There was good news. I knew the bad news. I had another contact to the outside world. I was housed in Módulo C and I was getting settled in and calmed down. I had an emergency going on and the help to deal with it.

First, I asked Gregory to do some calling around. The immediately urgent task is to get all of my valuables back from my taxi-driving compañero Julio. Get my car off the street and into a protected space where it wouldn’t get stolen, get my phone and the numbers in it. Ask Gregory to call my kids and my brother (Gregory speaks English), and call my friend Rigo to bring me some things from my house on his motorcycle (Gregory has no car).

Within 2 days of Gregory’s having called me, he along with my landlord Don Vicente and Rigo had accomplished most of this. Julio didn’t have much choice but to do the right thing given that I had called on a ranking member of his family, Don Vicente, to “read him the riot act.” The car and house keys were now safe with Don Vicente, the phone was with Gregory and Rigo had a list of things to bring me from my house.

For the better part of two weeks I had been handicapped by lack of access to my phone numbers due to Julio’s conflict of interests in getting those to me. Now I was free from both that jail within a jail and the lies that Julio was telling me.

The intensity of the blow of getting arrested was beginning to become better defined. This was going to be a very difficult and costly step in the struggle to vindicate my point and regain my property from the woman I had married. But that just made me feel more resolved. I want it to end, but not by surrendering.

Difficult and costly. Here things that take minutes outside took weeks and the agenda was heavily loaded with damage control and defensive maneuvers. None of the urgent things I need done right now really needed to be done but for the reason that I was in jail. In other words, every day I was in, I was getting further behind and losing hard won gains in the struggle to survive. I was hanging by a thread in the first place. Prison just cuts the damn thread and lets you fall. If you have God’s blessing, you land on your feet. If not, who knows, maybe I’ll find out.

What I’m going to find out and how I’m going to survive that fills my thoughts as I spend days in my bunk brooding. Debtors’ prison, how did it really work?

I still didn’t know what the legal situation was in my case. It isn’t like they hand you a brochure complete with with maps like a tourist when you go to jail.

Quite the contrary, when you try to get a straight answer, everyone from the authorities to the hoods tells you a different story, usually 180° opposed to the last thing your heard. Everyone has to demonstrate that they know more about the subject than everybody else. Buried in all that somewhere is the real story.

What I did know was that I had two issues going on with my “wife.” One was the pension and the other was the “Ordinario de Liquidación de Bienes Gananciales” that my attorney had filed in the Family Law court in San José last October.

That action contains proofs of a crime called “Simulación de Bienes” which carry a jail term. I had been thinking that the evidence now so heavily backed up my position of having been defrauded that I would not end up in jail. But I guess no one had actually done anything with my evidence yet.

I could not figure out what had happened to the Ordenario, I never received any word about if Doña Violeta had even been served. I had gone to the Tribunales in San José in January and gotten the expedient, it all looked great, but no one could tell me what had happened to the case. It was in limbo. My lawyer had nothing to tell me except “be patient.” Easy for him to say. I was getting pissed off again.

I really didn’t have a good answer to how this debt thing worked. Several versions of this were going around. One version that was real popular was the one where the 6 month sentence cancelled the debt for which we were imprisoned. Another version said that on the contrary, we were all incurring monthly charges at the same rate as always and that when we exited the jail, our debt would be 6 months longer than when we entered.

One day I was sort of mumbling out loud when my bunk-mate Hector took me by the scruff of my metaphorical neck and decided to clue me in about a few things. Hector knew something about how this all worked because he had had occasion to do better than just study it in books.

Hector was someone that I had a little trouble with. I mean he just rubbed me the wrong way generally. He was a loud-mouthed muscle-bound bear who had a tattoo that said “Killer” on his back. He loved to watch ‘Walker, Texas Ranger’ in the afternoon just before dinner. He would cheer Chuck Norris on and make comments about how we need a real life Chuck Norris Walker guy to deal with all the scumbags in the world and clean this place up. While he watched Walker he would jump and squirm around in the upper bunk making the planks supporting him fall down on me sometimes.

I was doing good though, at just letting these things go. One of the fastest ways to make this time hard was to make something out of nothing that needed me making it my business. Who cares about Hector, his idiotic tattoos or his infantile Walker-worship overweight bunk busting? Why waste any time on it? Because that’s how you find stuff out.

