Costa Rica’s struggle to maintain its security

INTERVIEW/ Kevin Casas-Zamora

The mere mention of Costa Rica evokes cascading waterfalls, pristine beaches and tropical forests. The country is also synonymous with living peacefully but it now begins to face the challenge of protecting its security, affected by so many internal issues such as impunity and corruption and global phenomena such as the drug trade and common crime.

Costa Ricans are definitely worried about security at home. Laura Chinchilla was elected president of Costa Rica last February, having committed to preserving this valued national treasure. More recently, in response to the drug trade, the Legislative Assembly approved a significant expansion of the presence of the United States in Costa Rican waters to perform maritime drug fighting operations.

 
Comunidad Segura interviewed Kevin Casas-Zamora, former vice president of Costa Rica during the Oscar Arias administration, and during that period he worked closely with the current president, (Arias’s first vice-president). Casas-Zamora is also the former Minister of Planning and Economic Policy, currently a researcher in international politics at the Brookings Institution.

In Casas-Zamora’s opinion, Costa Rica has in its favor the fact the general population trusts the police, but it must work tirelessly to recover the leadership of the state in critical areas, not just by police presence available, but by making social investments.

What are the main threats to Costa Rica’s security, and what are its main strengths?

The main challenge is to make institutions in the field of security more efficient so that citizens once more denounce crimes, which is vital to lower levels of impunity. Secondly, we need to recover the presence of the state in areas that are very problematic, this means multi-sector involvement that is complex and costly. Thirdly, it is important to continue concentrating efforts, to the fullest possible extent, on combating the international drug trade, we cannot escape this thankless task while the United States does not completely overhaul its drug trade policies.
Costa Rica’s main strength is that levels of violence in Costa Rica, unlike other countries, have not become uncontrollable. Our state is also appropriately, although imperfectly, in control of its territory. It is a state that works in the widest sense of the word. The same could not be said for all of Latin America.

What is the right strategy to preserve security in Costa Rica?

To put it in a single sentence: “zero tolerance for offending and zero tolerance for social exclusion”. It is crucial to improve the performance of our coercive apparatus – such as the police forces and the judiciary – but the state must also invest efficiently in society.

It is crucial that citizens denounce crimes to lower current levels of impunity, while today it only happens in exceptional circumstances for lack of sufficient trust in the penal system’s role in protecting society. It is also vital to have the state recover control of communities with very high levels of violence, and this not just to do policing, but as a multi-sector effort. Such small scale “failed states” have become typical of many of the cities in Latin America – they have growing influence and it is crucial that such situations are contained and reverted.

There are in these communities complex accumulations of social pathologies that decisively contribute towards the reproduction of criminal violence. And obviously all this is very affected by the presence of the drug trade, which requires an effort of cooperation that crosses over national borders.

In statements issued just after being elected president, Laura Chincilla said that the nation’s security does not necessarily imply in militarizing national territory, and that it will mean a modernization of public security forces. How do to see these statements and do you think it is enough?

The statements are what one would expect of the president of a nation that does not have an army. In fact, the modernization of the police forces is one of the key components, since the nation has been accumulating a considerable backlog in terms of its police force’s training, professionalization and equipment.

Despite of all the failures accumulated by the police and the general lack of confidence in its capacity to face crime, the public forces are not seen as a threat to citizenship, which is an important asset in Costa Rica. This is much more than can be said for a few neighboring countries. Now, no matter how decisive all this is, none of it is sufficient. To recover the presence of the state in critical areas is much more than a police task.

In fact one of the most serious problems is the disassociation between pubic security policies and social policies. This separation has to done away with as quickly as possible. Citizen security policy is not simply a task for the Ministry of Public Security, but of the entire government, with the collaboration, of course, of the organized community.

By improving security in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, all of Central America will benefit. Are there joint efforts being made by the three nations, what is the work being done and what are the main challenges?

Evidently the conditions in the north of Central America create very serious dangers to the rest of the region, especially with the expansion of the maras. However this has affected us little presently. One has to work preventively but not if animated by uncontrolled hysteria, as sometimes we note in clamor of the media.

Up to now the joint work among countries in the region is very limited, in spite of the efforts of the Sistema de Integración Centro Americana (Central American Integration System). Part of the problem is that the exchange of police information in the region requires more sophisticated information systems in each country, posing before us a great challenge. The use of information to create security policy is incipient in all countries.

Are Mexico and the United States articulating regional solutions within the notion of co-responsibility in topics related to the drug trade?  And are there any joint efforts with  Colombia and other nations that produce illicit drugs?

Yes, there are regional initiatives. The most obvious one is Plan Mérida that conceives of the regional issues through citizen security in an appropriate and sophisticated manner. It is not, as we tried to explain in some occasions, a simple copy of Plan Colombia. Far from it. Since it has important components such as institutional development in the field of security. One must understand that in Central America public institutions in charge of security are not only incapable of solving security problems, but that they aggravate such problems significantly.

In almost all cases they are eaten up by corruption and act in coordination with organized crime. So the task of rethinking them from the core is crucial. The problem is the plan only concedes Central America limited funding (less than 39% of the total) and even that is allotted among 8 countries, it leaves very little to each country. It is very insufficient if compared with the gravity of the challenge before us.