Costa Rica
Costa Rica remains Central America’s strongest media environment and one of Latin America’s freest, ranking highest among Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas. It has one of the region’s longest democratic traditions, no standing army, a robust constitutional framework for free expression and an independent judiciary that has repeatedly defended press freedom and access to information. In the 2026 RSF World Press Freedom Index, Costa Rica ranked 38th of 180 countries with a score of 72.35, the only Spanish-speaking Latin American country in the “satisfactory” band, though down two places from 36th in 2025 and well below the 8th place it held in 2022. RSF attributes the multi-year slide to a steady rise in press-freedom violations, restricted access to public information and confrontational official rhetoric toward critical media during the presidency of Rodrigo Chaves.
The political backdrop shifted in 2026. On 8 May, Laura Fernández Delgado took office as Chaves’s closely aligned successor, running on continuity with his political project. Her Pueblo Soberano party secured 31 of 57 seats in the Legislative Assembly, the first time since 1990 that one party had won both the presidency and control of the legislature. Chaves himself remained in the cabinet as minister of the presidency and minister of finance. The change concentrates executive and legislative power within a single political project and places renewed attention on the independence of state-linked media, even as the country’s underlying legal and judicial guardrails remain comparatively strong.
The state’s footprint in the media sector is small and institutionally varied. There is no sprawling state-media apparatus of the kind seen in much of the region. Instead, public broadcasting is split between a captured central-government operator and an independent university media system, a contrast that defines the country’s SMM mapping.
SMM maps two state-linked outlets in Costa Rica, and they fall into different typologies, an unusual and revealing split. The Sistema Nacional de Radio y Televisión Cultural (SINART), the official public-media operator running Canal 13 and Radio Nacional, is classified Captured Public/State-Managed (CaPu). It is wholly state-owned, headed by a government-appointed executive president, dependent on state-linked advertising and public-service revenue, and operates without independent enforcement of its statutory autonomy. Its capture intensified across the 2025-2026 cycle through a politically scrutinised leadership appointment under the new administration, sustained budget retrenchment and allegations of politicised state advertising, though its public-company form and mixed board keep it short of full State-Controlled classification.
The University of Costa Rica media group, comprising the television channel Quince UCR and the Radioemisoras UCR, is classified Independent State-Funded (ISF). It is funded predominantly from the state through the university’s FEES-based budget, but it is owned and governed by a constitutionally autonomous public university whose media leadership is appointed through university bodies by open competition rather than by the national executive. It sustains pluralism and critical debate and operates at arm’s length from government.
That two-outlet split, one captured, one independent, is the central finding for Costa Rica. It shows that public funding alone does not determine capture: what separates SINART from the UCR group is not money but governance, namely whether the outlet answers to the national executive or to an autonomous institution insulated from it. Costa Rica is therefore one of the few countries in the region to host a genuinely independent state-funded media outlet alongside a captured public one, a structural pluralism that mirrors both the strength and the current pressures of its wider democracy.