The English-language Costa Rican newspaper Tico Times reports that the country’s new president, Laura Fernández Delgado, who was inaugurated on 8 May 2026, has ordered polygraph screening of senior government officials in an attempt to root out organized crime. Excerpt:
President Laura Fernández has widened a controversial order requiring polygraph tests for officials involved in her government’s new security strategy, declaring Friday that judicial branch personnel who attend her weekly “Fuerza Élite” meetings must also submit to lie-detector exams.
Speaking to reporters after a closed-door session with representatives of the Legislative Assembly and the Supreme Court of Justice, Fernández was asked whether the requirement she imposed on police commanders earlier in the week would apply to members of the other branches of government. “Polygraph for everyone. I already took it myself without any problem, and so did the vice presidents,” she said, framing the tests as a way to build “an environment of mutual trust” among the institutions joining the talks.
The expansion follows the order Fernández issued Monday at the first meeting of “Fuerza Élite” (Elite Force), a weekly working session she has convened at the Ministry of Public Security for the remainder of her term to coordinate the fight against organized crime. Surrounded by police chiefs and flanked by Security Minister Gerald Campos and Justice Minister Gabriel Aguilar, the president directed that all police directors, ministers, vice ministers and regional Fuerza Pública commanders present undergo polygraph examinations featuring questions on organized crime and drug trafficking.
“I won’t tolerate the slightest whiff of organized crime,” Fernández said at the time, adding that officials who fail the test would have “their days numbered” within state institutions. She said she had taken the exam herself before launching her presidential candidacy and stressed that the measure reflected no specific distrust of Campos’s team, but rather a push for what she called “total cleanup.”
The polygraph drive is rooted in the case of Celso Gamboa, a former magistrate and prosecutor who became the first Costa Rican extradited to the United States, on international drug-trafficking charges. The case has fueled an intensifying confrontation between the Fernández administration and the judiciary over how deeply criminal networks may have penetrated the country’s institutions. Fernández has previously cited the practices of U.S. agencies such as the FBI and DEA in arguing for periodic testing of officials who handle sensitive corruption cases.
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President Fernández’s order to conduct polygraph “tests” on government officials may be well-intentioned, but it is ill-advised. Because of polygraphy’s complete lack of scientific underpinnings, her polygraph campaign is more likely to result in innocent public servants being falsely branded as liars, than it is to identify any corrupt officials, who can easily learn how to beat the polygraph, as the methodology is vulnerable to simple and effective countermeasures that anyone can learn and that polygraph operators cannot detect.
As for President Fernández having taken and passed a polygraph “test” herself, that’s no surprise: the polygraph operator who “tested” her would have been out of a job had the outcome been otherwise.