President Laura Chinchilla faces obstacles in struggle against organized crime.
| Autor | Rodriguez, George |
In a complex context ranging from a judicial ban on preventive police checkpoints to the unprecedented US listing of Costa Rica as one of twenty countries worst hit by drug trafficking worldwide, President Laura Chinchilla warns that organized crime--including illegal drug trafficking-is the biggest threat her country has ever been up against in 189 years of independence.
Costa Rica's first woman president is certain that world solidarity is essential for a successful struggle against crime everywhere; otherwise, all progress toward development will be at risk.
Chinchilla also strongly believes developed countries, mainly the major drug consumers, must cooperate efficiently with developing nations, such as Costa Rica, on the south-north drug path that makes them victims of a problem they have not created.
After delivering the central speech at the main Independence Day celebration on Sept. 15, Chinchilla told journalists, "Costa Rica sees its liberty, its peace, and its democracy threatened." It is "a situation...that is threatening our institutions and our public liberties."
President says problem threatens national security
Minutes before, as she addressed the gathering, the president had said, "We are living a situation more dramatic than any chapter in our history, because we must now combat an enemy that is rooted in the nation's territory."
"We are living in difficult times," since "drug trafficking and organized crime have settled in our region [Central America] and are vying for control of the territory and the institutions," warned Chinchilla, a former minister of security and of justice who has also been a legislator and a vice president.
"We are speaking of an unprecedented international scourge, of crime with no parameters because of its ability to corrupt, because of its lack of scruples, and because of the technological and economic means within its reach," Chinchilla went on. "Winds are sweeping our soil, the same winds of violence and lack of security blowing strongly in other countries in Central America and beyond the region."
This situation "warns us, as at other clear times in our history, that we have a common destiny, that we face similar problems, and that only united shall we be able to solve them," the president said. "Today's threat is different" from that posed in the 1850s by William Walker, the pro-slavery head of a US mercenary army who led an invasion of Central America and was captured and executed in 1860 in...
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