According to the Costa Rican Red Cross, August was the most violent month so far this year, with 102 deaths in "tragic circumstances," a term the agency uses in statistics to refer to both homicides and accidents. The report was released on Tuesday.
"With Belize joining in, Central America becomes the first region in the world free of cluster munitions," Christian Guillermet, a Costa Rican diplomat working with UN bodies in Geneva, told reporters.
Residents and business owners in Nuevo Arenal, a town in north-central Costa Rica near the Arenal Volcano, are demanding a greater police presence after a spike in crime in recent months.
The argument goes like this: A small country like Costa Rica cannot protect itself from highly armed drug lords without the help of the United States. We need to train police at places like the U.S. Army’s Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly known as the School of the Americas.
When I arrived in La Fortuna, clouds had formed an eerie wreath around the volcano, and the sun sent blasts of light across its flanks. The mountain looked mythic and Olympian.
