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.