POLICE ACADEMY NO, COSTA RICA SOVEREIGNTY SI

November 2002

By Dale L. Johnson

The International Law Enforcement Academy that the United States wants to establish in Costa Rica has stated goals that are presented as worthy and unobjectionable. In programs such as the ILEA, stated goals may conceal purposes that are far from benign. There is a dark side to this proposal. If established here it would likely seriously compromise Costa Rica’s valued traditions of neutrality and the pursuit of peace.

The proposed Academy should be placed in the historical context of United States police and military training programs in the Latin American region, as well as the current context of U.S. policy objectives.

During the 1960s the other side of President John Kennedy’s Alliance For Progress was extensive aid and training programs to Latin American police and military forces. The emphasis in these assistance and training programs was "internal security" and "counter insurgency." The main purpose, amply accomplished, was to strengthen security forces to be able to effectively repress domestic protest of prevailing injustice and movements that challenged the status quo. In the 1970s, police forces participated in all the bloody military interventions of the period in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. During the 1980s United States assistance and training programs focused on Central America. The violent repression unleashed against all those social forces considered subversive in Guatemala and El Salvador is directly related to the strengthening of security forces by the United States.

Costa Rica was less scarred by these programs than other countries in the region. The Nation only had its sovereignty compromised and its democracy subverted.

U.S. sponsored police training programs have had a presence in Costa Rica for many decades. Between 1949 and 1967 nearly 2000 police officers were trained in military tactics and anti-communism at the U. S. Army School for the Americas in Panama. From the late 1960s until 1974 Costa Rican police received assistance and training through Aid’s Public Safety Program and many police were sent to Panama and to the International Police Academy in Washington. However, in 1974 the Congress of the U.S. banned training Latin American police forces because of their flagrant history of torture and "disappearances." Nevertheless U.S. involvement with Costa Rican security forces greatly expanded during the 1980s. Washington was anxious to open a Southern Front in its Contra War against Nicaragua. The size of Costa Rican police forces increased 400%. Programs proliferated, money flowed, and reorganization and "professionalization" were instituted. With Embassy pressure and CIA guidance and money, new units of the police were organized. Such units as the Directorate of Intelligence and Security (DIS) and the Special Intervention Unit (UEI) became infamous for abuse of legitimate police functions. In the early 1980s the Organization for National Emergency (OPEN) was formed to train a large auxiliary police force in the use of M-16 rifles and other military weapons. Infiltrated by domestic right-wing para-military groups that aided the Contras and engaged in domestic espionage, OPEN’s main activities were to put down demonstrations and attack strikers. President Arias and Security Minister Garrón suspended OPEN activity in 1987. In 1985 the U.S. constructed a camp at Murciélago run by the U.S. Green Berets to train an 800 man Civil Guard Lightening Battalion. Ostensibly to protect against Sandinista invasion, these Battalions only saw action in the repression of demonstrations by campesinos and peace activists and in evictions of squatters from the properties of wealthy landowners.

In the other Central American countries the U.S. intervened massively: with counterinsurgency programs; by turning a blind eye and lending a helping hand to the Death Squads; by massacres of villagers carried out by military forces armed by the Americans; by arming, financing, and directing a terrorist force, the Contras, against a reformist government in Nicaragua.

History is one guide to contemporary purpose. U.S. Embassy spokesmen claim that ILEA will not be engaged in militaristic programs, mainly offering training in combating drug and arms trafficking, money laundering, kidnapping, and child prostitution. The Latin American programs described above too were presented in ways that concealed their real purposes. Certainly it is not encouraging that President Bush has appointed three persons associated with the "Iran Contra" scandal and the most militaristic policies of the Reagan era to his Latin American policy team, Otto Reich, Elliot Abrams, and John Negroponte.

Of course, times and circumstances change and a history of nefarious hidden agendas need not define the present moment. The real purposes of ILEA will be more determined by contemporary circumstances than past trajectories. The U.S., having won the Cold War, had a choice to chart new policy directions promoting peace and respect for human rights and international law. Instead the U.S. since September 11, 2001 has chosen to dress-up old Cold War policies with a new name, a "War on Terrorism." This war is being waged on every front and one front line is police training.

The most frightening aspect of this war is the resort to terroristic means to fight terror. Terrorism is not unique to the barbarous acts of the Islamic fundamentalists who bomb innocents and crash airplanes into symbolic targets because in their reactionary vision, just like the vision of George Bush, the world is divided between the faithful and the unbelievers, those that are with us and those that are against us. A less distorted concept of terrorism than that fostered on the world today would recognize that persons that are blown to bits by bombs or burned alive in missile explosions, or tortured and mutilated by Death Squads, or massacred in villages, are victims of terrorism whether this occurs in New York, Kabul, Baghdad, or Guatemala. The United States intends to unilaterally carry out war against whoever, whenever, wherever, and against whatever enemy that it becomes expedient to define--and with any means necessary.

In this context, the proposed International Law Enforcement Academy surely will become a small part of a larger United States program to strengthen a world wide repressive apparatus subservient to the ends of that nation’s unilateralist and bullying posture, its superpower arrogance, its preference for violent repression over diplomacy, its propensity to violate international norms of civilized society and principles of human rights, its resort to terrorist means to achieve policy ends, and its striving for the global hegemony of the corporate interests that guide United States policy.

I hope that Costa Rica will reject the North American plan to install a regional police-training program. The history that guides these programs and no doubt its present intent in the context of Bush’s war against terrorism is to make police forces everywhere a vast, efficient, militarized international repressive force at the service of Empire. The United States will create such a program for the Latin American region. It does not have to be located in peaceful and democratic Costa Rica and Costa Rica does not have to send its police to this program.

This is not an easy decision for Costa Rica, a small country dependent on an impatient and arrogant northern giant that expects compliance. The best defense that Costa Rica may have is not an army nor a police force trained to be a surrogate army, but moral integrity--a firm noncompliance to North American proposals based on its tradition of neutrality and the search for diplomatic and peaceful solutions to conflict.