By Wendy Anders

Over the weekend, Costa Rican immigration police cooperated in a regional sting operation, El Operativo Mesoamérica, to detain alleged human traffickers, reported Radio Monumental yesterday.

At least 25 arrests were made in Guatemala, El Salvador, Panamá, Honduras, and in Costa Rica, where eight were captured between the northern border with Nicaragua in Peñas Blancas and the southern Paso Canoas border zone with Panama, stated Jorge Chavarría, Costa Rican Attorney General, in an interview.

Local officials in were aided in making the simultaneous arrests by Mexico, Brazil, and the United States.

Traffickers, who move up to 100 desperate humans per day, can receive as much as $25,000 per person for a journey from Dubai to Brazil, said Mauricio Boraschi, Costa Rica’s adjunct specialist on human trafficking and trade, in a radio interview.

Brazil is the go-to port of entry into the Americas, and from there migrants from around the globe attempt various routes to enter into the United States.

Last year, Costa Rica had to hustle to negotiate a special humanitarian passage of some eight thousand Cuban immigrants who arrived at the southern border seeking passage north.

On their heels came a wave of immigrants from countries in Africa and Asia, who Gladys Jiménez, acting Costa Rican Immigration Director, says should not be viewed as criminals. Rather they are victims in a highly lucrative and dangerous global trade, she said to the press.

In May, Costa Rica Foreign Minister Manuel Gonzalez spoke to the Organization for American States seeking assistance for the some 700 immigrants in the Paso Canoas southern border area who he said were receiving basic sanitary services. “It is a complicated situation because of the language barrier, the lack of diplomatic ties between Costa Rica and their home countries, the type of or lack thereof of travel documents, and the issues relating to the return to their countries … These are undocumented immigrants who don’t have the same privileges or benefits as Cuban migrants.”

Weeks after this appeal, 380 of the undocumented immigrants, most from the African continent, were released from the two holding centers after having been officially registered here and their identities confirmed with their home countries. They have the freedom to move throughout Costa Rica in the meantime, as reported in the Costa Rican Spanish daily La Nación.