Caribbean & Central America - July 2012 (ISSN 1741-4458)

The crime that shocked the Latin American folklore music scene in July 2011 (see page 14) has, for the first time ever, put Costa Rica at the centre of a transnational criminal organisation. While local residents have long described increasing insecurity as their main concern, many in the region continue to downplay the country’s increasing security problems as its traditional image of a safe and flourishing nation dominates the popular psyche. However, the case of El Palidejo could soon change that.

Alejandro Jiménez González (‘El Palidejo’) was arrested on 12 March in Colombia, triggering a series of arrests and surrenders in Colombia, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Aruba (for prosecution in the US) that have shocked Costa Rican and international law enforcement agencies alike.  “If the accusations made against El Palidejo [in Nicaragua] are proved, the fact that he was born in Costa Rica, educated in public schools and that from one moment to another he is recruited [by a transnational criminal group] opens a new scenario, to which we have to pay a lot of attention”, Minister of Public Security Mario Zamora told the local Costa Rican media.

In fact, Zamora said that the participation of a Costa Rican in a transnational criminal group is by itself “unprecedented; it marks a change in pattern. It was characteristic in all these groups that the central brain was a foreigner and that national participation was residual”. However, he says this has changed as El Palidejo wasn’t “a nobody; he was inside a hierarchical organisational structure. He could make decisions on his own; he didn’t have to consult [anyone]. We are talking about a boss within a transnational structure with different types of movements under his command”, Zamora said.

The domino effect

El Palidejo is believed to have acted as the organisation’s link in Central America, joining those producing cocaine in Colombia to those transporting it through Nicaragua and Guatemala into Mexico for its onward shipment to the US. Following El Palidejo’s arrest, Henry Fariñas, the Nicaraguan businessman accused of being his partner in crime, was arrested in Managua – although Fariñas was wounded in the attack and is expected to testify against El Palidejo, Nicaraguan authorities believe he used to be part of the Costa Rican’s network but was attacked as a result of a fallout between the two.

Fariñas’s arrest was followed by the surrender of Javier Calle Serna [RA-12-04], one of the infamous Comba brothers who led the Los Rastrojos criminal group in Colombia, to the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in Aruba. According to the Colombian police, Los Rastrojos were the ones who helped El Palidejo leave Costa Rica after the attack on Fariñas and seek refuge in the Colombian department of Chocó, one of the group’s strongholds.

Other members of the network had already fallen in the hands of authorities, but it wasn’t until El Palidejo was captured that Nicaraguan officials established the connections. In the formal accusation against Fariñas, El Palidejo is accused of handing over the cocaine transported from the port of Limón by a Colombian, Francisco García (‘El Fresa’), to a criminal gang known as Los Charros – believed to be the Guatemalan arm of the Mexican drug trafficking organisation (DTO) La Familia Michoacana. A former Mexican federal police officer, Gabriel Maldonado Siler, has already been sentenced in Nicaragua to 27 years in prison for his role in transporting the drugs through Nicaragua and Guatemala to Mexico as a member of Los Charros. The network’s movements, authorities claim, was possible thanks to the support of Julio César Ozuna, a former Nicaraguan electoral magistrate (CSE), who allegedly provided fake IDs for the members of the group. He was arrested in late May (see previous page).

• Marijuana consumption shoots up

The annual household survey on the consumption of drugs 2010, conducted by the institute on alcoholism and pharmacodependency (Iafa), reveals that the number of Costa Ricans who consume marijuana has more than tripled in four years. The investigation, in which 3,000 people between the ages of 12 and 70 were interviewed, found that while in 2006 only 0.6% of the population had consumed marijuana, this figure increased to 2% four years later. The survey shows that men consume marijuana much more frequently (3%) than women (0.9%). On average, consumers first try the drug at 16.5 years of age.