PENAS BLANCAS, Costa Rica -- The three men, fearing for their lives, left their homes in western Nicaragua under the cover of night. A taxi drove them south for hours. At a bend in a road, they got out, walked through scrubland and forest in darkness, passed through a gap in a low fence -- and emerged in Costa Rica.
"We felt relief," one of the men, Octavio Robleto, 57, a lawyer, recounted later that morning as he waited with the other two, both relatives, outside a Costa Rican immigration office where they planned to request asylum.
In Nicaragua, he said, "we live completely in terror."
Since mid-April, when Nicaragua broke out in a violent political crisis that has left hundreds dead and crippled the economy, Nicaraguans have being leaving their country en masse. Some are fleeing a crackdown by President Daniel Ortega against his opponents, while others -- newly unemployed -- are looking for work. Many thousands have headed to Costa Rica, Nicaragua's neighbor to the south.
They have streamed across the border, some through legal crossings but many more along clandestine routes to sidestep Nicaraguan security forces. Thousands have applied for asylum in Costa Rica, overwhelming the government's migration bureaucracy, while others have simply melted into the broader population.
The Nicaraguan influx has posed an enormous challenge to the administration of President Carlos Alvarado Quesada, which is also wrestling with a gathering economic crisis and rising violence related to drug trafficking.
The migration challenge has also tested Costa Rica's celebrated and carefully cultivated ethos of hospitality and positivity, sparking flare-ups of xenophobia and exposing undercurrents of anti-Nicaraguan prejudice.
Late last month in the capital, San Jose, protesters -- some carrying Molotov cocktails and baseball bats -- descended on a park that has become a popular gathering place for Nicaraguans. Yelling anti-Nicaraguan invective, they clashed with opponents, resulting in dozens of arrests.
"I call for calm, for peace," Alvarado Quesada said in a televised speech. "In the face of calls for hatred or violence, sanity, prudence, intelligence and solidarity must prevail."
Epsy Campbell Barr, Costa Rica's foreign minister and first vice president, said the government is preparing for the political situation in Nicaragua to worsen as the year draws to a close, possibly pushing many more migrants into Costa Rica, one of the region's most politically stable and peaceful nations.
The Nicaraguan crisis is threatening to become "too big for a country with the conditions of Costa Rica," she said during an interview in her office in the presidential palace in San Jose.
"Sadly," she added, "it's not clear when the crisis will end."
The migration of people fleeing violence, political upheaval, poverty and natural disasters has for years tested the political resolve and good will of governments and populations throughout Latin America.
Hundreds of thousands of Central Americans, mostly from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, have in recent years left their homes seeking sanctuary and better lives elsewhere, mostly in the United States. More than 2 million Venezuelans have left their country, scattering throughout the Americas and Europe.
While it is unclear how many Nicaraguans have fled since the unrest started in April, the exodus does not compare in size with those mass movements, officials said. Still, it has had an unsettling effect on countries in the region, particularly Costa Rica, which has received the biggest influx of Nicaraguans.
The current surge is just the latest in decades of Nicaraguan immigration to Costa Rica, whose Nicaraguan emigre population numbers roughly 500,000, or about a tenth of the country's overall population, government officials said.
The Costa Rican government has been applauded -- by international migration officials and other advocates, and by migrants and refugees themselves -- for its handling of the migration crisis, even if its migration bureaucracy is threatening to collapse under the strain.
This year, more than 24,000 Nicaraguans have formally expressed a desire to apply for asylum in Costa Rica, a sharp increase over last year, when a total of about 6,300 people from all nations sought asylum.
The backlog is such that new appointments for asylum interviews are being scheduled for next spring, and the Alvarado Quesada administration has appealed to the international community for help. U.N. agencies have agreed to provide additional office space and salaries for more migration officials to speed up the work.
Administration officials and their allies worry that the longer the migration crisis persists, the greater the likelihood that Alvarado Quesada's opponents will use it as a wedge issue to turn public opinion against him and what he hopes to accomplish.
Already, some local politicians representing border precincts have raised the specter of an influx of Nicaraguan criminals to demand more police and greater financial assistance from the federal government, officials said.
The Alvarado Quesada administration responded by assuring the country that it is taking adequate security measures, including developing a plan to toughen border vigilance.
But some officials also acknowledge that the border police are overwhelmed, that the border is highly porous, and that there is little to stop Nicaraguans -- or anyone else -- from entering the country unchecked.
A Section on 09/23/2018