Word: costa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...signs of tension appeared. Ricardo Arias Calderon, president of Panama's anti-Noriega Christian Democratic Party, was held for 45 minutes at the Panama City airport when he arrived from Miami after Delvalle's speech. Calderon and his wife were forced to reboard the plane and exiled to neighboring Costa Rica. "I refused to go," Calderon said, "and then they started shoving me and eventually had to carry me onto the plane." Three U.S. journalists were also returned to their plane and sent to Costa Rica. Panama's principal opposition newspaper, La Prensa, and a TV station owned...
Deep in the lush tropics near Quepos, a sleepy town on the Pacific side of Costa Rica, lies an airfield that services only small propeller-driven planes. Not long ago, Costa Rican security forces caught a band of smugglers on the runway as they unloaded 1,100 lbs. of cocaine. The cache, provided by Colombian drug lords, had been flown to Quepos aboard a Panamanian-registered Cessna piloted by a Colombian. A Costa Rican produce-export company served as the front. Had the operation run its course, the shipment would have continued on to Miami for sale...
...region's fragile governments. The tentacles of the narcotraficantes reach up to top officials and down to lowly policemen. With a wink and a nod from cooperative judges and prison officials, notorious narcotics peddlers have strolled out of jails in Colombia, Mexico and Bolivia. Customs and immigration officials in Costa Rica and the Bahamas look the other way as some of the hemisphere's most wanted men have walked from their private planes to waiting limousines. Police and military officials in Honduras and Panama have tipped off traffickers to impending raids. Efforts to slow the trade, from destroying coca crops...
...controls a tightly organized enterprise. Coca leaves are grown mostly in Peru and Bolivia, where they are turned into a thick paste. The paste is shipped to processing laboratories, most of them in Colombia, where it is converted into the powder that drug users, especially in the U.S., consume. Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama and the Bahamas are among the favored transshipment points. Profits are usually laundered in Panama and invested...
...doubtful whether, before Nicaragua is fully democratized and thus demilitarized, this is indeed the wish of Nicaragua's neighbors. But assume that it is. Assume further that proximity gives Central Americans greater moral cachet than North Americans to decide Nicaragua's future. What then gives a Costa Rican more moral authority to decide the fate of Nicaragua than 12,000 to 15,000 Nicaraguans fighting to liberate their own country and asking only for the materials with which...