Costa Rican Congress Rejects U.S.-Backed Police Academy

[arcos]

Legislative Assembly Rejects
U.S.-Backed Police Academy
By Steven J. Barry

An agreement with the United States to create in Costa Rica an International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) has been virtually nullified after U.S. negotiators refused to accept various interpretive clauses proposed by the Legislative Assembly, sources from the assembly told the press last week.

<snip>

Legislator Rolando Laclé, president of the Congress' Inter-nation Relations Committee, said the interpretive clauses "close any possibility whatsoever that there could be any aspect of military character in this project."

The project to create the academy, which would have trained officers to combat problems such as weapons and drug trafficking, generated controversy in Costa Rica after it was denounced as a military training center that would not be in keeping with the civil tradition here, AFP reported.

<snip>

In many countries, military personnel carry out duties normally reserved for civil police officers. It was the intention of the United States that the ILEA in Costa Rica would train such personnel, representatives of the U.S. Embassy told The Tico Times.

<snip>

http://www.ticotimes.net/daily.htm#story_two

[Florida_Geek]

1. Good for Costa Rico

they are happy not having a military.

[R Hickey]

2. They don't like military dictratorships in Costa Rica

They have a nice little democracy, and they don't need a "School of the Americas" to teach the use of thumb-screws and what-not.

[Florida_Geek]

3. But a "nice little democracy" is not safe in

Bush's World. :scared:

[MetaTrope]

4. Seems to be a lot of this going around

http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501031124-543844,00.html

By the end of the six-week course, the 24 students will have fired more than 30,000 bullets. Watching Captain Ardiansyah Daulay, a 28-year-old trainee who is pumping hundreds of practice rounds out of a shiny new 9-mm Glock, Jake Wohlman, the American regional-security officer overseeing the counterterrorism project, observes, "It's all about repetition. When they're finished, these guys will be the new élite."

That emerging élite is Task Force 88, an Indonesian crack police unit created by the U.S. State Department's Diplomatic Security Service as part of its program to develop local antiterrorism specialists in countries allied with Washington in the war on terror. More than $12 million has been spent by the U.S. to build a top-notch training school in Megamendung, some 50 kilometers south of Jakarta, where an academy belonging to the national police once stood. The four-hectare site features a "shoot house" for simulated hostage-taking situations, a breaching area to practice setting door charges, and a firing range. "We've never seen facilities like these," says Ardiansyah, who was recruited for Task Force 88 from the police Mobile Brigade, or Brimob as it's known in Indonesia. By the end of 2005, another $12 million will have gone toward forging a team of 400 Indonesian investigators, explosives experts and snipers, armed with high-end American weaponry, including assault vehicles, Colt M-4 assault rifles, Armalite AR-10 sniper rifles and Remington 870 shotguns. "They are training exactly as they would do in the U.S.," explains program manager Gary Laing, a West Point graduate who has served nine years in the U.S. military. "We teach them to save lives and use deadly force as a last resort."

Pretty handy for the State Department to have these guys around when they decide a new government is needed...