WikiLeaks: Costa Rica suspected Venezuelan spying

A WikiLeak published Monday reveals that former Costa Rican President Abel Pacheco suspected that Venezuela was involved in espionage within the Central American country.

In a conversation with former United States Ambassador John J. Danilovich in Brazil in 2004, Pacheco said he believed a Venezuelan intelligence officer was “meeting secretly with labor union officials and has brought $200,000 into Costa Rica to pay labor activists to stage ‘provocations.’”

At the time, Pacheco requested intelligence assistance from the U.S. government.

Jokes about Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s “buffoonery” were “rampant” throughout the course of a meeting held in Brazil.  

Pacheco confirmed the comments when contacted by Costa Rican media on Thursday.

“It is true that Hugo Chávez said funny things,” Pacheco told the daily La Nación. “I remember when he referred to [former president George W. Bush] in a meeting full of heads of state that ‘here, yesterday, the devil was here and it still smells like sulfur’ …how can you not laugh about something like that.”