Police Academy Debate Stirs
By Tim Rogers
Tico Times Staff
trogers@ticotimes.net

After a year of lying dormant, the opposition movement to establishing a U.S.-run International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) on Costa Rican soil started to grumble back to life this week, as the project approaches judgement day in the Legislative Assembly.

Advertised by the U.S. as a training facility to prepare regional law enforcement agents to identify and combat transnational crimes, the proposed academy would be the first of its kind in Latin America, and the fifth ILEA in the world. The academy's curriculum has not yet been determined, and would depend on what regional law enforcement leaders decide are priorities for combating international crime, according to the U.S. Embassy.

The U.S. government claims ILEA is civilian and has no military function or objective. The academy would not teach live weapons training and its students will be judges, prosecutors and civilian law enforcement agents, the embassy stressed.

Critics of the proposed cop school, however, fear ILEA would act as a Trojan Horse for U.S. hegemony and military expansionism. The academy is often likened to the infamous School of the Americas (SOA) in Fort Benning, Georgia, which trained and graduated some of Latin America's most ruthless military strongmen and abusers of human rights from the '70s, '80s and '90s.

Maryknoll priest Roy Bourgeois, founder of the activist group SOA Watch, warns that the police academy in Costa Rica would serve the same function as the Fort Benning military academy that he has worked to expose and close down for the last 13 years. He charges that the academy will be used to train Latin American "watchdogs" to protect U.S. interests in the region.

"The issue here is control," Father Bourgeois told The Tico Times this week during a phone conversation from Colum-bus, Georgia. "This control is needed to continue the socio-economic system of keeping wealth and power in the hands of the elite."

The U.S. vigorously shakes off any comparisons between ILEA and the School of the Americas, which was recently renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Embassy spokeswoman Marcia Bosshart said ILEA falls under the Department of State, not the Department of Defense. She said the U.S. hopes the Costa Rican Congress will ratify the project "soon," but with "respect for Costa Rica's democratic process."

The plan to establish an ILEA in Costa Rica was signed last year by the Costa Rican government and U.S. Ambassador John J. Danilovich (TT, July 5, 2002). The project is currently being studied by Congress' nine-member Commission on Foreign Affairs, which this week called a hearing with the sub-director of Costa Rica's Judicial School to ask questions about ILEA.

"The meeting was positive and cleared up a lot of doubts," Committee Secretary Liliana Salas, a congresswoman for the ruling Social Christian Unity Party, told The Tico Times Tuesday afternoon. "It was explained to us that this type of training is necessary for our law enforcement agents. The FBI and DEA already offer training for the drug war, but our agents need more training in areas such as domestic abuse, sexual exploitation of minors and the trafficking in people."

The Committee is scheduled to hold another hearing with judges next week, and could vote on the academy in the next few weeks.

If approved by the Committee by a simple majority vote - five of the nine members already publicly support the measure - the project will go before Congress, where it will be further debated and filibustered by opponents from the Citizen Action Party, the only party bloc to take a strong stance against the academy. The project does not have a ratification deadline and could be hung up in Legislative Assembly for months or years, though it is expected to be fast-tracked through before congressional discussion begins at the end of the year on the free-trade agreement between Central America and the U.S. (CAFTA).

Citizen Action congressman Rodrigo Carazo said there are serious doubts in the Legislative Assembly about how much the project will cost and how it will benefit Costa Rica. He said there hasn't been much serious debate in Congress about the project because most lawmakers don't yet have the facts about ILEA.

Carazo, however, has already decided that he is against the academy.

"It would be inconvenient and unnecessary and it would jeopardize Costa Rica's positions of pacifism and neutrality," he told The Tico Times.

The U.S. Embassy has been reluctant to discuss the price tag of the academy, but said the U.S. is prepared to make a significant investment in real estate here if the project is approved. Costa Rica, according to the Embassy, would be asked to pay for the maintenance and upkeep of the facilities, which would be Tico-owned and U.S.-operated.

Congresswoman Salas said Costa Rica's financial commitment would be $200,000.