When I first arrived in Manuel Antonio I stayed at the Espadilla hotel with the college students. After they left I moved into Villas El Parque condos. The very first day I stayed at the condo there was a big drug bust out in front of the condos. A ford ranger pickup truck was caught with 2752 pounds of cocaine and pot in the truck. Now remember the payload for a ranger is only about 500 pounds so this truck was so overloaded with weight that the springs must have been bent totally upside down and the bed must have been almost dragging on the ground. The strange thing is that the truck was driving in the direction of Quepos from Manuel Antonio and the road is a dead end at Manuel Antonio. So where did the drugs come from? They most likely arrived by boat at night. The drivers of the truck were two sixteen year old boys who claimed that they had just been hired that morning to drive the truck to someplace north of Quepos. The police let the kids go. All the police in Quepos and in Manuel Antonio had to come to the bust sight and get their pictures taken. The feds came in from San Jose to do the same. There must have been about a hundred cops there.
So what was the point of this truck? I think it was a diversion. There were probably three or four semi trailers full of drugs going by and they used this as a way to occupy all the police so they could get through unmolested and without having to pay bribes to get through. I was impressed watching them unload all the drugs. I sat at the Milagro Cafe and just watched for hours. I wonder how many of those bails went missing during the disposal of the evidence. They made a big deal of showing the drugs getting burned up on the news but they never actually showed the pile of drugs as they were lit. They just showed the burn pile where what was burning was obscured by the smoke and flames. It could have been just bales of hay.
There were a lot of other big busts. They found a submarine with three tons of cocaine in it one day. The submarine was made in Columbia out of two underground gas tanks welded together and a small diesel engine to power it. Technically it was a submersible not a submarine because it did not fully submerge. There were some abs pipes above the water for ventilation but otherwise it traveled just below the surface making it hard to see with radar or visually. Some fishermen saw it and reported it as a possible sunken boat so the Coast Guard checked it out and found the drugs. Three men were inside it. They were arrested and taken to jail. Three hours later they were mistakenly released from jail because of a paperwork mistake. Ya right. How much do you think they had to bribe the jailer to let them out? There are guesses of up to $25,000 but I bet it was more like $500 bucks to get out. Even the Costa Rican newspapers said that they must have bribed their way out of the jail. Nobody bought the paperwork error story. Three tons of coke is a lot of coke.
They also found boats with hundreds of pounds of coke fiberglassed into the hulls. That was fairly common. Usually the amounts were under a thousand pounds but that is still a lot. The perps always got out of jail and were never prosecuted. The Chinese have an agreement with Costa Rica to allow them to fish in Costa Rican waters without paying any taxes because they spent some money building a bridge in the country. Several of their large fishing boats have been discovered with large quantities of cocaine. We are talking more like ten tons with these large boats. Where all the confiscated drugs go I will never know but I bet that most of it continues on its way after the appropriate fees are paid to the local authorities.
Sometimes bales of drugs are found by fishermen floating around out in the ocean around Costa Rica. If you find one more than likely the Columbians that lost it will come knocking on your door. They are very good at finding their lost bales of drugs. They knock on your door and unlike in the movies they are very polite and just ask if you know anything about the missing drugs. If you tell them you have them and they can have them back there is no problem they just take the bale and go. If you lie to them and they find out they just come back and kill you. They will sacrifice a bale or two to kill anybody that lies to them. That intimidates people into always telling everything they know right away and thus helps the smugglers get almost all of their missing bales of drugs back quickly. The Columbians are ruthless about this and everybody knows it. Their reach goes very far and very deep. Basically they can do whatever they want to whoever they want without retribution to them. Their only worry is those pesky American Coast Guard guys.
Sometimes the small boats used for smuggling breakdown or run out of fuel or something. Boats treat smuggles the same as any other boat owner. When that happens the Columbians beach the boat and bury the drugs in the sand until they can get an alternative arrangement to get the drugs back on the road. Sixteen tons were found buried on the beach by the Costa Rican authorities one day. I heard lots of rumors or other buried treasures like this while I was in the country. An occasional semitrailer full of drugs would hit the front pages of the papers. Usually these big busts were timed around elections and the politicians would rail on about how they were going to put an end to this type of lawlessness in order to get elected. My guess is all the confiscated drugs continued on their way after the pictures were taken.
Some of the drugs went by small plane. The small planes would stop for fuel or if they had mechanical problems but usually they flew all the way to Cuernavaca Mexico and did not need to stop in Costa Rica. Several of them crashed and made the news though.
Most of these drugs passed right through Costa Rica. However there is cocaine readily available for local use all over Costa Rica. The quality is usually very good according to my friends that used it. In Quepos the taxi driver all sold it. There was a big drug bust just before an election and a little old lady was arrested for running the taxi cab drug business. Again my guess is that she failed to make a payment on time to the police. The personal use of drugs is not illegal in Costa Rica. The sale is illegal. People smoke pot in public there as long as there are no minors around. If there are minors around the police arrest you for contributing to the delinquency of a minor but not the drug possession. Drug addiction is not considered a crime in Costa Rica. It is considered a disease and it is treated as such. The local police make regular roundups of all the drug users and place them in mandatory rehab instead of in jail. The rest of the world could learn something from this attitude. Costa Rica and the rest of Central and South America have only really had a problem with crack cocaine and things since the 911 event in the U.S. The borders were sealed up tighter after the terrorist attacks and the drugs piled up in Mexico and Central America. The smugglers were forced to unload some locally and they have sold them locally ever since. It has become quite a large problem in some areas of Mexico and the other countries in Central America too.
Wiki has some interesting articles on this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco_submarine
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