Hector was doing his second 6 month term, back-to-back. He was an expert on how the place and the law functioned, and who was due for what. He had participated in October 2009 with other inmates including an attorney in a sort of class action civil suit against the Ministro de Justicia (Justice Dept.) that won in the Sala 4 (the Supreme Court).

It is called an “amparo” and it resulted in a multi-disciplinary intra-governmental study and an order to remedy violations of minimum human rights and sanitation standards and pay damages to the prisoners subjected to physical and moral damages by the Penitenceria. Hector says that the prison is exactly the same today as it was last October, if not a little worse for wear. No mitigation program is underway that I could see.

So this particular afternoon he surprised me because as always, there’s more than meets the eye to people. How many times have I learned that sometimes the people I don’t want to pay attention to have such important things to share with me? I was glad that I had kept my cool with Hector because he really turned me on to some important info and got my head ready to make my plans going forward.

Hector explained the pension debt algorithm mystery…

It went like this: Do 6 months. Get out, you have one month grace during which you better be getting some money saved, because the month that follows you must make the regular payment. If you do that for the next 6 months, then the debt that you just did time for is transformed from a “tribunal juridica” to a “tribunal ejecutivo.” That means that your creditor (ex-wife presumably) has to file a civil suit to get you to pay it, and in lots of cases the debt is just forgiven in the end. But…

If on the other hand you fail to make a regular payment, the old debt plus whatever new debt has been accrued becomes current again. Your ex can get an Orden de Captura signed and soon, you have to go back to jail for six more months. Unless you pay in full, or make a deal with your ex.

In Hector’s case, his judgement was for a payment of $700 child support per month for his one small daughter, whom he was forbidden to see because he is “aggressive.” He was flat busted, out of work, probably unemployable because of his angry mental state, he had no job, no property and no inheritance.

He had always paid what he could if only 50 thousand a month which is less than $100 so he had fallen behind for lack of work caused by decline in the tourist trade.

So how come the high pension?

Because Hector had taken a prestigious government Vocational Institute (INA) course and earned a certificate in Restaurant Administration. The judge used that alone as a criteria to dictate a required income and set a pension based on that amount without any true regard to the actual income and reality of the person involved. He had been legally out maneuvered and become judicially mandated to earn a certain amount and pay a certain amount. No exceptions.

No wonder Hector was unhappy and disturbed and a little unpleasant to be around. He seemed to be condemned to a sort of perpetual sentence. He had no way of earning that much money. He was an unemployed short order cook with a piece of paper that said “Degree” so he was condemned. In for 6 months, out 2 or three months, in for 6 months again. The debt always climbing and the devastation to one’s life incalculable.

Oh but that’s not possible you say, how could that be possible?

It is possible because one assumes a legal obligation to maintain the family when one becomes a husband and/or a father. There is no excuse except medical disability which absolves the responsibility.

The problem is that the state imposes pension amounts based on arbitrary criteria, such as titles, degrees, former employment etc.

The other problem is that the law is biased explicitly in favor of the woman and grants her advantages that it does not give the man. Such as discounting his documentation of his real income and favoring the assertions of the woman, such as not requiring witnesses in accusations of abuse or violence, etc.

The minimum wage in Costa Rica is ¢235.000 a month, $470 Rent typically costs between $100 – $150. Lights can be as high as ¢10.000. Add water for 2 or ¢3.000. Food for one for one month, ¢70.000. Etc. The bill for a single person per month easily reaches $350.

Pensions of ¢50.000 to ¢70.000 are therefore the highest a normal working class man can afford to pay, regardless of how many children there are. I met several men whose reason for being incarcerated was inability to meet a high pension amount and inability to get the amount reduced because of legal resistance from his ex and the court’s support of her position.

In classic Liberal tradition, as in Próspero Fernández or Don Cleto Gonzales Viques, the State imposes the moral obligation to maintain the family as a matter of penal law. But in terms of economic rights the State does nothing to interfere with the “Free Market” other than to impose a classically Neoliberal band-aid which is to mandate an insufficient low minimum wage.

In terms of individual economic obligations however, the State has no qualms against dictating directly to the individual the amount of pay he must earn to comply with his familial responsibility. This is an imperfect political construct that is damaging Costa Rican families.

The citizens are being pitted one against the other in a no-win competition to divide up a pie with not enough pieces to go around. Everyone suffers, except presumably the rich. I didn’t meet many of them in Debtor’s Prison, but then, the rich always play with other people’s money, right?

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

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