opposition organizations swiftly condemned the move. In a joint statement, they said, “If this decision is based on their critical stance toward this government, it would be yet another worrying signal for our democratic system.” The groups warned that withholding transparent justification “would constitute an unacceptable form of complicity.”
Mauricio Herrera, a journalist who served as Costa Rica’s communications minister from 2015 to 2018, put an even finer point on the allegation. “There is no doubt that the cancellation of visas for its board is in response to a request from the Costa Rican government,” he told The Associated Press. “The sanction tries to intimidate those who dare to dissent and exercise their freedom of expression.”
The revocations mark the latest in a series of visa cancellations that have hit prominent Costa Rican figures critical of the Chaves administration. Last year, the United States revoked the visa of former president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Óscar Arias, an outspoken Trump critic, as well as the visa of his brother Rodrigo Arias, then president of the legislature, who said he believed the U.S. decision was made at Chaves’s request. In recent months, opposition lawmakers Francisco Nicolás and Cynthia Córdoba, both harsh critics of Chaves, and Fernando Cruz, a constitutional court judge and migrant rights advocate, also had their U.S. visas canceled. Cruz was unable to travel to receive an award from Northwestern University’s law school last month.
Chaves, who has cooperated extensively with the Trump administration on deportations and the extradition of suspected drug traffickers, will leave office on Friday and hand power to President-elect Laura Fernández.