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PUERTO VIEJO, Limón province – Alex Stephens
and Evelyn Cortés woke up with two men in their bedroom
threatening to kill them. Instead, the criminals stole $10,000
in cash, paintings and a Toyota truck.
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| Losing Faith:
Alex Stephens and his family were robbed in
their home by two men who threatened to kill them.
Stephens says he has so little faith in the criminal
justice system that he refused to testify against one of
the suspects. |
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Nick Wilkinson
| Tico Times
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During their escape, they killed police officer Mario
González at a checkpoint and disarmed the remaining officers.
The year was 2006, the place Puerto Viejo, a village on the
Caribbean coast.
Fast forward to last Saturday, when two rival gang members
were killed in a shootout at the Stanford's, a popular spot with
tourists. The two gangs in question are the Guapos and Panas,
and their dead members are Johnny Fajardo, also known as Virus,
and Luis Martínez, respectively.
From Cahuita to Manzanillo, some of the
hottest tourism spots on the Caribbean, residents say they have
been facing a debilitating crime wave – including murders,
rapes, robberies, extortions and acts of arson – for years.
The authorities, residents say, are not
responding adequately, if at all.
“This is a drug town with a sugar coating of
eco-tourism,” says Stephens, the owner of a dried flower
business in northern California who's lived off and on in Puerto
Viejo for 20 years. “The country's lost its pura vida.”
“We're totally abandoned here,” says Eddie
Ryan, a U.S. citizen, owner of the Costa Papito hotel in Playa
Cocles and vice president of the area's Tourism Chamber. “It's
so dysfunctional, and a lot of the police are corrupt. The whole
system needs to be fundamentally reformed.”
‘So tired of all
this'
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| Fat Bad Boy:
A self-proclaimed hitman, ‘Gordo Malo' says he not only
kills people, he steals from their refrigerators.
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Nick Wilkinson
| Tico Times
|
In Stephens' case, he had such little faith in the judicial
system, he didn't testify against Mendoza, aka “Rambo,” who
allegedly threatened to kill him in 2006. As a result, Mendoza
walked.
“No way, man, here they just shoot you in the street,”
Stephens said. “There's no guarantee I would have made it from
San José to Limón.”
Cortés, however, did testify against the perpetrator she saw,
Cristian Vargas, also known as “Culebra,” and he is doing 10
years in prison.
“If they had not killed a cop, they never would've looked for
them,” Stephens said. “There were checkpoints with 50 police and
helicopters and it was the biggest thing I've seen in Costa Rica
in 20 years.”
Stephens said he believes the failed hit was orchestrated by
one of Cortés' ex-boyfriends, a local crack dealer.
“I said to him, ‘If you had anything to do
with this, I'll kill you,”' Stephens said. “I had another
meeting with (the crack dealer) to try to make peace and (an
agreement is) in place, but it's hard for me to not want to kill
him or have him killed. Hits are customary in the area. But if
we do it – retaliate – then they'll throw the book at us because
we're foreigners.”
Ryan points to another case illustrating the
impunity and dysfunction of the police and judicial system here.
He says there's a serial rapist who lives nearby in Playa
Chiquita who was positively identified by his latest attempted
victim, a Brazilian, with the aid of National Police.
According to the Puerto Viejo Satellite Web
site,
http://www.puertoviejosatellite.com, police believe
the suspect has preyed on at least seven women, mostly
foreigners and including a 16-year-old, since 2003. He had
previously served six of 13 years for a sex crime conviction and
got out early for good behavior.
Ryan and others in the community are enraged
that the suspect is not behind bars, at least in preventive
prison while an investigation goes forward of the most recent
case of the attempted rape in March of the Brazilian. Ryan said
Bribrí Criminal Court Judge Eliseo Duran filed the case as a
robbery because the woman's wedding ring was stolen and threw
out the attempted rape charge because National Police are not
allowed to help a victim identify suspects.
“The rape charge was thrown out on a
technicality because the procedural rule is (the National
Police) can't be involved in suspect identification,” Ryan said.
“It just doesn't add up and I'm so tired of all this.”
Ryan and others in town filed a formal
complaint against Duran with the country's Supreme Court Chief
Justice Luis Mora. Criminal Court Chief Justice Jose Arroyo
confirmed Duran is under investigation by the Judicial
Inspections Department because of his potentially questionable
rulings.
Duran could not be reached for comment.
Cases going nowhere
Ryan, a leader in the community, said he's
fed up with the criminal justice system and has nearly given up
hope. He cites corruption and lack of jail space as being two
primary reasons authorities aren't protecting the public.
