by Rod Hughes

You may not be a chicken, but look out for the “hawks” if you are going to the Immigration headquarters to apply for or renew your residency visa. So don’t heed the siren call of those preditors outside Immigration’s gates who will allegedly run your paperwork through for an extra fee.

This was the important message from Central America’s leading English-language newspaper The Tico Times recently. The paper revealed that those gavilanes (the Spanish word for hawks), the people who gather at the gates of the Immigration compound to “help” you go through the process of of obtaining or renewing your cedula, may not only rip you off but actually put you in peril of deportation.

They are also the bane of the existence of Immigration director Mario Zuniga who has been trying to clean up his department of corruption and bring order to a red-tape-bound process. He warned that some of the “gavilanes” are linked with human smuggling and identity theft, using information obtained ostensibly to process papers. And the “document” they obtain for you may be a worthless forgery. Zuniga told the paper that foreigners have come in waving these documents proudly for renewal only to find that Immigration has no file on them.

Zuniga told the newspaper that the gavilanes have so infiltrated the system that they actually enter the working area where legitimate employees toil. “When I first got here,” Zuniga confessed to the paper, “I didn’t know who was who.” Gradually he began to identify his employees and weed out the intruders but the process is far from complete. So far Zuniga has whittled down the estimated 350 gavilantes who had infiltrated his department when he took over in 2006. He has also fired 10 regular employees for corruption, filed 50 on-going prosecutions against others. An on-going investigation into 22 officials suspected of falsifying exit and entry stamps continues.

A bill, partly written by Zuniga, languishing in Congress, would speed up and smooth out the complicated bureaucracy leading up to a legitimate visa. That, more than anything else, would take the temptation out of the siren call to have runners take care of the paperwork.