Mum's the word: Costa Rican Cruz Prado, right, confers with her lawyer Tuesday when questioned by an investigative commission about her alleged involvement with Colombian leftist guerrilla leaders.

Hannah Rexroth |Tico Times

Former labor leader Cruz Prado declined to testify Wednesday before a legislative committee investigating the presence in Costa Rica of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), citing possible legal proceedings against her in Colombia for keeping $480,000 of FARC money in a safe in her Heredia home.

Cruz told the panel that on advice of her lawyer she would not make statements or answer questions because she could face money-laundering charges in Colombia.

Authorities were led to the safe from information found on a computer belonging to FARC second in command, Raúl Reyes, killed March 1 in a cross-border Colombian military raid into Ecuador.

Cruz Prado and her husband, Francisco Gutiérrez, maintain they believed the safe contained documents.

The legislators lamented Prado's refusal to talk, saying the matter was one of national security.

“What this commission is trying to discover is extremely important for Costa Rica,” said National Liberation Party deputy Marvin Rojas.

Prado gave The Tico Times and the weekly magazine Seminario a document in which she reiterated that her house has always been open to thinkers, academics and even exiled political leaders – including the physicist Jorge Wagenberg, the scientist Brian O'Leary and the neural surgeon Julio Cesar Pagán, as well as the Guatemalan guerrilla leader Rodrigo Asturias. Her point is that it was not unusual that she and her husband would agree to host Colombian rebels who they said came to Costa Rica about a decade ago for talks with representatives of the U.S. State Department.

She made a list of questions of her own that she said should be answered to explain the reason for all the controversy over the safe. For example, she c ited U.S. Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice, who said Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, whose name appeared on Reyes' computer, would have a lot to answer for if the information on Reyes' computer was true. Prado asked if the raid on the Heredia home was an effort to provide proof that Reyes' computer contained reliable information.