By Wendy Anders A 55-year-old Costa Rican man was described by local media as being in “stable condition” after being bitten by a crocodile several times in his left leg yesterday evening at Herradura beach near Jacó along Costa Rica’s Central Pacific coast. Firefighter rescuers were called from the local Garabito station to aid just before 6:00 p.m., said Costa Rica’s Channel 7 Teletica new...

U.S. police have arrested at least 750 people in sex-trafficking sting operations timed to coincide with the Super Bowl, saying the top sporting event is a magnet for illicit sex. More than 100 arrests were made in Houston, Texas where the National Football League championship game took place on Sunday as sports fans flocked to the city for parties and entertainment in the run-up to the event, ...

Sydney, Australia, Feb. 6 — Over 4,400 people reported cases of child sexual abuse perpetrated by members of the Catholic Church in Australia between 1980 and 2015, according to a report released on Monday at the beginning of a new round of hearings by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The Royal Commission, which is responsible for investigating the extent...

By Wendy Anders Costa Rica’s northern border region with Nicaragua just got a little harder for human traffickers, and a little safer for its potential and current victims. The Rahab Foundation, a Costa Rica non-profit founded in 1997 and dedicated to stopping human trafficking and the human sex trade, set up shop last week in the border town of La Cruz, Guanacaste in northwestern Costa Rica...

By Wendy Anders Did you know that at least 28 percent of human trafficking involves children? And the U.S. Department of State estimates that more than a million children are exploited each year in the global commercial sex trade. An update on an international effort in Costa Rica to diminish this tragic form of modern slavery was recently provided by the Quebec-based International Bureau...

Hardly a day passes in Costa Rica without a road fatality. Bicyclists are taking up the banner for road safety in the wake of recent tragic accidents. Yesterday, downtown San José’s streets were flooded with helmeted cyclists who pedaled from La Sabana Park to Curridabat via downtown to demand respect for their safety on the country’s streets. The turnout almost doubled the organizers’ expec...

Scam group charges up to $5,000 to Costa Ricans not to divulge sexual videos on Facebook. How it works: A network that is operating from the Ivory Coast sends a friend request to a male from a very attractive female with a fake profile. The “Tico” receiving the friend request thinks he is the luckiest man on earth since a sexy women wants to be his “friend” and accepts the request, giving acce...

By Wendy Anders Police found enough clues to arrest a man suspected of stabbing five students to death in mid-January in their apartment on a quiet residential street in Liberia, capital of Costa Rica’s northern Guanacaste province, said Wálter Espinoza, director of the judicial investigative police agency (OIJ). A careful review of evidence in and around the crime scene led police to invest...

By Wendy Anders Even in a crowded San José, Costa Rica shanty, a police patrol can become an unexpected wildlife adventure. Yesterday afternoon, public safety officials found themselves rescuing a colorful keel-billed toucan from the southern Costa Rican district of Alajuelita, reported police, who said the event is the result of a bolstered wildlife protection initiative by police. Last ...

Specially trained dolphins and a marine sanctuary are to be used in a bid to save the critically endangered vaquita, a rare porpoise endemic to Mexican waters whose numbers are believed to have fallen to less than three dozen. The goal is to capture some vaquitas and place them in a temporary sanctuary until it is safe for them to return to the northern part of the Gulf of California, said Lore...

More than 400 people were arrested in a three-day statewide sweep aimed at stopping the sexual exploitation of young women and girls, law enforcement authorities in San Diego and other jurisdictions announced Tuesday. “Operation Reclaim and Rebuild” also resulted in the recovery of 28 sexually exploited children and 27 women, according to the San Diego Human Trafficking Task Force. According...

By Wendy Anders In an interview on January 16 by Costa Rica’s Spanish daily Diario Extra, Martin Arias Araya, director of the Costa Rican Coast Guard Service, expressed concern over a lack of water navigation laws in the country that he said makes Costa Rica the only country in the Americas to lack such regulations. Arias Araya has led the Coast Guard since 2007, and has a total of 33 years ...

Toronto, Jan. 30 — Canadian police on Monday charged a 27-year-old Canadian student, Alexandre Bissonnette, with six counts of first degree murder and five counts of attempted murder for the shooting attack on the weekend at a mosque in Quebec City. Police believe Bissonnette, who was arrested a few hours after the attack on the Islamic Cultural Center of Quebec, is the only suspect in the case. ...

