QCOSTARICA — The former regional deputy director of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), James Kuykendall, a chief inspector of the Spanish anti-narcotics police and a senior representative of APM Terminals, the company that manages the port of Moín and has scanners installed to detect drugs, agree that the installation of these devices is an important measure to combat international drug trafficking, but they are not a definitive solution to the scourge of drugs that has flooded Costa Rica.
This was stated in interviews with crhoy.com days ago. This same criterion has been warned about since the beginning of the year by the Organismo de Investigacion Judicial (OIJ) and the Fiscalia (Attorney General’s Office)), entities that have pointed out that the scanners will not have a real effect on the homicide and violence figures that have plagued Costa Rica since mid-2022.
Kuykendall, a long-standing international security expert, advisor on port issues and senior DEA official in countries with high drug activity such as Colombia and Mexico, explained that the implementation of non-intrusive methods to inspect cargo is not infallible and therefore must be accompanied by other public policies.
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Visualize it this way: a toolbox is required: the scanner is a tool in your toolbox. It helps, but it is not a magic wand. You have to understand that a port is very vulnerable in many ways, criminal organizations depend on people inside the port to be able to get the drugs out.
It must be understood that good practices are required in a port, procedures, technology for perimeters and access control, to help detect bad employees and conspiracy, all internal risk.
The scanners are obviously there to try to see what is inside the cargo, but there are many images, it is not so easy to read the images, it requires expertise and knowledge to be able to read what one is seeing.
It is not like it highlights “there are drugs here, there are drugs here”, no. They camouflage the drugs very well and it is difficult, it requires a lot of expertise to understand what is happening inside a container.
In short, scanners are one of the many tools needed in a port.
According to the expert, Moín is the seventh port supplying cocaine to Europe and Costa Rica has become a transit country and logistics center for large organized crime groups. For that reason, decisions are urgently needed to confront criminal activity.
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First of all, we must face the fact that there is a problem, that the problem is serious, and not facing it is taking an enormous risk for society, because a country that allows itself to be flooded with drugs, in this case cocaine, is risking a lot because the influence of criminal organizations on society is real.
There is a lot of money involved, where there are drugs there is violence, homicides, fights for control by different criminal gangs.
A place that allows itself to be manipulated by organizations only invites more organizations: these international criminal gangs like the Mexican cartels, the different European organizations like the Albanian, the Dutch, the Serbian, are serious and are very involved in global trafficking.
Where they are, they bring violence, intimidation, fear and terrorism, like the use of grenades, bombs and murders to achieve what they want.
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Furthermore, allowing these organizations to take over a country or an area is allowing corruption to abound, because they seek to corrupt because they require information and cooperation from entities and authorities, and they do this with threats and money.
Spanish Police
Fernando Guerrero Sánchez is an inspector and head of the Greco Group, of the Central Narcotics Brigade of the Spanish Police. This is a specialized group in that European country, with powers to investigate and prosecute crimes related to illegal drug trafficking.
With extensive experience on Spanish soil investigating and detecting drug shipments, Guerrero also recognizes that scanners are not a measure that solves the circulation of the product that moves organized crime.
All measures are not sufficient by themselves, the scanner is one more. It is one more that is taken into account when a risk analysis or an investigation determines that a container may be contaminated.
But how many containers can be contaminated and how many can pass through the scanners? We are also talking about free trade.
We are talking in principle about an assumption that it may be contaminated, but you cannot be stopping all containers or looking at all containers with scanners.
It must be established with very clear criteria when inspections are carried out.
As I said before, the measure is not unique, it has to be accompanied by other intelligence work for the scanner to be effective.
APM Terminals
Another expert who shares a similar opinion is Victor Konen, the commercial director of APM Terminals, the company that manages the Limón Container Terminal (TCM), the only port in Costa Rica where anti-drug scanners have been installed.
The company has the experience of managing more than 60 terminals around the world, both in nations such as the Netherlands in Europe, which constantly receive containers with hidden drugs.
They also manage 14 important docks on the American continent, in territories such as Buenaventura, Colombia, one of the areas with the highest rate of export of illicit substances.
In an interview with crhoy.com, Konen stressed that the scanners are a complementary measure to combat international drug trafficking, but it is not a definitive solution.
It is more of a tool that is added to other tools (scanners): intelligence, profiling, a layer of intelligence on top of all this to analyze all the information that is generated, in addition to social problems such as job creation. It is complex, if the problem is complex, the solution is also complex.
The commercial director of APM Terminals also stressed that the problem of drug trafficking is structural and is not addressed solely by controls in ports, hence the importance of taking other public policies to stop the contamination of legal shipments.
All links are exposed, not only within the terminal: on the roads, on farms, in packaging plants, wherever.
Each of the actors in the link has to take actions to mitigate the risk and potential attacks on these links for contamination and of course, the terminal is no exception. We do things to mitigate and enhance security under our control.