“It's by no accident that we don't get
preventive prison here because there's no prison space,” he
said. “We have the same jail capacity here that we had in 1950
and the population's gone from 1 million to 4 million. On the
corruption front, if one cop comes in (who's not corrupt), they
take him down with rumors and innuendo and set him up. If you
have one guy really into doing his job, the supervisor will get
rid of him.”
Puerto Viejo police officer Dennis Pereia, an
eight-year veteran, acknowledges the crime problem is out of
control. He said Puerto Viejo alone averages 20 reported
robberies a week, but he estimates only 20 percent of crimes are
reported.
“There are robberies every day against
foreigners and Ticos but they leave the country or go back to
San José,” Pereia said. “Some tourists file reports, but they
get scared and they don't want to go through the judicial
process.”
The officer said it's a mystery what happens
to many of the cases filed with the Bribrí prosecutor's office.
“We give them the police reports and then I
don't know what happens,” he said. “The law here is pretty
flexible. And the town doesn't help the police much.”
‘Time to give out
some beatings'
Because of the lack of action from
authorities, some residents are talking about taking matters
into their own hands.
Martín González, the Tico owner of Sol del
Caribe restaurant in Playa Cocles, said the community is fed up.
“There's talk of linchamientos,” he
said. “Some are thinking it's time to give out some beatings.”
Linchamientos are public beatings of alleged
criminals, intended to get them to stop their behavior or chase
them out of town.
But González acknowledges the practice, once
commonplace in the area and referred to as “giving a good
massage,” is no longer that easy because criminals often have
guns.
“The entire town is afraid,” he said, “and
the police are, too.”
Some are talking openly about taking even
more desperate measures, such as contracting hits against
alleged threats.
One such man is Manuel Pinto, a Frenchman and
owner of the local Caribe Sur real estate business. He and his
wife Emmanuelle, say they filed a police report with prosecutors
in Bribrí after they and their two daughters, Sara and Maya,
were allegedly assaulted and threatened on Father's Day by two
U.S. citizens who have a business in town. Although the Pintos
received a restraining order against them, they are unhappy the
suspects have not been arrested for the crime.
“(One of them) grabbed my daughter, the one
with muscular dystrophy, by the hair and dragged her three
meters,” he said. “They slammed my wife's head down. … The whole
town saw it, but the prosecutor still hasn't done anything.”
Pinto said he began considering the option of
contracting a hit on his aggressors after a local hitman
approached him, saying the other side in the dispute already had
offered money to kill the Pintos.
“They threatened to kill us twice right in
front of the cops, but when we asked the cops if they heard,
they said they didn't understand English,” Manuel said. “Why
hasn't the prosecutor done anything about the assault? I'm
paranoid and I can't sleep at night. We considered a hit because
of lack of support from law enforcement.”
“The judicial system in CR isn't worth a
sh--,” Emmanuelle said. “Life is cheap.”
The Pintos have left the country for a week.
Before they left, Manuel said the crime problem has come to such
a level he has thought about temporarily giving up on his real
estate venture.
“I considered taking down the Web site and
putting up a splash page saying that due to uncontrolled crime
in the area, we're closed and we don't recommend foreigners
coming to invest here now,” he said.
Making nice with
‘Gordo Malo'
The hitman most mentioned on the lips of
these people is a local legend known as ‘Gordo Malo.'
Underscoring the impunity in the region,
Gordo Malo granted The Tico Times an interview, acknowledging he
is a hitman for hire who also runs a protection racket.
Gordo Malo, who has a cedula with the name
Magno Enrique Beñavides, claims to be a former Contra in the war
against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and a former agent with the
Judicial Investigation Police (OIJ).
Residents say he's terrorized the region for
years, but the stories have mutated and it's hard to separate
fact from fiction.
But Beñavides says he charges from $100 to
$20,000 for a hit, depending on the client and the target. He
also likes to sample the offerings of the different
refrigerators in the area.
“I have the ability to go into your kitchen
and leave without you even knowing it,” he boasted. “I know
violence but it doesn't please me. But I get bothered easily,
and when I get bothered, I get very violent. Everyone's afraid
of Gordo Malo.”
Asked for specific murders, Beñavides
declined to offer any, citing his knowledge of the country's
laws and what he could and couldn't get away with.
“There are various dead but they are labeled
as disappeared or unidentifiable,” he said.
Pinto used to consider Gordo Malo an enemy.
Now he considers him a necessary evil after the self-avowed
hitman warned him his attackers asked for his services.
“He's one of a small handful of people who
have terrorized the town for years,” he said. “The reality here
is you have to go and make nice with the criminals. That is the
unfortunate absolute reality here.”
nwilkinson@ticotimes.net |