GUNS IN COSTA RICA

In the 1980s, El Salvador was awash in massacres of rural villagers by the US-supported army. Anyone even suspected of helping the guerrillas was labeled “subversivo.” Many were killed. Ditto in Guatemala. Honduras was “an aircraft carrier” – a platform for launching anti-leftist military operations in the area, especially against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.

     Honduras is just north of Nicaragua, so perfectly handy for cross-border operations there. But Costa Rica, proud of its tradition of anti-militarism and strict political neutrality since the 1948 takeover by the tiny anti-corruption army led by José (Don Pepe) Figueres, was still struggling to stay out of the cold war episode that was knocking at its door, shared its northern border with southern Nicaragua. Reagan’s CIA, and his National Security Council honchoed by USMC LtCol Oliver North and others, wanted a “contra” front attacking Nicaragua from the south, to catch the Sandinista army in a hammer-and-anvil operation from both directions. Nicaragua’s east and west, of course, were bounded by oceans.

     Tiny Costa Rica was caught in the middle…                  

                                    Guns in Costa Rica

     In Costa Rica, I started with a map, with the bits of information I'd picked up reading and listening, and with my own hunches about how military operations, and secret ones in particular, work. First, the border-jumpers would need roads. And, because they were working with Americans, they'd need airstrips, preferably close to roads which were passable in all seasons yet not too heavily traveled.

     And, since the real energy behind the push against Nicaragua came from Americans rather than Hondurans or Costa Ricans, there would have to be places for the secret-war types to hang out, get drunk, get laid, and otherwise indulge themselves in the neo-colonial niceties that were part of the reason they lived the lives they lived. (Some of us began referring to people from the United States as "North Americans," feeling that people from Central and South America were as much "Americans" as we were.) The usage never seemed to take hold in the U.S., but it is common in South America, where many (not all) people see North Americans’ habit of seeing themselves as the only “Americans” as just another example of our national arrogance.

     I went to the office of the Tico Times, Costa Rica’s respected English-language newspaper. People there, including the proprietor, were helpful. But when I asked a reporter who had written about the Nicaragua situation if he cared to accompany me to the border area, I got an emphatic "no." He went further, saying that he very much doubted that I would find a journalist in Costa Rica who would be willing to go there, not now. It was because of La Penca.

     In May of 1984, the contra leader Edén Pastora, who was leading a group of contras raiding across the border, had held a press conference just inside Nicaragua at La Penca. Someone disguised as a journalist had set off a bomb, gravely wounding Pastora and killing three of the journalists present and wounding over a dozen. A reporter from the Tico Times was one of those killed.

     During the three or four days I hung around San Jose trying to get my bearings and to get the lay of the land from journalists working in the country, I prowled the streets of the capital at night, sniffing for the spoor of the covert-operations types I knew must be flocking to the tiny, neutral, anti-military country Mickey had told me was becoming a fogón of military activity.

     One of the first watering holes I wandered into was Nashville South, a hole-in-the-wall country and western bar that was a habitual stop for all manner of U.S. expatriots, including being something of an "in" place for the more adventurous among the American Embassy crowd. The place was lined with barn wood and wooden shingles, had a lot of Jimmy Buffet and Willie Nelson on the jukebox, and a green and white flag with the words CALIFORNIA REPUPLIC in bold letters, a dead replica of the original Bear Republic flag, except that it had two bears instead of one, and they were fucking.

     Good a place as any to start, I thought.

     The covert war was definitely present in Nashville South, but I didn't get very far in penetrating it. Military people wear civilian clothes in a way that lets you know it's a change from how they normally are, even when they're trying not to. When such types would be cloistered at the bar in what appeared to be a particularly focused conversation, they always quieted when I sauntered by. I guess I was as obvious to them as they were to me. I did see a couple of different Latinos, obviously just in from the boonies, hurriedly stash military rucksacks in the back. The closest I came there to getting useful information was several conversations with a young German woman who worked for a U.S. agency that administered aid to people in outlying towns. She said that her boyfriend, a Texan, was working on a massive construction project, a wide road with over-strength bridges up near the border that she was sure had something to do with planned operations against Nicaragua. She herself was adamantly against the contra effort, as much for its attempt to militarize Costa Rica as for its targeting of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

     I asked for her help. Could she talk to her boyfriend? Get me facts, numbers, names of contracting companies, documents? She thought it over, agreeing that a military move by the U.S. against southern Nicaragua could trash the fragile Costa Rican democracy. But finally she said helping me would jeopardize her job. She backed off.

