Q COSTA RICA — Costa Rican President Laura Fernández has threatened to sue the La Nación journalist behind reports on the controversial Fire Department’s purchase of 40 ambulances.
She remarked at a government news conference on November 11, after La Nación reporter Cristian Mora asked whether she agreed with the department’s decision to invite only one bidder to a procurement process involving a company linked to two donors to her presidential campaign.
Fernández first asked Mora whether he had written the articles.
“I have been seriously thinking about suing the journalist who has published those articles,” she said, adding that her honor was not something to be taken lightly. She called the newspaper’s work on the case a “low blow.” According to Delfino.cr, she did not directly answer Mora’s question about the single bidder.
The underlying reports concern a contract worth nearly ¢6.5 billion colones. La Nación reported that two Fernández campaign donors are linked to one of the companies in the consortium selected to supply the ambulances.
The procurement used an emergency procedure with a single bidder. The newspaper also reported that an anti-corruption prosecutor’s office opened an investigation into a suspected offense involving influence over public funds, while Costa Rica’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal began a preliminary administrative inquiry into the origin of the donors’ contributions.
Those inquiries are not findings of wrongdoing.
Fernández said the Fire Department and the Instituto Nacional de Seguros (INS)—national insurer— are autonomous institutions and that she does not intervene in how they make purchases.
Fire Department director Héctor Chaves has likewise said the president did not decide to use the emergency procedure or choose the supplier. Chaves acknowledged that the procurement relied on a Health Sector Council instruction to speed up improvements to prehospital care, but said the Fire Department made the subsequent decisions about the ambulances and how to acquire them.
Analysis
Two questions run through this dispute, and they should not be collapsed into one. The first is whether the ambulance contract was handled properly. The second is whether Fernández had any role in the choices that led to a single-bidder process or the selection of the supplier.
A policy instruction to accelerate ambulance services does not, by itself, establish that she chose a contractor. Equally, the Fire Department director’s account of who made the purchasing decisions does not remove the need to scrutinize the procurement process.
Fernández’s response creates a separate concern.
A president may dispute reporting and defend her reputation, but raising the possibility of a lawsuit when asked about a public contract shifts attention from the unanswered question to the journalist who asked it.
As reported by Delfino.cr, Fernández said she was considering legal action; the article does not report that she filed a suit. The public still needs a clear explanation of why only one bidder was invited and how the selected supplier was assessed.
Chaves’s feud with the press, particularly with La Nación
On November 11, 2026, during the weekly government press conference at Casa Presidencial, Rodrigo Chaves, now the minister of the Presidency in the government of Laura Fernández, revived his signature confrontation with the media by shouting “¡Prensa canalla!”
The confrontation is the latest chapter in a feud that began before Chaves took office in May 2022. La Nación had reported on allegations concerning Chaves’s conduct while he worked at the World Bank and on questions surrounding campaign financing—reports he disputed. In the campaign, Chaves vowed to bring about the “destruction” of what he called corrupt media structures, including La Nación and television station Canal 7.
The conflict took a more consequential turn two months into his presidency. On July 8, 2022, the government ordered Parque Viva, an events venue owned by Grupo Nación, the newspaper’s parent company, to close. Officials cited traffic and emergency-access concerns. La Nación and its journalists argued that the closure was an indirect economic pressure on the company—and, by extension, on the newspaper—after Chaves had publicly attacked the group.
In October of that year, Costa Rica’s Constitutional Court, known as Sala IV, annulled the closure order. The court ruling did not end the dispute.
For press-freedom advocates, the concern is not limited to any single insult or lawsuit. They point to a pattern: public attacks on critical media, legal threats and government actions that can affect the financial or working conditions of news organizations.
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