President Oscar Arias told The Tico Times recently that he agrees with the idea of sending police officers to train at a U.S. military school that has come under fire in recent years for its ties to human rights violations.
“If they are going to get training on how to handle drugs, I would be OK with it,” Arias said after the presentation of the State of the Nation report Thursday night.
Public Security Minister Fernando Berrocal recently visited the school, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in the U.S. state of Georgia, and says he plans to recommend to the President that some Costa Rican police officers train there for at least two years. They would take classes in leadership, citizen security and fighting drug trafficking.
Arias said in May after meeting with U.S. peace activists that he would not send any more officers to the school, which is a U.S. Defense Department institution that trains military and law enforcement officers from Latin America, Canada and the United States. Isabel MacDonald, who heads the Friends' Peace Center in downtown San José, was not pleased that Arias might change his mind.
“We're going to make a big fuss, of course,” said MacDonald, who was at the first meeting with Arias and is trying to arrange another one.
In its former incarnation as the School of the Americas, the institute graduated some of Latin America's worst human rights violators. In the 1980s, it used manuals that advocated torture to quell insurgencies in the region.
WHINSEC spokesman Lee Rials said the school has since changed; it now has a human rights curriculum and an independent board of visitors.
The School of the Americas Watch, which lobbies for the WHINSEC's closure, held its annual protest this weekend outside the grounds of Fort Benning, Georgia, where the school is located. |
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