Organizational Capacity and Resources Cyber troop capacity in Costa Rica is low compared to other countries in Latin America. Activities by politicians or their political operatives are still mostly uncoordinated and rely on human accounts and human trolls. Given that the country does not have an army and lacks experience with the type of military intelligence operations seen in other Latin American countries, its current low level of sophistication is unsurprising. During election periods political parties have small teams working on their digital communications which reduce in size after the elections have finished. As one interviewee said: “There is little money for such [cyber troop] campaigns in between elections, they spring up more systematically during election campaigns.”32 Public data on the amount of resources spent on digital marketing, data mining and cyber troop capacity is almost non-existent. This has been, in part, due to the fact that neither digital marketing agencies nor researchers hired privately during election campaigns need to register with the TSE. Only companies which conduct polls intended to be published during elections and the media which accept money for political advertising need to register by a certain deadline with the TSE. But digital marketing agencies are currently outside of the legislation operating under “a veil of opacity”, as one interviewee lamented. 33 In addition, while the TSE looks into spending on marketing, costs to develop trolls, for example, are hidden in the category of digital marketing. Hence, it is difficult to isolate resources spent on political propaganda by cyber troops. The scandals outlined above reveal some of the resources spent on developing manipulated content or actors which have been involved in the past. They include the USD 31,200 the PRN owed to Opol for the unrepresentative polls, USD 230,000 paid for digital advertising, and USD 35,000 for a voter market analysis to ADD Integral solutions. But the amounts paid on any trolling activity by companies, such as Soluciones Digitales or OW Marketing Agency are unknown. According to Iván Barrantes, communication strategy fees amount to USD 50,000 per month in Costa Rica (Cambronero, 2014). Of the USD 190,000 he was paid during the 2014 election, almost USD 130,000 (CRC 75 million) was a bonus for winning (Chinchilla Cerdas, 2014; and Cambronero, 2014). Such amounts pale into insignificance compared to the USD 600,000 budget Andrés Sepúlveda had at his disposal for cyber troop activities during Mexican President Pena Nieto’s election campaign (Robertson, Riley and Willis, 2016). Table 3 captures cyber troop capacity in Costa Rica. Table 3: Cyber Troop Capacity in Costa Rica Team Size Resources Spent Activity Levels (USD) Small 93 Coordination USD 31,200 for Mostly Around Low unrepresentative polls by Election Periods, with Opol; some continuity USD 230,000 digital afterwards advertising paid to ADD Integral Solution; USD 35,000 to ADD Integral Capacity Measure Low