GIGANTE, Costa Rica - There was a ghostlike quality to Rudy Gonsior, an American former Special Forces sniper, on the morning he arrived at a jungle retreat to see if a vomit-inducing psychedelic brew could undo the damage years of combat had done to his mind.

Glassy-eyed and withdrawn, he barely spoke above a whisper and was much quieter than the six other veterans who had come to dredge up painful memories of comrades fallen in battle, thoughts of suicide and the scar that taking a life leaves on the psyche.

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LEAP Executive Director Neill Franklin, a retired major with the Maryland State Police, says that drug policy needs to focus on health first, not criminal prosecutions, during a press conference on Friday, Sept. 5, 2014. Lindsay Fendt/The Tico Times Costa Rica will become the first country in Central America to host a branch of the drug policy reform organization Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, the group announced at a press conference Friday morning. The announcement took place after a week of debate on drug policies in the Americas at the Fifth Latin American and First Central American Conference on Drug Policy in San Jose.

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SAN JOSE President Laura Chinchilla inaugurated on Thursday a radar station on Costa Rica's Pacific coast that will be a tool in the country's fight against drug trafficking and illegal fishing.

The radar, which has a range of 50 nautical miles, is located in Puerto Caldera.

Chinchilla said that during her four-year term as president, which will conclude on May 8, she has made security a priority, adding that her administration had made "the greatest investments to improve the monitoring and protection of our citizens and our territory by land, sea and air."

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Costa Rica's public security minister says the inability for U.S. joint patrol vessels to dock in Costa Rica sends the wrong message to drug traffickers.

United States Coast Guard and Navy vessels participating in joint drug patrols are left out to sea without permission to dock in Costa Rica after the legislature failed to take up a vote on the measure before going on break, the daily La Nacion reported on Tuesday.

Public Security Minister Mario Zamora said the patrols' inability to dock weakens Costa Rica's ability to combat drug trafficking in its territory.

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"No international entity is going to dictate legalization, and certainly not to the United States," a top U.S. official says.

ANTIGUA, Guatemala -- Four decades after Washington launched its international "war on drugs" in Latin America (the U.S. no longer uses that term), members of the Organization of American States' General Assembly are questioning the logic behind what is increasingly viewed in the region as a failed policy.

In a General Assembly meeting that started Tuesday in the colonial town of Antigua, Guatemala, OAS members will begin to explore alternatives to a strategy focused on military and law enforcement intervention to fight the trafficking of illegal drugs, mostly from South America and destined for users in the United States.

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DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) - Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla says her nation, Mexico and Colombia have opened talks with U.S. officials to prepare for the legalization of marijuana in some U.S. states.

She said in an interview that the Central American nations worry about what the effect that legalization will have on the battle against international drug cartels.

Chinchilla says the drug cartels that have become entrenched in Mexico "pose a very important menace to our country" and U.S. cooperation is needed because it is a huge consumer of those drugs.

She also says "it's very hard to pretend that they are going to disappear. What is happening is that they move from one country to another."

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Costa Rica is Showing Progress in its War on Drugs, but Concerns Exist That the Country is Used as an Exchange Center for Major Drug Trade

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica -- Known abroad mostly for its political stability, pristine beaches and eco-tourism, this country without an army has suddenly found itself in the middle of the war on drugs.

During President Oscar Arias' 14 months in office, Costa Rican and U.S. authorities have set seizure records in increasingly spectacular drug busts -- nearly 50 tons of cocaine, compared with 2003, when seizures didn't reach one ton.

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SAN JOSE, Costa Rica - Tipped off by three plastic pipes mysteriously skimming the ocean's surface, authorities seized a homemade submarine packed with 3 tons of cocaine off Costa Rica's Pacific coast.

Four men traveled inside the 50-foot wood and fiberglass craft, breathing through the pipes. The craft sailed along at about 7 mph, only six feet beneath the surface, Security Minister Fernando Berrocal said.

The submarine was seen Friday 103 miles off the coast near Cabo Blanco National Park on the Nicoya peninsula.

