A Gringo Doing Time In Costa Rica – Part VI Apremiados Excepcionales

Upstairs, a quick counsel among some of the men and I am shown to a lower bunk at the front of the 14 mt. long 5 mt. wide room.

In the open space outside of the bunk, three rows of benches accommodate the television audience and serve as the public commons of the module. From above the TV was trained on the room, hung in a frame just above head level of a short man, above the microwave oven. I accepted the bunk, seemed like a really good spot actually, not crowded into a row and close to the TV. Thanks.

One of the men who made my acquaintance while I was in Módulo D had been telling me about this place, and how it would be so much better for me to be housed here. I just shrugged. For one thing, I had no way to confirm or deny his tales nor did I want to try. Dios primero. “If God Wills It” is the attitude.

He was called “Arcilla” and he was assigned to Módulo C. As I settled in Arcilla gave me some pointers and showed me around the Módulo. I appreciated that at least what he had been saying to me before now coincided with observable fact.

Not to say the I trusted him, but I appreciated the refreshing break from the normal mendacity, duplicity and vulgarity that characterize most verbal interaction here. Arcilla had asked me about my situation when I was downstairs, so he knew that I had no family to help me here, nor money, and that I had been set-up and robbed by my “wife.” He could see that I had nothing but the clothes on my back and provided me with a roll of toilet paper and a bar of soap. Great… now I could attend to pending chores.

Arcilla was in because his wife had gotten a judge to award her a high amount for the child support of their daughter Abigail. The issues involved in the award of a Pension Alimentaria can be complicated by emotions and ulterior motives and mitigate toward avaricious settlements. The law lends itself to this result by its blind adhesion to favoring the woman, which provides myriad opportunities for astute and unscrupulous women to manipulate the law to their selfish advantage.

What advantage? The law does not require women to provide witnesses when they make accusations of domestic violence against their spouses. An abused wife can force her husband to leave the home, get a restraining order against him, and collect a pension worth half or more of his salary just on her word.

There is unfortunately no shortage of women who use this power to manipulate men into positions of servitude. Evicting their men from the home they have the best of both worlds, the income of a breadwinner without actually having to live with or ever even see him. Not to put to fine a point on it, but of course, this does not signal the end of romance for the ex-wife, and the restraining order helps keep out prying eyes.

There are women known as “vividoras,” a play on words with “bebedoras,” cattle who can’t stop drinking when presented with a trough. Some have children with several men and pensions from each.

Each new husband is a new chance to catch something that could make the difference between penury and middle class fantasy. I’m not making this up believe me. I learned it from various people in jail, each with their own case of familial bliss turned mercenary.

In Arcilla’s case, his wife seemed to believe that she was entitled to half of what Arcilla’s family had given him as his inheritance before he became a father or husband. That is not her right, but she found another way to get at it.

She was allowed to use the value of the property Arcilla inherited combined with his status as an ex-small-proprietor (a baker) as the basis for calculating the monthly amount granted to her for support of their only daughter, 10 year old Abigail. It was thus legally established that Arcilla was mildly rich and should pay an $800 a month child support payment.

The ex knows that Arcilla lost his business to bad economy more than a year ago and was stuck with loans. She knows that he went to work as a driver working 75-80 hours a week for $400 or 500.00 a month. He was an underpaid, overworked failed small businessman who gave what he could every month for his daughter, like $150. That made her strategy all the more effective, he really did not have cash or income with which to buy his freedom, just land, which would now be converted into cash for his ex-wife to use as her income for the next 10 years.

Effectively, the strategy is to force Arcilla to gain his liberty from prison by selling his inheritance to pay back and ongoing pension payments. Thus virtually forfeiting ownership of property to his ex that she has no right to. Using the pension law as a tool.

Instead of taking any of that into account, the judge in fact dictated Arcilla’s expected income based on the woman’s unsubstantiated and unjustified claims about his earning power and then legally obligated him to earn that and pay or go to jail. Touché!

Now we have a really stupid result which takes men who are working and paying what they can and then suddenly incarcerating them and obligating them to sit in dedicated limbo doing absolutely nothing for 6 months. As they get behind on their rent, lose opportunities, lose crops and miss seasons of construction and tourism work they fail to provide care or affection to their minor children. They eat twice a day on the public account while their children presumably go hungry for lack of their support.

I heard that the state pays approximately $40 a day to maintain men who typically earn $10-$20. Most men work 6 days 60 hours a week with incomes of the minimum wage ¢235.000 ($470.00) per month or less and owe around ¢100-300.000 colones ($200-600.00)

The state incurs that much expense in 5-15 days of the 180 sentence they give an incarcerated man for pension debt. This system manifests moral and social damage and the simple economics of protecting the family this way seem to be completely dysfunctional as
well.

As I came to find out over the next few days and weeks all of the men in Módulo C were there for some version of the above. Some combination of arbitrary legal injustice, avaricious, antagonistic or bored wives and ex-wives, simple hard times and lack of solvency or physical incapacity had conspired to land us all in jail for 6 months at a pop for failure to keep up with payments.

These men are mostly peones, jornaleros, men who get paid one colon for each pineapple they plant. 6,000 times a day bending over and straightening up and moving on in the southern zone sun 6 days a week. To earn a little more than $275.00 a month.

This is Debtors’ Prison, prohibited by a constitutional Article. But there’s another Article that makes an exception to this prohibition in case of family law debt. We were all therefore technically not “prisoners,” we were instead ‘Apremiados Excepcionales” (“Exceptional Detainees”) and this was a detention center, not a prison.

The men in Módulo C of La Reforma de Pensiones had all landed there so that the Jail could separate the just down on their luck misunderstood poor working men in the jail from the dope addled vagabonds and malicious predators also present in the jail population.

These “delincuentes” were not here because of failing to pay child support or alimony to an ex-wife. They were here because they had failed to pay a pension to their mother usually, sometimes grandmother or father. These were the majority of prisoners here whose family had used the Pension Law as a means to accomplish the task of ridding their households of problematic overgrown adolescent drug addict adult children.

This distinction was the most obvious and profound in the reality of jail culture. Now that I had been removed to the protected environment of Módule C, I could understand what Arcilla had been trying to tell me when I was still newly arrived in Módulo D.

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Written by Terrence who is a 53 year old Gringo living in Costa Rica.

Andrew Makarik

to@welovecostarica.com

Andrew Makarik is the main editor of WeLoveCostaRica, a fan of this sunny country. He is also a loving husband and a has a lovely daughter. By being a devoted family man and the biggest Costa Rica fan, he wants to make more people feel at home there. WeLoveCostaRica unites people and helps them find new home or a new travel destination. This website is a friendly community where everyone can find not only information, but also new friends and travel pals. Andrew is also passionate about IT and programming, so he himself maintains a friendly atmosphere in this cozy environment of WeLoveCostaRica.com.