     Another place I went to a few times was Key Largo, decorated with posters of Bogart and Bacall from the movie of the same name. It was known as a pick-up joint, and openly worked by prostitutes. Still, with its dark hardwood bar and old palms growing just outside the windows, it had a certain sleazy class about it. I got in a couple of long conversations with a young Costa Rican who was a member of a folk-dancing troupe. He deplored the U.S. attempt to militarize Costa Rica. He said that he didn't have direct personal knowledge of what was going on in the border areas, but could probably find out, as it was common knowledge among "Ticos," or Costa Ricans. But it turned out that the main reason he talked to me was that he wanted to go to bed with me, and when that failed, so did his willingness to help. He'd get in trouble, he said.

     There was a restaurant called the Varadero, or Traveler, (also the name of a well-known beach in Cuba) where people weren't so timid. It was run by Cuban exiles. The food was good, and cheap. A glance at the menu told you where these people were coming from: a featured item was pollo a lo Reagan.

     I'd already noticed people in civilian clothes carrying concealed pistols. I seemed to have a knack for that since the time in Colorado Springs when I'd yelled out in the restaurant, "Hey Dave, look! Those guys are all packin' guns!" and the three feds, or whoever they were, had melted away. Once when I was eating dinner in the Varadero I looked up to see a muscular forty-ish Cuban man emerge from a back room, talking in a loud voice to someone over his shoulder. He was carrying a pozo like Shooter and Flaco had carried in Tegucigalpa, and my eyes were immediately drawn to the pendulousness with which it hung from his hand.

     As quickly as I noticed that, he noticed that I'd noticed. He stopped next to my table on his way to the door and stared down at me and gave me a hard smile - one that reminded me of Perico's smile at me when he'd showed us the garrote in the contra camp in southern Honduras - and raised his eyebrows as if to say, "Well?" I nodded, gave what must have been a sickly grin, and turned back down to my food. He walked on out the door, leaving me thinking that the difference in pure balls between these guys and the gentle, conscionable people like the young German woman and the young Tico who so opposed what guys like this were doing but would take no risks to oppose them, said a lot about why the militarists were succeeding. I hoped that his arrogance also said that he and his kind must ultimately fail, but just now that hope seemed thin.

     I began to spot them on the streets of San José. I remember one particular night when I was just hanging out, people-watching, on a well-lit, crowded square. A man in his late twenties or early thirties, dressed in a tropical suit, looking quite like a gringo of the U.S. type by his skin color, haircut, and manner, walked by a few yards from me. My attention immediately homed in on him, but the weapon wasn't the first thing I saw. It was the excitement visible in his step, in the jerky movements of his head as he looked around him, trying for all the world to pass himself off as just another person walking through a crowd, yet with the deeper longing even more visible, at least to me: the need to be someone who lived a life that required, or allowed, him to carry a gun; to be someone apart, "special;" to know that he, alone in the crowd, carried such power with him.

     Then I looked at his waist, saw the bulge. His head, jerking about like a radar antenna gone amok, found me looking at him. His hand involuntarily clutched at his coattail and pulled it around front, as if he'd been caught with his fly open.

     A news report had mentioned the town of Los Chiles. I found it on the map. It was at the end of the highway north out of San José, Costa Rica's capital. There was an airstrip nearby. And Los Chiles was one kilometer - just over half a mile - from the Nicaraguan border.

     I hired a taxi driver to take me to Los Chiles. After a drive of several hours, he dropped me at the town square and headed back to San José. I stayed in the tiny town the better part of a week. It was a zillion miles from anywhere, with the exception of its being a short walk from the border. It was also near, or even adjacent to, land owned  and/or managed by John Hull, the expatriot rancher from Indiana who critics of Reagan Administration policies in Central America had charged was aiding the contras by allowing his land and airstrips to be used as staging areas for cross‑border raids against the Sandinistas, and for resupply flights to contras inside Nicaragua. It was also charged that aircraft carrying drug shipments to help finance the contras were using the area.

     Knowing by the look of the tiny town that any accommodations would be primitive, I asked for the "best hotel in town." I was directed to the Hotel Río Frío, a little ways downstream from the town's boat landing. My "room" at the hotel consisted of three thatched panels which formed a small rectangle against the outer wall of the single‑story building. The walls went only up to about head height, to allow ventilation to pass between them and the roof. I had a narrow bed, and the lady of the house furnished me a mosquito net to drape over it.

