🇨🇷 Costa Rica

Costa Rica's government disclosed receipt of an intelligence report describing an alleged plan to assassinate President Laura Fernández, with officials indicating the plot was being coordinated from a maximum-security prison by leaders of the drug-trafficking organization Los Lara.

A 27-year-old woman, Jocelyn Paniagua Gutiérrez, was shot and killed Thursday afternoon in Tuetal Norte de Alajuela, Costa Rica; her relatives reported she had previously received death threats, intensifying concerns about femicide and gender violence in the country.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has confirmed the first locally acquired detection of New World screwworm in Texas, marking the first case in the continental United States in decades. The parasitic fly, which causes severe tissue damage in livestock and has been spreading through Central America, has breached a long-standing containment zone that Panama has maintained as a barrier to prevent its northward spread.

The U.S. dollar remains under ¢455 in Costa Rica’s wholesale currency market, even as higher international oil prices threaten to increase the country’s demand for foreign currency in the coming months. The exchange rate in Monex, Costa Rica’s foreign-exchange market, reached a new low yesterday, with a weighted average of ¢452.74 per dollar.