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On the morning of June 19, Roberto Samcam was shot eight times at point-blank range by an assassin posing as a delivery courier at his condominium in San Jose, Costa Rica. Samcam was a retired Nicaraguan army officer who, after fleeing a wave of violent repression that killed over 300 opposition protesters in 2018, had become a prominent critic of the government of President Daniel Ortega. In early 2023, Ortega illegally stripped Samcam of his Nicaraguan citizenship. Despite numerous threats against his life, Samcam chose to remain in Costa Rica, living among the Nicaraguan exile community there, rather than in Spain, where he had been granted citizenship.
The director of Costa Rica’s Judicial Investigation Agency, Randall Zuniga Lopez, has already stated that the evidence shows that the attack against Samcam was definitely premeditated. According to reporting by Confidencial—a Nicaraguan investigative media outlet that operates in exile and has done some of the best reporting on the incident—Zuniga Lopez added that it is possible the Ortega regime is operating clandestine sleeper cells in neighboring countries to harass and attack critics who live in exile.
An assassination on foreign soil is rare enough in Latin America to be shocking, but it is not without precedent. In 1976, the regime of then-Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet killed Orlando Letelier, a dissident former diplomat, with a car bomb in Washington. More recently, in 2023, the regime of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is alleged to have hired hitmen to kidnap and kill Ronald Ojeda, a former Venezuelan military officer and government critic, in Santiago, Chile, where he was living in exile.
Those high-profile killings reshaped hemispheric politics and demonstrated the depravity of the dictatorships that conducted the assassinations. But they were also one-off events.
What makes the current Nicaraguan regime different is that it has now been engaged in a multiyear pattern of attacks against political opponents in exile, many of whom live in Costa Rica. Among the over 150,000 Nicaraguan refugees who live in the country are a number of prominent dissidents who Ortega claims have been stripped of their Nicaraguan citizenship, though that violates Section 15 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Student leader Joao Maldonado has been attacked twice in Costa Rica, in 2021 and 2024, with the second attack leaving him briefly in a coma and his wife paralyzed.
In 2022, the body of Rodolfo Rojas Cordero, a former Sandinista activist who turned against Ortega, was found murdered in Honduras near the Nicaraguan border. His family says he was likely kidnapped and then murdered.
In 2023, assassins killed former Nicaraguan political prisoner Erick Antonio Castillo near Costa Rica’s northern border with Nicaragua, after Castillo continued to speak out against the torture he endured while in prison.
In late 2024, Jaime Luis Ortega Chavarria was shot and killed in the Costa Rican town of Upala where he was living as a political refugee. After his death, it emerged that Chavarria had been a member of the anti-Sandinista Contras back in the 1980s, suggesting that the Ortega regime is now even targeting enemies from the distant past in remote towns outside of Nicaragua’s borders.
Each one of those killings was horrifying in its own way, but the intent behind them was not only to kill an individual critic of the Ortega government. They were also meant to spread fear among the thousands of other exiles to make them think twice before speaking out against the regime and its abuses. Combined, the attacks also suggest that the Nicaraguan government has built an infrastructure outside of its borders to track down and attack its political opponents.
Further, in partnering with criminal gangs in Costa Rica to conduct some of these attacks, Nicaragua’s government is now linked to one of the key domestic security threats facing the Costa Rican government and its population. In other words, Ortega has turned his brutal extraterritorial crackdown against critics of his regime into a form of interstate violence that also targets Nicaragua’s neighbors and trade partners.
The Samcam assassination has attracted more attention than the previous attacks, as the circumstances of the attack point to a clearly targeted political assassination, with less room for Ortega’s defenders to try to plant doubt about it being linked to other forms of crime. Costa Rica’s prosecutors have already announced that no ongoing investigations of Samcam existed, preemptively removing any connection to organized crime as a potential line of attack for the Ortega regime to smear Samcam. Key officials, including former Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla, are speaking out. Costa Rica’s Congress has voted to demand a thorough investigation.
All of this puts pressure on current President Rodrigo Chaves, who has yet to condemn the assassination, to respond. In reality, it’s a complicated issue for him. Costa Rica does not have a military, so its ability to counter what amounts to an interstate threat like this is somewhat limited, and any escalation of the dispute brings risks to the Costa Rican population. While the country’s police and other nonmilitary security forces and institutions are quite strong and capable of handling investigations and prosecutions of homicides, they have struggled to handle the rising violence caused by the transnational cartels that have begun to operate in Costa Rica. Furthermore, Chaves has his own political problems at the moment: As part of a corruption investigation into his government, prosecutors have asked for his immunity to be removed, with an eye to potentially prosecuting him.
The international response has been to condemn Samcam’s assassination, but we’re unlikely to see any action to back up those strong words. Nicaragua is far from the top of the agenda, whether globally or in the Western Hemisphere. Moreover, the U.S., Canada, the European Union and many of Nicaragua’s neighbors have already imposed sanctions and trade restrictions to punish the Ortega regime for its abuses and repression. But those measures have failed to change the Nicaraguan government’s behavior.
The most important short-term action those countries can now take to support Costa Rica is to mount a regional response to what has become a regional threat. Nicaragua’s neighbors should cooperate to investigate and prosecute this murder as well as to find and shut down any other Ortega-linked criminal cells that threaten to harass and kill people outside of Nicaragua. The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump should direct its intelligence agencies to share any information they can to expose the threat and disrupt future plots.
The risk is that the international community may feel like one assassination does not justify such a robust reaction. But Samcam’s killing is not just one event. Rather, it is the highest-profile incident so far, with more attacks likely in the near future. Without a stronger response, Ortega will assassinate more Nicaraguan politicians and regime critics outside of Nicaragua’s borders. And that’s a threat not just to the Nicaraguan exile community but to regional stability.
*Article originally published in World Politics Review.