     One evening, I got to drinking beer in a cantina with a young man named Enrique Millón. He was a member of the Guardia Civil, a lightly armed part-time police force, and quite proud of it. After we'd gotten acquainted a little, he said he wanted me to hear a certain song. He stepped to the beat-up jukebox and punched "C7", and the scratchy record began with a military fanfare and a dramatically spoken introduction: "NIcaRAgua! 1978!" The song was “Comandante Zero”, and recounted the exploits of Edén Pastora, Sandinista revolutionary hero turned contra leader, as he directed the taking of Nicaragua's National Palace by Sandinista insurgents in 1978, the year before Somoza was finally defeated. Millón said "Comandante Cero" was his favorite song ‑ both because of Pastora's former Sandinista identity and his current contra status.

     Enrique was a recent graduate of the US Special Forces infantry training course at Murciélago, in northwestern Costa Rica. With his rounded, boyish face and decidedly unathletic physique, he bore a striking resemblance to Liberace. But he was clear about why he volunteered for the US training: "I like the military," he said, making a chubby fist. "Soy hombrón: I'm a real man." Millon's outfit was a company of the Guardia's Batallón Relámpago, or Lightning Battalion. The battalion's shoulder patch consisted of M16 rifles crossed over a lightning bolt, a near replica of the US Special Forces (Green Beret) patch.

     The unit was responsible for maintaining the integrity of Costa Rica's northern border with Nicaragua. That responsibility included enforcing Costa Rica's official policy of neutrality towards all Central American armed conflicts.

     Los Chiles, a half hour's walk from the Nicaraguan border, was in an area where the presence of contra camps was such an open secret that no one even pretended it was a secret. Yet members of Millón's company told me that they were on guard "to keep the piricuacos from coming up the river (the Río Frío, which flows past Los Chiles into Nicaragua)." Piricuacos was the derogatory term for Sandinistas used by the US military and contra groups; it meant something like "yapping dogs," which I always took for a reference to the Sandinistas' penchant for shouting slogans.

     Two young men from the company, Victor Ávila and José Manuel Esquivel, talked as they lounged on duty overlooking the Río Frío. It was one of them who had made the comment about piricuacos. They wore new US‑supplied fatigues and combat boots, and communicated with a US field radio. They were armed with three US automatic weapons between the two of them: an M60 machine gun, an M16 rifle, and the deadly M203, which consists of an M16 automatic rifle with a 40mm grenade launcher mounted under its barrel. The weapons were laid across a parapet of new olive drab nylon sandbags.

     Members of the Guardia company at Los Chiles were openly pro‑US and anti‑sandinista. This gave me the idea that their training by U.S. Special Forces troopers didn't stop at weapons and tactics.

     One night when I was asleep in my cubicle in the hotel, I was awakened at 1:20 in the morning by the sound of a multi‑engine aircraft circling low overhead. It landed at the strip near town. A half hour after the sound stopped, the front door of the hotel opened and several young men, talking in loud voices in Spanish, came in and went to bed in "rooms" a few feet down the hall from mine. One of them took the room next to mine, with nothing but a thin thatched partition between us.

     There was an airstrip shown on the map at Los Chiles. It may or may not have been owned or used by John Hull. But it was just an airstrip, with no facilities that could be said to constitute a passenger, or even a freight, terminal. Certainly there were no landing lights, no tower. There was no passenger service to Los Chiles; I had checked to see if I could come that way. No charter flight would have arranged to drop in there in the middle of the night.

     Yes, I was scared. To begin with, I was alone. As the young men bounced noisily around the hotel - including past the thin front wall of my cubicle - in the manner of men who have no reason to be respectful, let alone afraid, of anyone nearby, I feigned sleep and wondered if the journalists back in San Jose I'd dismissed as timid knew something I didn't. 

     The next day, Enrique Millón, the guardsman who lived in Los Chiles, invited me home to meet his wife and mother‑in‑law. It was a tiny one‑room place on the edge of town. While we were talking I asked Millón about the airplane noise the night before. He said he hadn't heard it. The two women looked at him in disbelief, then at one another. They'd certainly heard it, they said. I asked all three what they thought a large airplane was doing landing at Los Chiles in the middle of the night. Enrique shrugged, said he didn't know. The two women looked at each other again, saying with their eyes, it seemed to me, that they didn't believe their husband/son. Their manner also suggested to me that they didn't approve of his military adventures, that he was involved in them more because of some personal need to prove himself than because of any national exigency, and that there was little they could do or even say about it because they were women and he was the man of the house.