At least four people have been killed, and several injured, in an attack on the Quebec City Islamic Cultural Center in the eastern Canadian city of Quebec, local media reported. La Presse newspaper said in its digital edition that at around 9:15 p.m. Sunday local time, a suspect was located by police on one of the city's bridges. Quebec police confirmed to the media that several people have be...

By Wendy Anders In the wake of the murder of five youth in Liberia, capital of Costa Rica’s northern Guanacaste province, early last Thursday morning, police have developed a sketch of the man they believe to be the suspected killer. Police received helpful information from an informal taxi driver who transported a man Thursday morning who he described as, “very nervous and appeared to be fl...

Reputed drug lord Joaquin "el Chapo" Guzman pleaded not guilty in federal court here Friday to charges of running the powerful Mexico-based Sinaloa cartel. "El Chapo" (Shorty) Guzman, who was assisted by an interpreter during the arraignment and is being held without bail at a jail in New York after being extradited to the United States from Mexico on Thursday, listened as the 17-count indictme...

By Wendy Anders Five university students were found stabbed to death this morning, and another was still alive but with deep wounds in her neck, in the middle class neighborhood of La Victoria, Liberia in the northern Costa Rican province of Guanacaste. The students apparently were renting a 3-bedroom apartment located behind a house on the densely populated street, according to police. Howe...

Mexico City, Jan 18 (EFE).- A Mexican activist honored in 2005 with the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for his work in the northern state of Chihuahua was murdered last weekend, a source in the state Attorney General's Office told EFE Wednesday. Isidro Baldenegro was fatally shot around 4:00 p.m. Sunday, but it took authorities several days to reach the crime scene in the remote indige...

Madrid, Jan. 16 — Rolls-Royce Holdings PLC said Monday it will pay a total of around 671 million pounds sterling ($810 million) to law enforcement authorities in the United States, United Kingdom and Brazil to settle bribery and corruption charges, according to a report from Dow Jones Newswires. The company, which manufactures jet engines and marine diesel engines, said it had reached deferred ...

By Wendy Anders Amid the lush forests and remote beaches of Corcovado National Park, southern Costa Rica’s biodiversity hotspot, Costa Rican police often find themselves on the front line of the illicit drug trade between South and North America. Early yesterday morning, Costa Rican police patrolling the stunning southern Pacific coast located eleven rectangular packages wrapped in a sack-li...

By Wendy Anders At dawn on Saturday, judicial investigative police (OIJ) from Aguirre and Parrita in Puntarenas province began investigations into the death of a Panamanian man shot dead near entrance to Portalón, Quepos in Costa Rica’s Central Pacific region. The 37-year old Bartley received several gunshot injuries in different parts of his body while driving around 1:00 a.m. from Quepos, ...

Chicago, IL, Jan. 13 — An investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice has determined that the Chicago Police Department often uses deadly force in ways that violate the country's Constitution, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said here Friday. The DoJ probe was launched after a white CPD officer was indicted for murder in the shooting death of African American teenager Laquan McDonald. The d...

Montevideo, Jan. 11 — A municipal program in the Uruguayan capital is inviting non-governmental organizations to join a project to help men who have abused their partners to change their behavior, Gender Equality Office director Patricia Gonzalez told EFE. "There's a lot of work done with women on how to end an abusive relationship and how to get out of the situation. But men are just punished an...

By Wendy Anders Costa Rican police made their second discovery this week of undocumented Cuban migrants in the country, this time in a boat in the southern Costa Rican border region. The Costa Rican border police intercepted a motor boat and detained the boat’s captain, a 53-year-old Costa Rican man from Puntarenas province named López, after discovering five Cubans aboard without entry stam...

Mexico City, Jan. 10 — Investigators have not determined why a U.S. citizen, who was arrested and later deported, shot the U.S. vice consul in Guadalajara, the capital of the western Mexican state of Jalisco, last week, Mexico's Foreign Relations Secretary Luis Videgaray said Tuesday. "I have no information that allows me to speculate on the motive for this person's actions," Videgaray said in an...

HYATTSVILLE, Md., Jan. 6, 2017 – A former member of the Guatemalan army, whom witnesses say participated in a massacre there more than three decades ago that claimed over 200 lives, was arrested today by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and charged in immigration court with having assisted or otherwise participated in extrajudicial killings du...

By Wendy Anders A Danish citizen was arrested in Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica last week on suspicion of committing massive fraud in the country, said police in a press statement. The Lebanese-born Dane, who goes by the name of YK (last name of Khater) is suspected of conning a woman in Quepos, Puntarenas in Costa Rica's Central Pacific region out of 10 million colones (over US$18,000), according...