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THE sight of three PVC pipes skimming the ocean's surface off the Pacific coast tipped off authorities in Costa Rica, who have seized a home-made submarine packed with three tons of cocaine. Four men were arrested after they were found travelling inside the 49ft wood and fibreglass craft, breathing through the pipes. The submarine was spotted oon Friday 103 miles off Costa Rica's coast near Cabo Blanco National Park on the Nicoya peninsula, said Security Minister Fernando Berrocal. It moved at about 7mph and was about 6ft below the surface.

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OROTINA, Costa Rica -- A torrent of teenage rage, hard and fast as the tropical rain on this Pacific coast, washed away the Academy at Dundee Ranch this weekend.

Dundee Ranch, the latest foreign outpost in a far-flung affiliation of behavior modification programs that promises to convert troubled American teenagers into straight arrows, lasted 19 months before the students rose up in revolt and overthrew their masters.

The rebellion erupted after Costa Rican officials visited the ranch - an old hotel on a rutted red-dirt road - and told the children of their rights after complaints about the program from a former director.

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Former County Resident Facing 15 Years in Prison for Growing 12 Pot Plants

His romance with Costa Rica started budding when he was barely out of high school.

White sand beaches, sapphire water and a steady march of waves conspired to steal Andy Seidensticker from his hometown San Diego. His ventures south grew more frequent and prolonged.

By the mid-1990s, the Poway High School graduate was living year-round in a remote beach village called Mal Pais and running his surf shop with a friend from California.

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New Costa Rican President Abel Pacheco said yesterday that his country, which has no army and has experienced nearly half a century of peace, may become the site of a U.S.-supported international police academy.

In an interview, Mr. Pacheco said he spoke with President Bush at the White House on Thursday about opening the police school in Costa Rica.

It would train officers from throughout North and South America to handle "modern" threats, Mr. Pacheco said.

"The police will learn management of very modern crime circumstances for which our traditional police aren't prepared," Mr. Pacheco said in Spanish.

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SAN JOSE, Costa Rica, Oct. 18 - The European Union plans an aid package for Colombia that falls far short of what Colombian officials had expected, weakening an anti-drug strategy that has failed to win significant domestic or international support beyond the United States.

Assembled here for a conference on the Colombian conflict, European diplomats said the $250 million aid package, to be presented in Bogota on Tuesday, will not be given directly to the Colombian government. Instead, the aid will be channeled mostly to programs run by nonprofit groups working for human rights, judicial reform and economic development. In addition, its size--only a quarter of the amount Colombia had anticipated--will mean less money than expected for government grass-roots work considered essential for persuading farmers to turn their backs on the drug trade by growing legal crops.

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SAN JOSE, Costa Rica, - Costa Rican police said on Wednesday they acted on a FBI tip to detain three Americans believed to be linked to large-scale drug trafficking and violence since the 1970s.

Police identified the three, alleged to have smuggled marijuana, cocaine and heroin into the United States, as Tammy Lynn Knox and Richard and Terry Van Gadner.

The trio had been hiding in Costa Rica since mid-1998 in a tourist zone near the Pacific coast.

Police spokesman Francisco Ruiz said they were the suspected leaders of a cartel operating in Mexico, Colombia, Canada and the Caribbean island of Aruba, off the Venezuelan coast.

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SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (Reuters) - Colombia's former Energy and Mines Minister, who fled his country after being charged with taking money from drug traffickers, has sought political asylum in Costa Rica, officials said on Thursday.

An official with Costa Rica's foreign ministry said Alvaro Leyva, who has been in the Central American country since July 24, filed for asylum late Wednesday.

``The case is being studied by the foreign ministry's legal office,'' the official said.

Leyva has told reporters in Costa Rica he fears assassination if he were to return to Colombia.

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SAN JOSE, Costa Rica - When Costa Rican President Jose Maria Figueres this week urged Latin America's drug czars to reinvent the concept of sovereignty to better fight international organized crime, some people were shocked.

"What's that mean?" asked an anti-drug official from a small South American nation. That they were supposed to let the gringos or somebody else take over our counternarcotics operations?

Not at all, said U.S. officials attending the International Drug Enforcement Conference in San Jose. What Mr. Figueres was talking about, they say, is that better cooperation is crucial if law enforcement authorities are to defeat - or at least control - the world's major trafficking gangs.

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