The three experts spoke with crhoy.com on September 26, when they participated in a high-level international congress organized by the Costa Rican Chamber of Shipowners (NAVE), the National Chamber of Cargo Transporters (Canatrac) and the Costa Rican Association of Security and Related Businesses (ACES).
The VIII Congress on Merchandise Security in the Logistics Chain brought together the business sector, police and judicial authorities, as well as Costa Rican and international specialists to train them on container contamination and other related topics.
OIJ and the Attorney General’s Office
The implementation of scanners has been the flagship plan of the government of President Rodrigo Chaves Robles and his government, to try to combat drug trafficking and its repercussions, such as the unprecedented homicide crisis.
However, in the opinion of the judicial authorities in charge of investigating organized crime and murders derived from their businesses, they conclude that this alternative would not represent a real solution to the crisis that ended with 907 murders last year and that already totals 690 crimes so far in 2024.
The technology was implemented at the Moín Container Terminal, Limón since the middle of last year, and despite that, the province ended the year with 214 murders, being one of the most critical sites in the country.
Analyzing the current criminal phenomenon in Costa Rica, the Judicial Investigation Agency (OIJ) and the Public Prosecutor’s Office recognize that this strategy is important, but it will not have a real impact in the short term on homicides, since at the local level the aggravating factor is the dispute over local sales.
This was indicated last March by the director of the judicial police, Randall Zúñiga López.
The scanners are in Limón, the crime rate in central Limón and the canton is due to drug exports, the rest of the country does not have this problem, the problem is drug dealing, that is, local sales, these are groups that try to take over other places or territories and that is what they are looking for.
So the scanners may help in central Limón, but the number of deaths there are now in Limón tells us that the problem will continue; the scanners are not going to solve the problem now. What the OIJ did by going to Limón and setting up a concerted and sustained operation over time, that will solve the problem in the short term.
The police chief indicated that investing in these devices in the Pacific ports, as the government intends, may not be one of the most effective ways to attack the exit of drugs, since this is an unusual route, although it remains a possibility, it is not the most frequent.
“Puntarenas as an exit offer for drugs is not so strong, it could suddenly increase evidently, but the Pacific market where this drug can be sent is limited, it would be Acapulco with La Familia Michoacana, perhaps sending it to Los Angeles, it will be Alaska or the Pacific Guatemala so that it can then go to the Atlantic suddenly.
But the Pacific route is not as sought after, it does not generate as much as the Atlantic route, it is just another route, but the export capacities are not as many. The Atlantic is where the business is,” said the police chief.
For his part, Mauricio Boraschi, deputy prosecutor of the Republic, shared a similar criterion, since it motivates the police forces to work more on the control of entry by means of boats and other transports of different scale, a way that local drug traffickers use to import drugs, which ultimately produces the wave of crimes in the country’s slums.
Everything is related and believe me, for the Public Ministry the issue of scanners is also very important, but that it works and works well and that they are effective. But I insist, much of what the scanner scheme is oriented right now is for what leaves the country.
I am more concerned about the territorial control over our waters, territory and airspace than about the port of Moín. That worries me a lot because that is where drugs are entering the country and that is where there are a number of organizations and people providing services, collecting and moving drugs and all those activities that revolve around marijuana, cocaine or other drugs, even synthetic ones. What this generates are payments in kind with drugs, which in order to make a profit, criminal groups have to place them within the national market. Many of these groups do not have the capacity to traffic internationally, so they create a problem on the streets.
He insisted that special attention must be paid to drug dealing because in Limón, in broad terms, there are a lot of drugs entering and the drugs that are exported do not generate that internal war between local groups.
“It’s not that I don’t care, but I don’t lose sleep over everything that goes out, because we really have to be on top of it, all the exports and that have Costa Rican soil as their base, mainly cocaine to Europe, but I’m twice as worried about what’s coming in, to be able to do those operations. What do I gain by concentrating only on what goes out if in the end I have open borders?
“This logic is perverse, but drugs or services to transnational and national criminal organizations are not paid with money, everything is paid with drugs, money is what a criminal cares about the most, so they pay with kilos and that is what encourages and is the engine of the national market, it is from there that we generate an impressive problem of violence,” he said.
It should be noted that since Rodrigo Chaves assumed the presidency of Costa Rica, more than 2,060 murders have been recorded, the vast majority of which respond to territorial disputes or situations linked to drug trafficking.
When asked about this situation, Casa Presidencial avoided assuming responsibility and sent the following response:
The Government is aware of the great challenge that the fight against organized crime implies, precisely because of years of having permissive laws that do not allow for a stronger strategy against this scourge.
Criminal organizations have sought new strategies to try to achieve their goals, after being cornered by the intelligence and action work of the police forces of the Ministry of Public Security.
This is a job that must be articulated by the three Powers of the Republic, in light of this we present consensus law initiatives that will allow improving the range of action of the police and the Judicial Power. However, they are still awaiting processing in the Legislative Assembly, held back by those who prefer to give hugs to those who shoot the population.
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