     Then I said that I thought that the flight must have had something to do with the contras, and the two women nodded in agreement. I think they felt they could publicly agree with me because, after all, I was a man too. They seemed to hope that I might have some influence on Enrique. I didn't, both because I was there as a reporter rather than a protagonist, and because he wouldn't have listened anyway: "Me gusta lo militar; soy hombrón," as he had put it earlier.

     Back in San Jose a few days later, I went again to the Tico Times office. I spoke to the same reporter who had told me I wouldn't find anyone to go to the border with me. I asked him what possible explanations there might be for a multi‑engine aircraft landing at Los Chiles at 1:20 am. It had to be guns or drugs, he said. Or both.

     A few days later, I drove in a rented four-wheel drive Suzuki to Upala, another small Costa Rican town near the Nicaraguan border, but farther west. I pulled up in front of the Buena Vista Bar and Restaurant. It seemed to be the only one in town, and I was hungry. It was an inviting place with a thatched-roof veranda overhanging the Río Zapote. I walked in, sat down, ordered a beer, and began reading the menu.

     A stocky young Latino in his early thirties walked directly up to my table. I had literally not been in town five minutes. "I am Comandante Charro," said my uninvited guest, then continued: "I am the leader of a column of combatants from the anti‑Sandinista group UNO‑FARN, led by Comandante Negro Chamorro. I formerly fought with Comandante Edén Pastora, but now I am with UNO‑FARN. I like Americans very much. I work with la Cía. My advisor is known as 'Mister Jones.' You look a lot like him. Are you with la Cía?"

     So another of my hunches had turned out to be accurate; my first minutes in Upala already had me hoping that I hadn’t landed in a situation I wasn’t equipped to handle, a situation that justified the Costa Rican journalists’ refusal to even go near the border area.

     UNO was the Spanish acronym for Unity of Nicaraguan Opposition, the umbrella organization that had recently been created to unite the groups attempting to overthrow the Sandinista‑controlled government of Nicaragua. FARN was the  Nicaraguan Revolutionary Armed Forces, a group of perhaps two hundred contras led by Fernando "El Negro" Chamorro. La Cía was, and is, the common Latin American term for the US Central Intelligence Agency.

     The young contra, without waiting for an answer, continued to talk about himself, launching into an account of his participation in the 1983 attack on the southern Nicaraguan border station at Penas Blancas. Having just driven five hours to Upala from San José and not knowing a soul in the little border town, I had to interrupt.

     "No. I'm not with the la Cía. I'm a reporter."

     "Oh," the young man replied, still smiling. "In that case, would you like an interview?"     

     Charro unhesitatingly showed his cédula, or Costa Rican national identity card, listing his real name as Gerardo Acuña Gonzalez (he said he was also known as Gerardo Noguera Acuña). He sat down at my table and exhibited recognizable scars from bullet wounds on both lower legs, describing in detail which bones had been fractured. He also spoke knowledgeably about weapons and tactics.

     The next day, Arturo Ruíz, one of the proprietors of the Buena Vista, came and sat down at my table. I asked him if there were any contras around, and if so, how he and other people in the town felt about them. "I help them (the contras) often," he said. "They come in here, and if they don't have any money, I give them free meals, transportation...." Ruíz also operated what appeared to be Upala's only taxi, a red Toyota jeep. He seemed, as did other Upala residents, totally unworried about disclosing information about contra activities in "neutral" Costa Rica to a reporter from the US. Most of the people there seemed to assume that anyone from the US was in favor of Reagan policies. He did, however, insist that nothing he said about helping the contras, or about their activities, be published in Costa Rica. Other sources in Upala spoke freely, but tried to impose the same conditions.

     Several times during one conversation, Ruíz would indicate a young man who had just entered the restaurant ‑ usually dressed in jeans, US‑made combat boots, and a civilian shirt ‑ and say, "He's a combatiente," meaning a contra fighter. And at another point, he said that four jeeps which had just passed the restaurant were contra vehicles. The restaurant owner said that there was a contra camp near the village of San Antonio, about four miles north of Upala near the Nicaraguan border.

