At a press conference given by Minister of Trade John Fonseca, the opening date for the new border crossing checkpoint along the northern border with Nicaragua was set for April 2015. The new checkpoint will be located in the Tablillas community of Los Chiles, province of Alajuela.

 

According to a news report by Jacqueline Solano of news daily Diario Extra, the Tablillas border checkpoint will feature provisional infrastructure at the time of its inauguration next year. Temporary customs and immigration facilities will be progressively replaced with permanent ones once financing provided by a loan from the Inter-American Development Bank becomes available.

 

The new checkpoint hopes to ease the increasing cross-border traffic between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. The current checkpoint of Peñas Blancas is often slow and crowded with vehicles carrying goods, immigrants, visitors, and expats on visa run who seek to extend their perpetual tourist status with a quick sojourn into Nicaragua before getting a fresh, three-month visa stamp on their passports.

 

Cracking Down on Smugglers

Law enforcement and immigration officials have been concerned about the rise in smuggling operations along the northern border. As has been reported by The Costa Rica Star numerous times in the past, drug trafficking has been largely replaced by smuggling of goods such as clothing, medicines, household items, cheap beer from the United States, and many others, Trafficking in such goods has become a lucrative activity due to high import taxes in Costa Rica as well as mounting inflation and unemployment.

 

Tablillas and other communities of Los Chiles have seen their fair share of smuggling, rustling and unlawful border crossings. This is a remote rural area that did not attract too much attention until construction of the controversial border highway nicknamed “La Trocha” (The Dirt Trail) began during the administration of former President Laura Chinchilla. This road project was supposed to provide an evacuation route for residents of communities such as Isla Calero, which was the site of the infamous Google Maps Invasion of 2010 by an infantry squad from the Nicaraguan Army led by an aging guerrilla commander.

 

The initial cost of this new border crossing checkpoint will be around $2.5 million, but future expenditure and financing will increase the price tag to $4 million. On the Nicaraguan side of the border, the checkpoint was once reported to be completed by state new agencies, but independent sources explain that there’s only a provisional immigration building and no customs facilities at all.