Editor’s note: The views expressed by guest columnists are not necessarily those of The Costa Rica Star, its advertisers, or its staff.  By Britt Nelson Why did the alleged shooter at the Fort Lauderdale airport put down his gun, drop to the floor and give up to police unharmed? Did he simply run out of bullets or is there a bigger plan? This mass shooter didn’t shoot himself nor was h...

By Wendy Anders Late Friday morning, police on motorcycles in rural southern Costa Rica responding to a 9-1-1 call arrived at the scene of a gruesome domestic violence shooting. In the small verdant indigenous village of Alto Conte, Progreso, some 53 kilometers from Golfito in Costa Rica’s Panama border area, Giancarlo Martín Abarca, a Costa Rican man, arrived at his 18-year-old lover’s pare...

Miami, Jan. 6 — The man who fatally shot five people and wounded eight others Friday at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport (FLL) appears to have acted alone, authorities said, stressing that it was too early to say whether the motive was terrorism. Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel told a press conference at the scene that the shooter offered no resistance when officers arrested ...

By Wendy Anders Costa Rica’s protected areas and national parks received over 77,000 local and international visitors between December 23, 2016 and January 1, 2017, according to the National System of Conservation Areas (SINAC). Some visitors had plans apart from enjoying nature. Sinac officials detained and filed police reports on 34 people for causing environmental damage by pillaging fore...

By Wendy Anders In San José, Costa Rica alone, the judicial investigative police agency (OIJ) investigate at least 70 and 80 house break-ins per month, said the police in a statement last week. Although previous years’ figures have been higher than in 2016, after studying their data, police said that house break-ins increase during Costa Rica’s summer months (December-April) when local resid...

By Wendy Anders Panamanian National Police announced Thursday they are offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to the recapture of an escaped prisoner awaiting trial for the alleged killing of five Chinese students in Chorrera, reported the digital English media Newsroom Panama. Gilberto Ventura Ceballos, a Dominican national, escaped Dec. 28 from the La Joyita penitentiary. Pol...

Jerusalem, Jan. 2 — Several senior Israeli officials have urged soldiers and police to "shoot-to-kill" Palestinians since a wave of attacks began in Oct. 2015, the international Human Rights Watch denounced in a report published Monday. According to the study, Israeli officials have encouraged soldiers and police to kill Palestinians suspected of attacking Israelis, even in cases where they pos...

By Wendy Anders Two police officers were detained Tuesday as part of an investigation into the escape of 10 suspected Mara Salvatrucha (MS13) gang members from a Salvadoran police delegation, said the director of the National Civil Police (PNC), Howard Cotto, to EFE. Costa Rican police reported yesterday they have tightened security along the country’s northern border which could prove to be...

Panama City, Jan. 2 — President Juan Carlos Varela highlighted on Monday a decline in Panama's murder rate since he took office 2 1/2 years ago, while acknowledging that his government needs to do more in the area of public safety. "Our public safety plan is yielding good results," Varela said in the annual state of the nation address to the National Assembly. "In 30 months of this administrati...

By Wendy Anders Local residents of Quepos, the small port town bordering Manuel Antonio National Park on Costa Rica’s central Pacific coast, greeting some New Year’s Day would-be robbers with a brutal surprise. They intervened when they attempted to rob a foreign tourist; and didn’t stop till his car was smashed and police came to haul him off, reported CRHoy.com citing local tourist police ...

Santiago, Dec. 29 — Seamen and non-commissioned officers serving aboard a navy frigate are facing court martial for planting hidden cameras in the quarters of their female shipmates and sharing the images online, the Chilean military said Thursday. Five men are accused of installing the cameras and sharing the images via WhatsApp and other social networks, while the other three are charged with...

January 2: Colombian rebels may be preparing to lay down their guns, but the nation faces a deeper challenge to heal itself: treating mental illnesses stemming from the trauma of a half-century war. The 260,000 people killed and 60,000 missing in the civil conflict are quantified in official statistics—but uncounted millions still suffer the psychological scars. Maria—a pseudonym which the w...

By Wendy Anders Downtown San José is a city which CNN recently described as having a bustling nightlife, and where “sex is for sale on nearly every corner.” And some of those selling sex are working as slaves. Mariliana Morales, founder of a non-profit that rescues women in sexual slavery on San José’s streets, said in an interview with CNN she was “called by God to help the women.” As Di...