     The tall, rather chubby Ruíz also smilingly pointed out the house of "Tamuga," the local UNO‑FARN representative, which was across the street from Ruiz' restaurant and about three doors north, next to Upala Sport, a sporting goods store. Tamuga's house, obviously known to everyone in town as a contra meeting place, was also just a few doors south of a post of the Guardia Rural, a more countrified version of the Guardia Civil. Both guardia groups were supposed to be enforcing Costa Rica's neutrality. But I saw uniformed guardia personnel standing and talking in the street a few feet from where members of the contra group UNO‑FARN were lounging on Tamuga's porch.

     "Lots of people around here support them (the contras)," Ruiz continued. "Half of the people around here are Ticos [Costa Ricans], half are Nicas [Nicaraguans], and the other half are half‑and‑half," he joked. "But most of us are anti‑Sandinista."        "Comandante Charro" was one who said he was half Costa Rican and half Nicaraguan.

     There seemed to be a feud between Tamuga and Charro. Tamuga said that Charro was a "former combatant," but was no longer with UNO‑FARN; Charro said that the two hated each other "to the death," and that Tamuga was a non‑combatant and "a thief who joined only to steal money." Charro's story was supported by restaurant owner Ruiz and other people in Upala, but Tamuga's status with FARN was confirmed by reliable sources in San Jose.

     "Charro" was not the only person in the Upala area to mistake me for a CIA operative. After offering rides to a young man and, a little later, to a campesino family north of Upala nearer the Nicaraguan border, the woman in back asked the young man in the front passenger seat, who was dressed in combat boots, jeans, and a civilian shirt, if I was "in charge of the fighting." The young man's answer was a curt "No!"

     Another day, Charro led the way down one of Upala's few dirt streets to the house of his friend, a high‑school teacher named Figueroa. Charro had stayed with Señor Figueroa's family while he was in Upala being treated at the local Social Security hospital for a wound in his back caused, he said, by firing a 60mm mortar over his shoulder. Inside the small, low‑ceilinged house where a space had been partitioned off for Charro, the two men pulled camouflage fatigues out of a hiding place, and Charro put them on and led the way out back to a grove of cacao trees where I photographed and interviewed him.

     He began the taped interview by saying that we were "somewhere in Nicaragua," which is typical of contras in both southern Honduras and northern Costa Rica, where both countries officially deny allowing contra groups to use their territory. Reporters sometimes play the game to get the interviews they need. Charro posed for photographs in his camouflage fatigues with a US flag proudly displayed on his left shoulder.

    Sr. Figueroa also introduced me to Upala's alcalde ‑ a politically appointed combination mayor and circuit court judge ‑ who was a slim, dark‑haired young lawyer named Rafael Calderón. Rafael Calderón was also the name of the Social Christian Party's candidate for President in Costa Rica's coming elections, but Upala's mayor of six months said he wasn't related to the presidential candidate.

     Asked for his assessment of the politico‑military situation in and around his jurisdiction, Calderón gave the impression that it was his job to know nothing. "The problem," he said, "is that the [Costa Rica‑Nicaraguan] border is ill‑defined near here. There is no clear marker. And the Government of Costa Rica allows no private land use within two kilometers of the border, so we have no way of knowing if there are armed groups operating within those two kilometers of Costa Rican territory." This seemed a strange statement coming from the mayor of a tiny town, especially at a moment when several young men who had just been identified as contra combatientes, posted at tables around the thatch‑roofed veranda like Apache sentries in an old Western movie, were listening intently to the conversation.

     He continued with a shrug, "The people around here may know more than I do. But I'm just the mayor. Who's going to tell the mayor anything?"

     As the conversation drew to a close, a fierce‑looking young man at the next table dressed in jeans, combat boots, and a civilian shirt made a stern finger‑to‑the‑lips gesture to me.

     As the group got up to leave, Figueroa tugged on my right arm and tried to say, in poor English, "Don't tell him [the mayor] about the comandante."

     Another member of the group, a local photo shop proprietor named Señor Marín, pulled on my left arm and shouted (he was a little drunk): "Aguas que no has de beber, déjalas correr." Or: "Any water which you don't need to drink, better let it run." In Spanish, it's a pungent, rhyming piece of folk wisdom about staying clear of forces that are bigger than you are.