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Panama Canal May Restrict Ship Traffic as El Niño Worsens

The Panama Canal has not ruled out further restrictions on ship traffic because of a drought worsened by the El Niño climate phenomenon, its new administrator, Ilya Espino de Marotta, said in an interview. The waterway, which connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and handles 5% of global maritime trade, has begun gradually reducing daily transits from 36 to 32 as of September 15. The 80-kilometer (50-mile) Panama Canal operates primarily with rainwater stored in the artificial Gatun and Alhajuela lakes. Their levels have fallen because of a drought that is shaping up to be the most severe ever recorded. Between 2023 and 2024, restrictions caused by El Niño, whose effects are intensified by climate change, resulted in 2,700 fewer ship transits. Espino de Marotta, a 64-year-old engineer and the first woman to run the canal, which the United States built in 1914, hopes to avoid measures that restrictive. But she stressed the need for a new reservoir to support operations at th...
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Costa Rica Stops 4 Panama Gang Suspects at Border

Four men linked by Costa Rican intelligence to Panamanian groups involved in drug trafficking and contract killing were stopped Saturday as they tried to enter by land at the southern border, the Public Security Ministry said. The ministry identified them only by the surnames Gutiérrez, Jiménez, Santoya and González. Officials said they are associated with two Panama-based organizations known as Los Terroristas de San Miguelito and Los Terroristas de Puerto Armuelles. The southern land crossing is the Paso Canoas border between Costa Rica and Panama — the same route used by trucks, tourists, and, increasingly, by criminal networks moving people and cargo between the two countries. Vice Minister of Gobernación Omer Badilla said the stop was not a random checkpoint find. Intelligence had flagged the group before they reached the line. “The now-detained individuals tried to enter the country this Saturday by land, at the southern border post. That intelligence allowed us to iden...
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Costa Rica Vehicle Thefts Hit a Ten-Year High

If you own a car here, it is more likely to be stolen now than at any point in the past ten years. Costa Rica recorded 5,146 vehicle thefts in 2025, according to open statistics from the Organismo de Investigación Judicial (OIJ). That is the highest annual figure of the decade, up from 4,289 in 2016 — a 20% increase. What makes the number worth paying attention to is what happened around it. Over the same ten years, almost every other property crime went the other way. Muggings, larcenies, break-ins at homes and businesses, and thefts of items from inside parked cars all trended downward. Vehicle theft did not follow and after bottoming out at 3,217 cases in 2020, it climbed every single year from 2021 through 2025. Part of that is simple arithmetic as there are far more cars to steal than there used to be. Costa Rica finished 2025 with 2,087,356 vehicles covered by mandatory SOA insurance, 9.1% more than the 1,913,266 registered a year earlier. But more cars on the road d...
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El Niño Drought Could Leave 16 Million Without Enough Food in Latin America

Drought caused by the El Niño climate phenomenon could leave 16 million people in Latin America without enough food, the regional director of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said on Sunday. This naturally occurring weather phenomenon raises sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, which can trigger changes in wind, pressure and rainfall patterns around the world. “In this region, we are talking about 16 million people who will probably face food insecurity as a result of El Niño’s impact,” said Lena Savelli, WFP’s regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean. “It is a very worrying situation (…). It could be one of the strongest El Niño events in recent history,” added the UN official, who arrived in Honduras to monitor the drought’s impact. The Central American country has kept nearly 80% of its territory under alert since August because of drought worsened by El Niño. Other countries in the region, including El Salva...
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Costa Rica Adds Booking.com, Expedia and ChatGPT to 13% VAT List

Starting Tuesday, a 13% tax will show up on your bill from Booking.com, Expedia, ChatGPT and 17 other digital platforms that were not taxed before. The Finance Ministry announced over the weekend that it had expanded the official register of foreign digital service providers subject to Costa Rica’s value-added tax. The updated list grows from 161 providers to 181. Among the new names are the travel booking sites Booking.com and Expedia, the AI services ChatGPT, Claude and Grok, and the social platform TikTok. This is not a new tax as Costa Rica has charged 13% VAT on foreign digital services used inside the country since October 2020, when the mechanism took effect under Law 9635, the public finance reform. Netflix, Spotify and Disney+ have been on the register for years. What changed is the roster, not the rule. You will not have to file anything or calculate anything as your bank will do it for you. When a charge from one of these platforms posts to your card accoun...
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National Geographic Germany Devotes 11 Pages to Costa Rica

National Geographic Traveler’s German edition has given Costa Rica eleven pages in its September issue, describing Costa Rica as a treasure of nature and taking readers on a route that runs from the Pacuare River to the Osa Peninsula. The photographs reaching German newsstands this month include hummingbirds, beaches, forest canopy, a sloth and rafters on whitewater. The written feature follows a journey through the Nairi Awari Indigenous Territory, San Gerardo de Dota and Los Quetzales National Park before moving south to Carate Beach, Corcovado National Park and the Gulf of Nicoya. The Costa Rican Tourism Institute ( ICT ) said the article is the product of a partnership with National Geographic Germany. Under that agreement, Costa Rica covered airfare, lodging and production costs for the assignment. As of Saturday, the institute did not have figures available on how much it spent on those items. The ICT said that in exchange, Costa Rica appeared in a publication where...
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Costa Rica Heads Into Peak Hurricane Season Without a Single Hurricane

The Atlantic has reached the second week of September without a single hurricane. That has not happened in a very long time, and forecasters do not expect it to change soon. The National Hurricane Center’s outlook says no tropical cyclone is expected to form anywhere in the Atlantic, the Caribbean Sea or the Gulf over the next seven days. That takes the basin past the middle of the month with nothing on the horizon. Five named storms had formed by the start of September — Arthur, Bertha, Cesar, Dolly and Edouard. None reached sustained winds of 119 km/h (74 mph), which is the line a storm has to cross to be called a hurricane. If none does so before September 12, this becomes the longest wait for a first Atlantic hurricane since satellites began tracking them. For a basin that normally does most of its work between mid-September and October, that is a strange place to be standing. The reason is sitting in the Pacific El Niño is a periodic warming of the surface wa...
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