Villalobos
Preventive Detention Extended
The much
awaited release of Osvaldo Villalobos didn't happen.
Saturday was the deadline preventive detention for the brother of Enrique
Villalobos, but the decision was not given to him
personally until Monday.
UCCR lawyer and possible presidential
candidate in 2004, José Miguel Villalobos,
(no relation), sent investors a press release late
yesterday afternoon indicating the judge's decision to extend Osvaldo's
detention.
"A few minutes ago, I have received the news that Osvaldo’s detention has been extended for an additional four months. This is unheard of. The decision was signed by Judge Sanchez’ substitute, Lic. Ricardo Valverde, and the reason why it was given to Osvaldo in a direct notification is yet unknown.
Frankly, this demands another line of attack on the part of Osvaldo’s lawyers, due to the fact that lacking any evidence whatsoever, this decision was worse than the previous one.
Osvaldo is calm. We await to learn the content of the decision in it’s official form prior to making further
commentaries", JMV
said via email .
Mother Planning a
School
The mother of a University of Kansas student killed in Costa Rica two years ago is working to open an English-language school in the city, where her daughter was fatally stabbed.
Jeanette Stauffer, of Topeka, flew to Costa Rica three weeks ago for a preliminary hearing against a woman and two men who are charged in Shannon Martin's death. And while she is there, Stauffer is organizing an English-language school to help residents of Golfito, Costa Rica, tap the tourism potential of their region, which lies between the Pacific Ocean and a rain forest.
It was partly the beautiful landscape that attracted Martin to the area to finish a research project she had started as a University of Kansas exchange student.
"I can't bring my daughter back, but I can do something she'd be proud of," Stauffer told The Kansas City Star this week in an interview from
Golfito.
A local teacher has signed onto the project, and the Costa Rican Coast Guard is donating a classroom with 10 computers. But the Shannon Lucile Martin English Center still needs $12,000 to buy language-instruction software, organizers said.
Stauffer has been soliciting donations from U.S. companies with operations in Costa Rica. In the United States, the Topeka Community Foundation has raised about $11,000 for the Shannon Lucile Martin foundation. That money is to be shared between the English center and scholarships for University of Kansas students majoring in biology and ecology.
Free-Trade Talks Set For Central America
Two weeks after the collapse of world trade talks in Mexico, U.S. Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick will head to Central America today to help wrap up a much smaller deal by the end of the year.
The pact with five Central American countries would be the United States' first regional free-trade deal since the North American Free Trade Agreement a decade ago.
Zoellick wants to finish negotiations with Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua by Dec. 31 so Congress can vote on the agreement early in 2004.
The four-day trip comes as the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs has intensified criticism of trade agreements among many of the 10 Democrats vying to represent their party in next year's presidential election against President Bush.
Florida Agency
Investigated in Costa Rican Bust
When police raided a two-story home here this week, they stumbled on a bundle of surprises: nine Guatemalan babies, the youngest 2 months old, allegedly brought to Costa Rica by a child-trafficking ring to offer them up for adoption by foreigners.
Illegal international adoptions are common in Guatemala, where babies are "bought" from poor single mothers or even stolen from hospitals. The government there reports some 3,000 suspect adoptions a year.
But such incidents are not common in Costa Rica, a more developed nation with a large middle class where officials now fear that a recent crackdown on Guatemala's adoption mills has led smugglers into its borders.
"We won't let Costa Rica become a transit point. We won't tolerate it," Children's Affairs Minister Rosalia Gil said in an interview.
Officials investigating the case of the nine babies say they now have their eyes on a Coral Springs, Fla., adoption agency, International Adoption Resources (IAR), which registered with the state of Florida three years ago and advertises that it helps couples find children in seven foreign countries, including Costa Rica. Costa Rican officials say IAR doesn't have permission to operate here.
IAR apparently hired a local lawyer, Carlos Hernan Robles, some months ago to help it get authorization to do adoptions in Costa Rica. A former bank executive, Robles was convicted in 2001 of embezzlement after Banco Anglo Costarricense lost millions from purchasing questionable bonds, a highly publicized scandal in this country. Robles was out of jail, awaiting an appeal, until Monday, when a higher court upheld his conviction.
IAR director Rebecca Thurmond, 47, of Coral Springs, didn't return several calls left at her home and office. But a man identifying himself as IAR's international coordinator returned a call and spoke briefly before abruptly ending the interview.
Raffael Leyba, 55, said IAR had no involvement with the Guatemalan babies but acknowledged that he didn't do his homework before hiring Robles this summer to facilitate the paperwork here. Although IAR has a policy of checking the backgrounds of everyone it works with to arrange adoptions in seven countries, Leyba said, he made an exception for Robles.
"In this case, it is completely my fault … I assumed that there was nothing wrong," he said. "This is the first time we'd ever worked with him, yes, but he was taking me to all these high government people. He had a nice office with lots of other attorneys. … This is a very traumatic thing to find out about Robles' past."
The adoption agency is in good standing with the state of Florida, according to officials of the Department of Children and Families. The department wouldn't comment or provide information about any complaints against IAR.
Robles' contact information was found in the makeshift nursery during the raid this week. He is under arrest, along with four women - three Guatemalans and one Honduran - who were caring for the nine babies.
All the babies, now being cared for at government shelter, had Guatemalan passports or other documents, but Cost Rican authorities are investigating whether the documents are real. The babies had been sleeping in cribs and on floor mattresses, but they didn't show any signs of abuse, said Gil, the children's minister. Their nursery was in a purple-trimmed, four-bedroom house in a middle-class neighborhood of San Jose.
Two neighbors said the babies had been in the house for weeks, brought in at night in pairs and wrapped in sheets to hide their faces. Their cries, heard in the street, were incessant and the caretakers never took them outside.
The caretakers kept to themselves and only opened the door a crack to receive deliveries of diapers and milk, the neighbors said.
"They looked scared," said a neighbor whose complaint to Costa Rica's child protection unit apparently triggered the police raid.
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