by Rod Hughes

The discovery of five bodies last week in a garbage dump in Costa Rica’s southern zone underscored the preoccupation of Chief Prosecutor Francisco Dall’Anese and Judicial Police (OIJ) director Jorge Rojas about organized, drug-related crime in the country. All the victims were Panamanians, all with their hands tied, carefully shot in the back of the head.

While these mass murders would hardly raise cops’ eyebrows in Miami-Dade county in Florida, a massacre such as this is most un-Costa Rican. Granted, assassination-style murders are not unknown here in the narcotics underworld, they usually entail as single killing, often gunned down on the street by paid assassins riding motorcycles. But 61 gangland-style murders have occurred in the past two years, up from only five killer-for-hire murders in 2005.

In a report to the Supreme Court last year before his reappointment to a second term as Chief Prosecutor (the equivalent of Attorney General in the United States), Dall-Anese told the judges that he wanted to target organized crime. Many law-abiding citizens and tourists, untouched by the violent struggles for turf among drug-runners, wondered what he meant or thought he was referring to auto thieving gangs.

As for Rojas, the OIJ director complained bitterly to the Al Dia newspaper that new laws with more teeth in them to combat crime were still stalled as bills in the Legislative Assembly. He did, however, succeed this year in obtaining an increased budget for equipment and personnel, but only by threatening late last year to resign.

He told Al Dia that many hired killers are Latin foreigners who enter the country to kill a specific persons and then leave. This lethal tourism makes them hard to catch.