Scandal Spotlights Costa Rica’s Battle on Drugs

Roberto Fionna, a discreet and wealthy Argentine, owned the best Italian restaurant in town and, according to investigators, had the most influential friends money could buy.

His arrest and extradition to France on heroin trafficking charges last year set off a national inquiry that has shaken Costa Rica’s political establishment.

After public hearings into Fionna’s web of protection, three high court magistrates, an ambassador and the chief criminal investigator of the judicial police agency have resigned, and a prominent lawmaker is under pressure to quit as well.

The scandal, which has riveted national attention, reflects the vulnerability of Central America’s most open and peaceful society to drug dealers seeking either refuge for themselves or new routes for Colombian cocaine to the United States.

Yet in a country with no army and not enough radar to track every aircraft, the continuing investigation by a Legislative Assembly panel seems to show the strength of Costa Rican democratic institutions in fighting corruption by the drug barons.

President Oscar Arias Sanchez, who was awarded the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize for trying to stop guerrilla conflicts in Central America, has put a high priority on stopping drugs. At his initiative, the Legislative Assembly last May enacted what U.S. officials call the toughest anti-narcotics law in Latin America.

In a televised address, Arias warned that “precarious political situations” in Panama and in Central America have “induced international rogues to try and test our stability and our respect for the law with their contemptible operations.”

With its lax immigration laws, unpatrolled coastlines and a multitude of private airstrips, Costa Rica became a major way-station for U.S.-bound Colombian cocaine in the mid-1980s, police officials say. This followed successful efforts to reduce cocaine shipments through the Bahamas.

From 1980 to 1984, Costa Rican police captured an average of one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of cocaine a year, according to Carlos Saurez of the Public Security Ministry. Without a major increase in police power, he said, total cocaine seizures since 1985 have soared to 3,000 kilograms.

Hernan Vargas, a narcotics specialist on the judicial police force, estimates that 1,500 kilograms of cocaine pass through the country every month, typically entering in small aircraft and leaving by sea in legally registered containers of shrimp, pineapple and other perishables.

Drug addiction is not yet a serious problem in Costa Rica, and the only known venture into cocaine production here was stopped in 1986 when police destroyed a major Colombian-run laboratory in the mountains.

But with fewer than 120 police agents assigned to drug interdiction and a $700,000 annual drug budget, law enforcement officials say they are overwhelmed by the narcotrafico .

“We’re like ants fighting an elephant,” said Eduardo Araya, Costa Rica’s chief prosecutor.

Some officials and lawmakers believe the lack of an army, though it is an asset to Arias’ peace campaign, makes Costa Rica an easier target for drug dealers.

But unlike their counterparts in neighboring countries--where the army is the power behind weak civilian institutions--Costa Rican police, lawmakers, judges and news media investigate corruption aggressively and work as a check on each other.

“The Costa Ricans’ record (against drugs) is fairly impeccable,” said Robert Nieves, a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency official. “They are making all the right moves. Their front line of defense is that they prosecute to the limit. The traffickers cannot bribe their way out. There’s a significant taint factor that goes along with association with a fugitive like Fionna.”

The three-month investigation of Fionna’s influence showed that he paid for a Honda sedan and an apartment used by Ricardo Umana, the third-ranking official in the judicial police. He also donated rice and beans to be served at rallies for Arias’ party during the 1986 election campaign.

Fionna, who testified that Umana was his “best friend in Costa Rica,” wrote letters on police stationery and gave the official $3,600 to assure Costa Rican resident status for two Thai immigrants wanted on drug charges in France, the investigators were told.

Investigators also reported that three Supreme Court magistrates and a lawmaker tried to protect Umana. The magistrates resigned under censure in November, as did Umana and the Costa Rican ambassador, who had invited Fionna to move here in 1982.

The Legislative Assembly is now looking into other politically sensitive cases. One involves Ricardo Alem, a former campaign fund-raiser for Arias who allegedly parlayed his presidential appointment to head a development bank into ventures involving the laundering of drug money. Alem was arrested last year after being linked to an attempt to smuggle $750,000 in cash into Costa Rica wrapped in campaign stickers of a presidential candidate from Arias’ party.

The most recent case is that of John Hull, an Indiana-born farmer with U.S. and Costa Rican citizenship. Hull, a powerful figure in Costa Rica who worked for the CIA as liaison with U.S.-backed Nicaraguan rebels based near his ranch, was arrested last month on charges of cocaine smuggling and violating Costa Rican neutrality.

Alem and Hull face trial under the new anti-narcotics law, which automatically denies bail, rules out executive pardon and threatens the same eight- to 20-year prison term for small-scale marijuana users and big-time cocaine smugglers. It also outlaws money laundering and allows the state to keep boats, planes or other vehicles seized with drugs on board.

“There is an atmosphere of national exorcism against anything that smells of drugs,” Information Minister Guido Fernandez Saborio said.

But even with the new law, several officials agreed, they cannot expect to reduce the drug traffic. They can only hope to keep it from expanding, leaking into an internal market or corrupting the legal system.

What alarms political leaders and law enforcement officials most about the Fionna case, and several recent ones like it, is the use of drug money in recent election campaigns. By some estimates, tens of millions of drug-tainted dollars flow through Costa Rica’s currency black market each month.

“Fionna committed no crime in Costa Rica, but he threw his money around,” said Alberto Fait, head of the legislative panel investigating drugs. “That is how those people work. They can use you without your knowing it. They can buy political influence and break the moral defenses of society. All this easy money in such large quantities is a danger we are not accustomed to.”

Some officials are uneasy with the panel’s standard of guilt by association. Arias and two former presidents have denied knowing that certain contributors to their campaigns were drug traffickers. Leonel Villalobos, the assemblyman censored for protecting Umana, has ignored the panel’s demand that he resign and is leading a campaign to reject its findings.

“It is illogical to say that if I knew someone who was a friend of Fionna, then I should resign,” Villalobos told the assembly. “If that’s the way it works, then Fait should resign too.”

Fait countered in an interview: “The climate in the country has changed. The people do not want scapegoats. We are not going after bit players, messengers and chauffeurs. We are going after the masterminds of the plots and the crimes.”