Costa Rica handed over two of its most notorious accused drug traffickers to United States authorities Thursday, flying Gilbert Bell Fernández, known as “Macho Coca,” and Gabriel Lozano Bonilla, known as “Compadre,” from San José to New York to face federal cocaine charges. The 63-year-old Bell Fernández, a Costa Rican businessman long accused of running one of the country's largest trafficking networks, told authorities that the United States was saving his life by taking him out of Costa Rica, though he also said he had been mistreated in prison.
The transfer, carried out under heavy security on Wednesday, sent Bell Fernández and Lozano Bonilla from La Reforma prison to Juan Santamaría International Airport in Alajuela before they were flown to New York via Nassau aboard a DEA-operated aircraft, according to CR Hoy. Both men were escorted to the airport in maximum-security orange uniforms along with ballistic vests and helmets, the outlet reported. CBS News reports the pair are accused of trafficking cocaine to the United States on behalf of a Colombian cartel, with Lozano Bonilla, a Colombian national, also allegedly linked to shipments of liquid cocaine bound for Europe and Asia.
What U.S. Prosecutors Allege
Federal court filings in the Southern District of New York allege that Bell Fernández managed a network that stockpiled and moved cocaine from Costa Rica to the United States between March 2022 and August 2023, including negotiating a 700-kilogram shipment with undercover DEA agents, according to The Tico Times. Per CBS News, a DEA official identified as Carlo Diaz said the agency links Bell Fernández and Lozano Bonilla to the Clan del Golfo, also known as the Gulf Clan. The U.S. Department of State designated that Colombian cartel a Foreign Terrorist Organization in December 2025, and federal prosecutors have described it as one of the world's largest cocaine distribution networks, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
The U.S. Treasury Department had already placed Bell Fernández on its sanctions list in 2023, describing him as one of Costa Rica's biggest drug traffickers, known for both the volume of drugs he moved and the violence with which he operated, per CBS News. Treasury officials said at the time he was the first Costa Rican national sanctioned for using commercial fishing vessels based in Moín, Limón, to move cocaine by sea, according to the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
A Legal Wall Comes Down
Extraditions like this one were impossible in Costa Rica for half a century. The country's extradition of Bell Fernández and Lozano Bonilla, carried out by authorities in San José, was only made possible by a May 2025 constitutional reform allowing the extradition of Costa Rican citizens on international drug trafficking or terrorism charges, per CBS News. That amendment to Article 32 of the constitution passed the Legislative Assembly with 44 of 57 votes, according to InSight Crime.
Domestic legal hurdles had also delayed Bell Fernández's transfer. The Tico Times reported that a criminal court in Limón dropped local fuel-theft charges against him in June by applying what is known as an opportunity criterion, clearing the last domestic obstacle standing between him and U.S. prosecution while he remained in preventive detention.
Widening the Net
Bell Fernández and Lozano Bonilla are not the first Costa Rican nationals sent north under the new legal framework. Costa Rica previously extradited former security minister and judge Celso Gamboa to the United States, where he was indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice in July 2025 on charges of conspiring with international drug traffickers to manufacture and transport significant quantities of cocaine, per CBS News. Hoodline previously reported on that case alongside the extradition of trafficker Edwin López-Vega, known as Pecho de Rata, to Texas, and a separate transfer of an accused migrant-smuggling boss detailed in Hoodline's coverage of an alleged Syrian smuggling case.
Costa Rica has also had recent success against other high-value targets. Authorities captured the country's most-wanted fugitive, known as Diablo, in July, ending a manhunt for a man wanted by the United States on drug trafficking allegations who had carried a $500,000 bounty, according to CBS News.
President Fernández Pushes Further
President Laura Fernández, who took office pledging a firm hand against drug trafficking during her May inauguration, has said her hand will not tremble when confronting organized crime, per CBS News. She succeeded former President Rodrigo Chaves. In July, she proposed expanding the constitutional grounds for extraditing citizens beyond drug trafficking and terrorism to include money laundering, human trafficking, arms trafficking, contract killings, organized crime, and cybercrime, unveiling the legislative package alongside a newly formed security task force, according to The Tico Times.
That task force, a weekly security cabinet called Fuerza Élite, was established in May along with mandatory polygraph testing for senior police commanders meant to root out organized crime infiltration inside law enforcement, per Latina Republic. Seven high-level police officials were dismissed the following month after failing those polygraph exams.
A Nation Reshaped by the Drug Trade
The stakes behind these measures are stark. Costa Rica, a country of 5.2 million people, has developed into a logistical hub in the regional drug trade, and the regional trade has fueled local turf wars that helped drive the country's murder rate to record highs, per CBS News. OIJ data cited by The Tico Times shows Costa Rica recorded 906 homicides in 2023 and 871 in 2024, with cartel territorial rivalries and firearms involved in nearly 80 percent of violent deaths, and homicide rates in Limón province reaching 35.8 per 100,000 residents.
Even as Bell Fernández faces trial in New York, his family's alleged ties to the drug trade have continued to surface at home. Costa Rican law enforcement carried out Operation Leviatán across six provinces in late July, a sweep of 65 coordinated raids during which Bell Fernández's daughter was identified as a suspected key member of a cocaine trafficking ring and declared a fugitive, according to Extra TV CR. It remains unclear whether Bell Fernández's cooperation or testimony in the U.S. case could implicate higher-level political or police figures, or how the power vacuum left by dismantled trafficking networks will reshape ongoing turf wars in Limón.
