Costa Rica News – Over this past week in Costa Rica a judge in the Limon province of Costa Rica was arrested as she is under suspicion for freeing those that are under prosecution for drug related crimes in exchange for bribes.
The judge with the last name Gamboa is potentially going to face charges of corruption and influence peddling. Her acts of crime and corruption are thought to go back to 2011.
An example of her questionable acts, she overturned a pre-trial detention of one of the largest known drug traffickers in the Limon province. That drug trafficker then fled and to this day still remains at large.
A second example of her corruption was ordering the release of a criminal under investigation whom was a brother of one of her friends.
In each of these cases it is thought that money exchanged hands.
The real question to ask is “How deep does this corruption really go?”
This is one example of one judge in Limon but accused drug traffickers are have been released with no pre-trial detention or not charged at all many times recently in Costa Rica. A 2,500 kg shipment of cocaine that was stashed in a pineapple shipment easily left harbor in Costa Rica only to be busted in Spain.
Costa Rica has transformed from being the bridge for drug traffickers between South and North America to becoming established as a storage location and trading hub for drug cartels. The authorities such as the OIJ in Costa Rica have confiscated over 90 tons of cocaine and over $17 million dollars just in the last 3½ years.
Colombians transport and leave the drugs in Costa Rica and then the Mexican Cartels come and pick them up. The drug traffickers use all different methods to transport the drugs as they have unlimited resources of time and money; Drugs have been transported in pineapples, surfboards, marble structures, and even sharks. The cartels use anything that looks legal for transport.
With the Costa Rican police and OIJ having limited resources and knowing that even the legal system has been corrupted with bribes and manipulation (such as the example of the judge above; can anything truly be done?
