Costa Rica has long held a reputation as a hide-out for criminals. Supposedly that has changed, but I still hear plenty of stories. I imagine when CAFTA (the Central American Free Trade Agreement) is finally and inevitably passed, the US government will have more say and control over things here.

One big problem has been Costa Rica’s way of handling pedophiles. To date, they are still allowed to be teachers after getting out of jail. The latest ridiculous thing to happen is the release of a guy named Calvert Bleasdale.

Bleasdale is the former San Cristobal sales manager who was apprehended in Panama and extradited to Costa Rica not long ago. He was wanted here on charges of fraud. As the story goes, he swindled investors out of millions of dollars selling them fake sugarbonds and other non existing investment vehicles. He then kept the money himself and eventually fled the country to Mexico and Brazil.

He somehow ended up later in Panama, where he worked as a sales manager for the land and investment scam San Cristobal, which has since seized to exist with its principal Tom McMurrain in jail in Atlanta, Georgia. Two defrauded investors from Costa Rica had tracked him down, and handed him to the Panamanian police which in its turn shipped him onwards to Costa Rica.

Bleasdale has an impressive and well documented history of child sex abuse. In Panama he became a client of infamous Madam Tonya, who ran a child prostitution ring which was basically being protected by the authorities.

Costa Rican prosecutors have now dropped all charges against Bleasdale and even let him keep his residency. The reason stated is that not enough victims came forward to file criminal complaints and/or came to Costa Rica to give evidence in court. However, it looks more like a case of lazy or even corrupt prosecutors.

"The problem I have with this is that there is overwhealming evidence of everything he did, a very large fraud," says one of Bleasdale’s victims. "Maybe Costa Rica can give Bleasdale a job in a kindergarten considering they have that information on his criminal sexual abuse of children," he added.