FIVE PEDOPHILES GO ON TRIAL IN COSTA RICA
Five accused Costa Rican pedophiles detained in July 2001 during a private ®party® that included four male children will stand trial starting November 19th.
The charges against the accused include aggravated corruption of minors; supplying drugs to minors, aggravated pimping and criminal association amongst others. The accused could receive a 15 year jail sentence if found guilty. The trial begins at 8am in the Second Circuit Court of Justice in Guadalupe, a San Jose suburb.
The accused were captured after a nine month Internet investigation by Casa Alianza, in conjunction with the Public Prosecutor Against Sexual Crimes and the Unit Against Sexual Exploitation of the Ministry of Public Security. The five accused men distributed child pornography through the Internet and formed part of a pedophile network in the Central American country.
The principal suspect, Araya Monge, 32, worked for the state run University of Costa Rica and appears to have produced child pornography in the university. The school has since installed security programs on its computer network to prevent future access and distribution of pornography.
The four other accused are a lawyer by the last name of MarÌn Rojas who, together with a computer technician by the last name of Salas Vargas and two others, Morales Espinoza and Vargas Carrillo, are accused of participation in the pornography ring which, according to evidence collected, recruited young boys to sexually exploit them.
®This is the first time that a pedophile ring has been infiltrated and disbanded in Costa Ricaî, said Bruce Harris, Regional Director of Casa Alianza, an organization that defends the rights of children in Latin America and is headquartered in San JosÈ. ®Because we did not manage to detain all of the members of the ring of child abusers, society must be very careful with its children.
Casa Alianza has received a series of threats of violence against its staff in relation to the beginning of the trial this week.
During the same Internet investigation, Casa Alianza also infiltrated a group of pedophiles ®Paidos® in Chile, which resulted in the arrest of seven people, including two US citizens. Since then, 15 other pedophile rings have been discovered in Chile. Casa Alianza, which serves street children in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, continues to investigate pedophile networks in four other countries in the Americas.
For more information, please contact Bruce Harris at +506-253-5439 or <bruce@casa-alianza.org>
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world, indeed it's the only thing that ever has". Margaret Mead, Anthropologist
